Just as the word "computing" has lost its original association with mathematics and now refers to the entire range of information systems, "cloud computing" does not denote just the provision of compute servers. The distinction among IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS already indicates a broader scope.

Over the last two weeks, we've seen two moves by enterprise vendors making acquisitions of high-performance analytic DB vendors:1 Hewlett-Packard (HP) acquired Vertica, and Teradata bought Aster Data Systems.

Despite the attention now given to innovation and innovation processes, and the importance in which they are viewed for the progress and survival of companies, the means by which good ideas are created continue to elude us.

In his book The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development, Donald Reinertsen formulates the principle of quantified cost of delay as follows:

It's widely understood that most of the life of any product ever fielded is spent in production. Specifically, despite the time and costs of initial development and installation, most of the time invested in the life of a product is during the postinstallation phase, commonly called "operations and maintenance" (O&M).

The 1988 movie Rain Man won Dustin Hoffman an Oscar for his portrayal of a mentally challenged man who was incredibly gifted at recalling certain things; for example, recalling facts and computing complex numbers in his head.

Whether it is the collapse of a particular bank or the global financial crisis, weakness in critical thinking and inadequate strategic analysis in decision making appear to make significant negative contributions to corporate collapses. Business analysis (BA) offers an answer by sharpening the capabilities of critical thinking and analytical decision making.

Two recently formed organizations have come to my attention lately that are (or should be) of interest to architects. The first is the Federation of Enterprise Architecture Professional Organizations (FEAPO), and the second is the Business Architecture Guild (BAG).

Building on the November 2010 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "E-Government: Embracing the Challenges and Opportunities" (Vol. 23, No. 11), this Advisor further explores how local governments and citizens may use IT to better communicate and collaborate. While the focus here is on IT use by municipalities, these concepts translate into the worlds of business (with customers), nonprofits (with clients), and other domains.

Like many folks, I've become fascinated watching IBM's Watson playing the TV quiz show Jeopardy! As a result, I've been examining everything I can about it. In a nutshell, Watson is a pretty amazing system, and it's got me thinking just how smart it is and about what its significance may be when it comes to BI and decision support and corporate computing in general.

In my last Advisor (" 'Click here to Learn This One Crazy Secret...'," 27 January 2011), I dropped the "V" word, "visualization," and it probably hit you like a sack of feathers unloaded from 100 feet in the air.

Chances are that your IT organization is structured in different departments, such as development, quality control, and operations. Although the names may vary across companies, the idea is to group people that execute similar work or have similar expertise.

In my previous Advisor ("When It's Snow Go: Defending Your Decisions, Part I," 10 February 2011), I told the sad tale of the massive traffic jam that a snowstorm caused in the Washington, DC, area in late January.

Discussions of mobile computing are generally focused on smartphones and consumer capabilities. In the US, smartphones had about 17% market penetration at the end of 2009, but this is growing at about 35% year on year.1 Most businesses have yet to take advantage of these capabilities internally. Having a mobile strategy is a critical component of an organization's technology plan.

In my last Advisor (" 'Click here to Learn This One Crazy Secret...'," 27 January 2011), I dropped the "V" word, "visualization," and it probably hit you like a sack of feathers unloaded from 100 feet in the air. What is it about visualization that makes it such an important topic that we choose to take up your time with it ... again?

Your Web site is a mess. The social media initiative that you so desperately wanted to get going never got off the ground. You're not tweeting. You're not on Facebook, and you're not seen as a thought leader in the IT community. These were all priorities once, but now they've all fallen by the wayside. Why? Because other priorities came to the fore.

For every vendor presentation claiming that cloud computing is an unprecedented revolution, there is an analyst paper denouncing the hyperbole. Every new example of IT goes through this phase, just as surely as a child goes through the "terrible twos" -- and at about the same age.

When all's said and done, getting anything right depends on the people in our lives: smart people, stupid people, and nasty people, among other descriptors we might use. Worse, all these people exist in the insane asylums we call teams, organizations, and corporations. But tell me how many organizations are sane and improve the mental health of the inmates?

In today's ever-changing business environment, IT service providers need to implement an effective strategy and business model to tackle the problem of cannibalization within their portfolio of business software. The cloud supply chain illustrates the link between the provisions of business software through the cloud. Game-changing technology, such as cloud computing and resulting portfolio changes within the IT industry, determines daily life within business.

Some of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of companies wanting to use consumer-oriented social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn for marketing and other purposes have to do with compliance and worries about brand management. This is especially true for financial services and insurance companies, which face considerable scrutiny from government regulatory agencies.

"Are we productive enough?" one of my client's teams recently asked as the theme of a two-day retrospective. The team had done one year of agile transition and had made significant progress in its collaboration and transparency.

This week did not start out well for either J.C. Penney or Google. The reason was an article on the front page of the Sunday business section of the New York Times by David Segal, "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search" (12 February 2011).

I experienced an interesting challenge last week. For 25 years I have taught in a master of information management program at a European university. This program targets IS and business professionals; the median age is probably about 35 years. In short, these are seasoned managers from all kinds of businesses and government organizations.

While IT people have a propensity to make projects out of anything, not perceiving features of an application environment in more detail, and in enough implementation detail, is a flaw in the planning process -- a rookie mistake. In many ways, technologists are obsessed with automating certain features of an application environment, but when it comes to deployment, all brainstorming seems to cease. This isn't a very enterprise-wide or Gestalt view of the world, where the "essence or shape of an entity's complete form" is understood by the application designers.

You staff a project with experienced professionals to carry out a project for a customer who is expecting the best that you can give. Likewise, as the project manager, you have similar expectations for those professionals that are reporting to you on the engagement. You expect the best from them, and you expect them to perform on the assignments given to them. Project success involves some luck -- no one can argue that.