I used to say to a client that "I am only as good as my data" when the input I received for an engagement was inadequate. I still use this phrase, when appropriate, from time to time.

When an organization effectively combines business and IT architectures together in an initiative or funded program, it stands a much better chance of success.

In recent engagements, I have had the opportunity to move away from consulting within the infrastructure world of SOA and into the realm of pure business process management (BPM). Prior to that, I had more of a conceptual appreciation as to how BPM technology could integrate within an SOA.

All effort in data warehousing is ultimately to make information discovery and delivery possible. Though I do not intend to explore the Inmon versus Kimball theories here, I do think they hold clues for dealing with industry models. There are also models that build two layers, one for storage and the other for consumption. It is important that enterprises learn to rise above these two theories and make a meaningful blend of the two.

What would you do if you had no money, and no prospect of getting any for a week or more?

In my last Advisor ("Cloud Architecture Practice: Sharing a Few Observations and Lessons Learned"), I submitted a few observations and lessons learned from a real-wor

The most common agile challenges and usage in the context of business analysis (BA) work are as follows:

I've been talking with the folks from Cirro -- a new startup that has just launched its Big Data enterprise access and exploration solution.

The advent of iOS and Android has created a seismic shift in the fortunes of manufacturers, with stalwarts such as Nokia and Motorola superseded by Apple and Samsung. Overall, a recent Cutter survey suggests strong support for Apple's iOS and Google's Android, with limited support for RIM's BlackBerry and almost none for Symbian. Microsoft's Windows Phone registers with about 1 in 5 respondents, suggesting that there is some way to go before this newest platform has yet to make an impact.

Sometimes technology trends are hard to anticipate or understand. The topic of this Advisor is neither; it's just somewhat misunderstood. While this Advisor covers data analytics, it's not really about the "Big Data" that has been much discussed in recent months -- it's about even bigger data.

In my last Advisor ("Predictability, Reliability, Serendipity"), I highlighted the role of serendipity in value realization, as follows:

This week I was speaking at a cloud conference and not surprisingly there were a lot of sessions about Internet as a service (IaaS) platforms, software as a service (SaaS), elasticity, cost savings, mobility, social media, and more of the

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant Bill Keyworth's introduction to the June 2012 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "ITIL/Operational Excellence" (Vol. 25, No. 6).

Real-time Complex Event Processing (CEP) has been around for more than a decade. Traditional (legacy) CEP systems were constrained in scalability and performance and lacked real-time ability. Today, the business case for CEP is becoming more evident due to the real-time impact of various social channels, capital market volatility, increased threat through network attacks, and the emergence of decision making "on the fly" based on raw business intelligence.

I recently had the opportunity to hear Dr. Paul Roehrig, assistant VP of corporate strategy for the 140,000-person consulting firm Cognizant, talk about the coming changes in the workforce. Underpinning these changes, importantly, are high and, in parts of Europe, alarmingly high levels of unemployment.

In my recent Advisor, "Process as a Service," I described the agile process as a reliable process all too often subject to unrealistic expectation of predictability, as follows:

I just returned from yet another client engagement that had the same symptoms and, not surprisingly, the same root cause.

We have traversed several periods in the last 100 years -- from the agrarian era to the knowledge era. Leadership has continually changed in each of these eras based on changes in the associated business environments and with people's perspectives. We now stand at the end of the knowledge era and at the beginning of the consciousness era. The focus of the knowledge era was on people leading toward competence-building activities.

A friend whose company provides data recovery services mentioned to me that his firm had been hired by a company to delete proprietary information from the mobile phone of an employee it had recently fired. In other words, he was going to have to go through and remove company information from the employee's personal device.

The project management community remains one of the growth industries in business, reaching its tendrils deep into diverse sectors of the economy, ranging from petrochemical to information technology.

"Scrum and distributed teams are no problem" some consultants claim. Others recommend that while Scrum "in theory" claims colocated teams, Kanban could help you to run distributed teams in an agile way.

In the 2001 film, Analyze That, Dr.

The entertaining film, Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, tells the story of Billy Beane's revolutionary shift in the selection of baseball talent and the strategy used to construct a winning team. Impressions and "seasoned judgment" on the part of wizened veterans were replaced by empirical analysis of player skills and competencies. The result? Startling choices that disrupted the established order of baseball's "good ol' boy" network. IT leaders can learn some valuable lessons from the film.

In socially infused enterprises such as healthcare IT, Big Data analytics is quickly becoming the cornerstone for ongoing transformation. Like many professionals in the field, I recognize that Big Data is big; in fact, it is huge and complex. Furthermore, it has significant prospects for businesses of all sizes.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."