Understanding, using, and representing a set of business capabilities for a business is challenging for many management teams. Establishing certain principles ("agreed-upon truths to guide our actions") streamlines efforts to understand, explain, define, map, and use capabilities for planning and executing business/IT transformation efforts. These 10 principles are:

A survey conducted by Cutter Consortium in February/March 2011 offers some insight into corporate spending plans for predictive analytics.1 Specifically, when asked, "Does your organization plan to increase or decrease spending on predictive analytics and data mining this year (i.e., 2011) compared to last year?" participants responded as shown in Figure 1.

Waste is worse than loss. The time is coming when every person who lays claim to ability will keep the question of waste before him constantly. The scope of thrift is limitless.

-- Thomas A. Edison

There was a recent story in USA Today about how venture capitalists have been pouring billions of dollars into startups that are targeting clean or "green" technologies, with billions more in investment on the horizon.1 The story noted that mainstream companies are investing billions in green technologies, too, as a way to save money and lower their social reputati

A colleague and I began talking and writing about energy informatics about three years ago as a result of a request from the Advanced Practices Council (APC) of the Society for Information Management (SIM) to make its members, typically CIOs, aware of developments in green IS.

Green, like greed, is good. With regards to sustainable IT, the two terms are often linked. After all, aren't all these improvements in virtualization and energy-efficient CPUs supposed to help reduce the energy consumption of IT and hence reduce the negative impact IT may have on the environment?

This week, in recognition of International Green IT Awareness Week, Cutter is addressing the topic of green or sustainable IT. The question I'll explore is how to take an architectural approach to going green. First, let me propose the following definitions1:

It's been increasingly evident over the past three to four years that "going green" is a business movement that is here to stay -- partly out of necessity as businesses struggle with increasing costs from fuel and energy. But also partly out of having an environmental conscious. Certainly organizations, publications, activist groups, and news stories are making the masses aware of our duties to help protect and preserve the world we live in.

The outsourcing relationship is an amorphous, ambiguous thing yet crucial to the success of the outsourcing initiative. Relationships must be established within and across the client and supplier organization -- and at every level. This is where middle managers (MMs), with their skills and experience, become key. Individuals can get in the way of outsourcing success.

Going "green" and conducting a well-thought-out sustainability program can affect an organization's operating efficiency and corporate reputation, both of which can positively impact its bottom line. BI has a major role to play in an organization's efforts to improve sustainability and do something positive for the planet.

In a global sense, intellectual property (IP) protection is both a help and a hindrance to innovation, and its role needs to be examined carefully. Protection helps where it provides the creator of a new idea with the means to capitalize upon that idea by the granting of a temporary monopoly.

As I reported in an earlier Advisor (see "An Enthusiastic Update on Kanban Adoption" 31 March 2011), Kanban is being adopted in all regions of the world.

General, that is a computer-enhanced hallucination!

-- Stephen Falken, Wargames (MGM, 1983)

General, that is a computer-enhanced hallucination!

-- Stephen Falken, Wargames (MGM, 1983)

A colleague and I started talking and writing about Energy Informatics about three years ago as a result of a request from the Advanced Practices Council (APC) of the Society for Information Management to make its members, typically CIOs, aware of developments in green IS. Our ideas were well received, and Energy Informatics emerged from the APC-funded research.

A key tenet for modernizing core systems is to assess the current solution and to define the context for the to-be solution. While working with a large customer in Europe, my colleagues and I focused an eight-week effort on assessing the current environment and the readiness to renew core systems. The assessment revealed issues about product currency in operational environments and resulted in our recommendation to correct these infrastructure matters before embarking on a renewal. These tasks are ongoing as part of broader development initiatives.

Over the past few weeks, I have received nearly a half-dozen notifications from companies that I do business with saying that my email address, along with possibly some personal information, has been compromised due to "unauthorized intrusions" at third-party Internet retail marketing provider Epsilon.

"Citrus dreamsicle cake... HEAVEN!!! Why did I only give them four stars as opposed to five?!?!??! the cake was too small. :( sad face... yup.. def. sad face there. My previous cake for the same price was 3 layers and the citrus one was only 2 layers. I should have specified. But it was AWESOMELY! good cake."

Just about every one of my clients wrestles with the problem of governing the software process. As the process often eludes us, the natural tendency is to add more and more performance measures in order to ensure "completeness" of the governance system. More often than not, the end result is a baroque system that is difficult to implement, use, and comprehend.

APOLOGIZE, v.i. To lay the foundation for a future offence.

-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Ah, another day, another data breach; another insincere apology most probably written by a corporate lawyer.

Outsourcing is inevitable. In X years, all companies will be outsourced, primarily to SaaS applications. The only question is, "What is X?" And this isn't a conclusion I have come to lightly. Nor is it the position of an outsourcing zealot. In fact, I have some deep concerns about what might happen to companies in this "brave new world."

Consider some well-known examples of user interfaces, varying from extremely simple to extremely complicated.1 At one end of this spectrum we have the Google search engine, which initially captured our attention not only because its "secret sauce" -- the page-ranking algorithm -- gave better results, but also because the search page was so extremely simple: the Google logo, a search box, a s

Google's introduction of the Chromebook has serious implications for cloud computing and IT -- and threatens to shake up enterprise computing. Google is hoping that companies will find Chromebook's reduced maintenance and lower cost of ownership too good to resist. But Google does not expect companies to embrace Chromebook overnight.

There are many ways people interact with e-government applications. Some people work for the government and others work for companies that supply solutions to this very large and interesting market. However, most people interact with e-government applications as end users.

Cloud services can supplant or supplement traditional outsourcing, and it is easy to enter into these arrangements without considering the impact sufficiently or to treat them in the same manner as conventional outsourcing. Agreements are one mouse click away, but there can be unforeseen repercussions, depending on the specific services used.