A few months back I was at eBay's headquarters in San Jose, California, USA, having a conversation about performance reviews with one of its executives. Like most large companies, eBay offers bonuses to its employees based on individual performance, which is expected to have improved from the previous work period, be it yearly, semiannually, or quarterly.

Hace algunos meses estuve en las oficinas generales de eBay en San Jose, California, conversando con uno de sus ejecutivos acerca de evaluaciones de desempeño de empleados.

It's hard to discuss transformation when the current state is so anchored in the previous century. But as more and more 20th-century warriors pass the baton to the next generation of business technology leaders, we'll see major changes in the whole business technology relationship.

I had the pleasure of hearing Cutter Senior Consultant Michael Mah present to Latin American CIOs at the recent Cutter Latin America Summit in Mexico City.

Last week, while in a discussion about architecture, someone in the group said, "We don't really have architecture, we're not big enough to justify the cost." Unfortunately, this is a common misconception about the size of a company and the value of architecture. Actually, it is often smaller companies that can demonstrate the benefits most quickly.

When it comes to measuring carbon emissions, especially across medium-sized to large businesses, there is an urgency to measure and report carbon data. Two important things related to carbon emissions stand out: the need to comprehend how much carbon is being generated by the business activities, and even more importantly, the lack of standardized and detailed measurements to do so.

Since we're approaching the end of the year, I thought I'd offer some predictions and comments on some of the key developments I see taking place with the market for, and the application of, BI and data warehousing in the New Year.

Cost reductions in business operations in this turbulent economy have affected IT spending for software and application or system development as well as for integration projects. Many companies and their visionary leaders have used agile methodologies, including XP, Scrum, and Feature-Driven Development, with mixed success.

"How are you doing"

There's a nice, benign, safe question. But in today's economy, I've noted that I get one of two very dichotomous responses:

Response #1: "We're holding it together. I think we're going to make it, but it's been a tough year."

There is nothing like the prospect of getting hanged in the morning to focus one's attention.

There is nothing like the prospect of getting hanged in the morning to focus one's attention.

Participants in a recent Cutter Benchmark Review survey who indicated that their organizations are not using or testing social networks cite a lack of perceived business value as the main reason (see, "Unlocking the Organizational Potential of Social Networking," Vol. 9, No. 5). What can organizations do to make sure their investments in social networking applications pay off? First, organizations need to make sure that their social networking applications are aligned with their corporate strategy.

Participants in a recent Cutter Benchmark Review survey who indicated that their organizations are not using or testing social networks cite a lack of perceived business value as the main reason (see, "Unlocking the Organizational Potential of Social Networking," Vol. 9, No. 5). What can organizations do to make sure their investments in social networking applications pay off? First, organizations need to make sure that their social networking applications are aligned with their corporate strategy.

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

-- General Dwight D. Eisenhower

In project management, as long as things move the way they are envisaged, there is no problem. If there is a hurdle, however, the project manager is expected to respond in the least time possible. This hurdle may be either technical or human, and in either case, arriving at the best alternative or finding the exact error requires absolute openness and being in the present moment.

A project manager's inability to be open and receptive can become a block in finding creative solutions to the problems that crop up. It's like the following story:

Your IT organization has certain skills and capabilities that you deploy to solve various business technology problems. Ideally, you market these skills and capabilities to your internal clients (as well as your external stakeholders -- vendors, partners, etc.).

Slightly fewer than half of the organizations using on-demand/cloud-based BI and data warehousing solutions have had to modify their business processes in order to use the on-demand software. This finding comes from a Cutter Consortium survey conducted in May-July 2009 of 79 end-user organizations based worldwide.

The waves of the business cycle are becoming ripples. The recent American combination of minimal inflation and very low unemployment may not be an aberration, but the beginning of a new worldwide trend.

In my last E-Mail Advisor ("Hidden Pitfalls of Agile: User Contact," 12 November 2009), I talked about a potential pitfall you may encounter when transitioning a traditional organization to agile: the impact of direct user contact. This Advisor is about another pitfall: transparency.

The other night, fellow Cutter Senior Consultant Mike Rosen and I just missed each other in New York City at a conference where we were speaking. As I was coming into the hotel, Mike was leaving to fly to San Francisco for another gig. I had wanted to chat with Mike, but our schedules made that impossible.

For most companies, business transformation is usually linked to strategic activities, such as entry to a new target market segment, introduction of a new service or solution offering, attainment of competitive advantage, and improvement of customer satisfaction.

Yesterday, I participated in a "virtual trade show" called "Pragmatic BPM and SOA: Strategies That Work." I was a bit surprised when I was invited to participate because I thought BPM/SOA was basically old news. It's been four years since I wrote about the relationship between these, but based on the comments and questions, it seems that most people haven't been paying much attention.

Enterprise data integrity, security, and confidentiality have long relied on combined network- and application-based security. As enterprise architectures become more complex -- both increasingly distributed and centralized -- the old models for securing data are no longer applicable when the data can be anywhere, accessible from any place and at any time.

Starview Technology has introduced the latest version of its Complex Event Processing (CEP) platform. Until recently, Starview has kept somewhat of a low profile and didn't always immediately appear on the radar when it came to CEP software vendors. This is unfortunate, because Starview has been shipping products since 2003.