Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

The data warehouse, unlike the other IT systems in an enterprise, is an exclusive data platform with a data model as its backbone. In general, one may conceive an IT system to be a combination of processes and data.

A lively debate about the nature of the agile process often erupts in my executive workshops. Participants, who have not been exposed to agile methods, usually expect the software process (or any process, for that matter) to be predictable.

One of the most important skills of an architect (be it a business architect, IT architect, or enterprise architect) is that of “critical thinking.” It has been defined by the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking as: "the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or gener

Companies have used Hadoop mainly to process high volumes of unstructured data for Internet operations.

Frameworks provide the theoretical backbone for architecture, but they are often perceived as too abstract with little direct relevance to the architect's daily routine.

In my previous Advisor ("Inflection Points for Decisions and Profit, Part I"), I pointed out that all exchanges of goods and services are exchanges of risk and opportunity between the pa

Common wisdom in process improvement efforts includes the notion of a "sponsor." The sponsor is a person (sometimes a small group of people) within an organization who buys into -- often literally as much as figuratively -- the improvement effort.