Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

Business intelligence (BI) and analytics technology are continuing to extend into new domains, where the usefulness of developing trends from aggregated data becomes both obvious and possible. At the same time, analysis is increasingly granular, yielding information down to the small group and individual level. As soon as information can be linked at the individual level, some of the many laws regarding information privacy will come into play.

"Whatever Web 2.0 is, IT executives and technologists need to pay attention to it, and so do the business-unit managers who look for ways to use IT strategically to improve their revenues and shareholder value."

-- Ed Yourdon, Guest Editor, Cutter IT Journal

The business/IT divide is alive and well. We often cast blame on IT for not "talking to the business in a way they can understand," but it's a two-way street and there is plenty of responsibility to be shared for the situation. Business blames IT for a host of sins. Recently, I heard: "They can't do what we ask ... everything takes too long ...

In January, I said that I believed that grid computing represents the future of enterprise computing (see "What About Grid Computing?" 9 January 2007).

During several recent interviews with candidates applying for a project manager position in our company, I ran across a gross misconception about agile software development processes that, in my opinion, requires some explanation.

BI proponents -- including vendors, analysts, and consultants (myself included) -- have pushed the idea of ubiquitous BI, or "BI for the masses," for years. To date, however, most companies have found the widespread dissemination of BI practices to their more rank-and-file workers an elusive goal.

Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are gaining momentum because they are perceived as the key for enterprises to achieve business agility, improved quality of service, quicker time to market, and lower total cost of ownership. While an SOA has the potential to deliver significant benefits to the business, those benefits do not come automatically.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has the potential to play a significant role in aligning business and IT and to deliver key benefits to the business. However, those benefits do not come automatically. The architecture needs to be defined following sound SOA guidelines, and the services must be designed according to service-oriented analysis and design (SOAD) principles, with loose coupling being one of the most important principles.