Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

As we move into the era of Big Data analysis and extensive use of unstructured data, it is time to take a closer look at data-quality issues. While there have long been procedures in place for ensuring quality of transactional data, unstructured data has been less well served.

"If you want to create an Agile organization, you can't rely on stacking the deck with your best staff members -- everyone needs to make the transition, not just your star players."

Although many Agile teams are small, say 10 or fewer people, and either colocated or at least near-located, the majority of Agile teams work in more complex situations. For example, some teams are several dozen people in size and sometimes larger. Some teams are geographically distributed. Some are taking on very challenging problems.

This case study illustrates that sometimes very significant business goals seem to get washed out of the process of specifying and building a system; the focus is on managing the solution (e.g., certainly reducing manual effort is solved with automation) rather than on managing the relationship be

Too many organizations confuse activity with purposeful action. For them, especially in a crisis, it's important to do something. The worse the crisis, the more pressure there is to act. If you follow this path, at best your success will have had more to do with luck than with planning.

The Circle -- the new novel from Dave Eggers -- is being billed as sort of a modern 1984 meets A Brave New World.