Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

The Internet changes everything -- or does it? New business models; Web 2.0; social networking; interactions with customers, employees, and partners, etc., are being revolutionized. The change is so rapid, how do we keep up?

The ability to host high-performance analytic databases1 on public cloud environments -- particularly Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform -- has received a fair amount of attention over the past year or so. We have also seen a number of vendors (e.g., Vertica Systems, Teradata, Greenplum) offer versions of their high-performance analytic databases for use on Amazon EC2.

It may seem like IT is the culprit of many problems, including data integration for the enterprise, but the issue may very well be something upper management brought on itself. Each year, IT is asked to do more with fewer resources such as hardware and software. People are also reduced every year because IT is seen as overhead in many organizations. So to balance things out, some applications are outsourced to another company. By outsourcing applications, more complexity is introduced into the IT group or any enterprise project.

Two of the more serious problems holding back increased enterprise adoption of cloud computing are security and portability -- specifically, a lack of any real standards in these areas. But all is not doom and gloom. Several organizations have taken up the mission of addressing these issues, and some of those efforts are already beginning to bear fruit.

Even with all the talk about the need for real-time data warehouse updating techniques, most organizations today primarily perform daily and weekly updates of their data warehouses. The key word here is primarily. That's because most of the end-user organizations that are using real-time data warehousing techniques are doing so on a very selective basis.

Cutter Consortium Fellow Ward Cunningham's quip, "A little debt speeds [software] development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite," is intuitively very clear.1 He is talking about short-term debt, which should be reduced -- and, it is hoped, eliminated in its entirety -- at the earliest possibl

Business Process Management (BPM) provides a proven method for analysis and design of business processes that can provide agility and flexibility and improve alignment of business goals with IT systems. However, to achieve these benefits, BPM must be aligned with the overall enterprise.

Despite operating in a period of economic uncertainty, the majority of end-user organizations have either increased spending on their BI and data warehousing initiatives in 2010, or their spending has remained constant.