Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

There are good reasons to step back and assess where we are as an organization in our adoption of agile (or any other process model). Executives should concern themselves with these questions:

• We've spent a lot of money and political capital on agile. Where are we in terms of our capability? Are we still at a beginner level organizationally, or are we fairly mature now?

• What percentage of our teams are at an advanced level of practice?

Back in March, I discussed some of the important developments involving the incorporation of social computing techniques (i.e., blogs, wikis, social networks) with enterprise software (see "Facebook for the Enterprise: The New Business

Enterprise architecture continues to grow as a job title, but what does it mean to make the transition from just a title to an actual profession?

Last month (see "Corporate Use of Text Analysis and Mining Grows," 25 May 2010), I wrote that organizations are showing more interest in using text analysis and mining tools to support their BI efforts.

Much has been argued about the value of architecture, but actual proof is generally lacking. As for solution architecture, recent quantitative research has confirmed that this approach not only helps reduce throughput time and budget for IT projects but also leads to a reduction of variance in time and budget, indicating that bringing solution architecture to a project can be viewed as a quality improvement process in line with Six Sigma thinking.

"In the absence of a long-range plan, short demands will always drive out long-term needs."

There have been a number of recent developments pertaining to the use of MapReduce1 and its open source equivalent, Hadoop.2 These developments are important because they should help spur greater use of MapReduce and Hadoop by traditional enterprises looking to take advantage of their big data assets by implementing applications that can rapidly process vast amounts of dat

One of the beautiful things about agile is its simplicity: Scrum consists of three roles, three artifacts, and three plus one practices; XP provides 21 practices; and FDD comes on a single sheet of paper. In fact, we have printed an overview of Scrum onto a beer mat. Sounds easy, doesn't it?