Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

In a recent Advisor (see "To Attract Agile Change, Embrace Uncertainty," 11 September 2008), I discussed the need for managers and teams to embrace uncertainty in development efforts and, furthermore, that this is very difficult to do.

We like to think that knowledge is cumulative -- what mathematicians refer to as monotonically increasing. Unfortunately, that is not the case. For example, we no longer know how to build pyramids as the Egyptians did, make violins and cellos the way 18th-century Italians did, or, surprisingly, how to build the rockets that got the first man to the moon.

In the first Executive Update of this three-part series,1 we introduced the notion of operational business patterns as a key construct in enterprise business architecture. Here in Part II, we compare and contrast two such patterns with which we've had the opportunity to work.

Most applications, enterprises, or products will have unique architectures designed to meet their specific goals and requirements, though many of them will be very similar. For example, the architecture for a portal application at one company will probably resemble a portal application at another company of like size and business function.

Last week, I was briefed by the folks from Success Metrics, which has just introduced a new on-demand BI offering: Birst. I say "new," but the product actually has been in use for several years now by a number of customers in various one-off applications.

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are quickly moving beyond commercial web sites into core enterprise applications. Chances are you have already heard about how these dynamic web interfaces can improve the user experience, boost productivity, and take full advantage of SOA.

For some time, my favorite topic has been agile enablement, and, surprisingly, I have found a lack of decent information about the more subtle aspects of transitioning an organization that follows more traditional software engineering practices to more of an agile approach.

With more sophisticated methods than traditional search, and without manipulating the applications to be searched, enterprise search lets users locate data in multiple repositories simultaneously. The result is better "findability" to cope with info glut and numerous other challenges. This Executive Update is the first of a three-part series on enterprise search.