Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

While making predictions for the new year last December, I said that it would become more practical for end-user organizations to take advantage of social BI in 2010, because BI vendors would increase their efforts to add to their platforms social media, such as blogs, wikis, social networking, BI search, and mashups.1

Municipal government, at the city, township, and village level, is a foundation for day-to-day living. Local elected officials, city administration and staff, and volunteer boards and committees provide the services that figuratively and literally pave the environment in which residents live, work, and play.

Today governments at all levels in the US, and indeed around the world, are dealing with declining revenues and increasing costs across the board. Thus, government executives are challenged each day to do more with less -- or as Ashton B.

Does your organization possess a reference model for EA that goes beyond the tired, old organization chart? Traditionally, most models of EA organization have been predicated on the view of IT as a support function, as reflected in the ubiquitous organization chart showing "Architecture," in one form or another, usually either reporting to the CIO or CTO.

In my work as an agile coach, I find many teams applying agile techniques are puzzled about how to slice epic requirements into user stories. In Planning Extreme Programming, Kent Beck and Martin Fowler define stories simply:

One of the seemingly perpetual issues that we face is "business-IT alignment." First, we might ask what that really means. Then, we can look for ways to specify and achieve the alignment.

I've been thinking a lot about the findings from a new study cowritten by Carnegie Mellon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Union College researchers, which was recently published in the journal Science [1].

I'm a firm believer in complex projects having a team composed of both specialists and generalists. The argument in support of the generalist is that he or she has the ability and skills to keep options open and may see solution details that would otherwise be missed.