Where work is outsourced to remote departments, integration becomes an important issue. Integration requires development of clearly understood policies and careful oversight. The outsourced department must be integrated into operations on both a technical and a social level. This is greatly aided by modular organization, in which the boundaries and interfaces between departments are well understood.

A couple weeks ago, I discussed how social media monitoring and analysis tools can be used to defend an organization's reputation (see "Play Better Defense With Social Media Monitoring," 16 November 2010).

In my last Advisor (see "Preparing for the Net Generation," 11 November 2010), I discussed the distinctive characteristics of the Net generation, or Net-Geners -- the group now graduating from college and entering the workplace.

I've been part of the agile software development world since 2000, when I first found out about XP. I was immediately taken with its high level of collaboration, emphasis on working with the business, and tight focus on technical practices that, when used properly, produce excellent software quality.

Andy Maher is a very old friend of mine and a long-standing collaborator. Andy may be the best business intelligence consultant/programmer in the world -- no kidding. This is because, rather than write books and give speeches, Andy still does real work, helping large organizations try to pry near-real-time information from the cold, hard grasp of their antiquated databases, data warehouses, data marts, etc.

These days it is quite fashionable to paint a dramatic picture of the sweeping changes and cataclysmic winds swirling all around us. Faced with this effective illusion of certainty of change (or do we call it a reboot now?), many heads nod in groupthink response to the shibboleths spoken by our techno-shamans.

Agile and service-oriented architecture (SOA) share similar goals, and both represent the current end point of lengthy processes of evolution. SOA and its concepts are derived from innumerable attempts through the years to develop reusable code and to segment individual software development projects into modules through OO programming.

When a group of Baby-Boomer IT professionals get together, it is not unusual for a game of “IT Codger One-Upmanship” to break out. In this game, the old-timers usually start talking about who remembers programming in FORTRAN or COBOL. Someone then ups the ante by talking about punch cards. If the participants are old enough, a winner emerges by explaining how he or she used to program in hexadecimal using toggle switches!

Adoption of high-performance analytic databases1 by end-user organizations has experienced moderate but steady growth since their inception. According to Cutter research, about 18% of end-user organizations use high-performance analytic databases to support their BI data management and data analysis efforts.

"You did not finish the stories you committed to!" a product owner at a client of mine recently raged against the team. "What the hell are you doing all day long? This commitment was pointless!" And he was right.

Two government reports published this past week again highlight the old adage "Any fool can make a project late or overbudget; all he or she need to do is not give the project enough time or money."

As the result of a life in the trenches, I have a reading list that is quite broad. One of the journals that I subscribe to is TR News.

Business legend has it that Henry Ford waited three days before reading any memos that appeared on his desk. It drove his managers to make autonomous decisions on anything pressing or urgent. It ensured they weren't waiting for blessings from "on high" before taking action. They knew that his responsibility was the longer term, not the short term, and they acted accordingly.

This summer, Cutter conducted a survey of EA programs with the subscribers to our Enterprise Architecture practice. Among other issues, we looked into the perceived effectiveness of EA programs. Unfortunately, the results were a little disappointing.

The first view of outsourcing contracts argues that the contract is the most important part in the client-vendor relationship. The second view, while far from advocating that a contract is unnecessary, places its importance significantly beneath that of the relationship. The contract has its place, but it alone cannot produce results. An experienced contract-management team focused on cooperation, common interests, and earning trust over time creates the results and efficiencies. A mere piece of paper cannot achieve such results.

Last week, it was in the news that a Pacific Gas & Electric executive admitted to having used an assumed name to infiltrate an online discussion group organized by consumers who are against the deployment of the utility company's smart electricity-usage metering devices. The executive indicated that his goal was simply to get a better understanding of what his company's customers are thinking.

Technical innovation is widely viewed in the developed and developing world as the driver for economic and cultural growth and prosperity. The growth of network services and social media have made new innovation processes feasible, and the members of the next generation of knowledge workers often have been among the leaders in such approaches.

Every good manager knows statistical data is always subject to interpretation. A poor interpretation could be disastrous. For some time, my attention has been drawn to how frequently Standish Chaos Reports are used and how almost nobody who uses or refers to the data remarks on their inadequacy.

On the recent Apple investor call, CEO Steve Jobs made an impassioned plea for the superior usability of the single-vendor Apple products, contrasting its usability with Google's many-hardware-devices mobile experience. Jobs critiqued the use of the word "open," which Google uses to describe its platform.

Thus far in this series ("Part I: Basic Concepts," 15 September 2010; "Part II: Let's Get Critical, 13 October 2010), we

For years now, I have made a good living by exploiting Geary Rummler and Alan Brache’s famous subtitle, "How to Manage the White Space in the Organization Chart" (Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space in the Organization Ch

A recent Cutter Consortium survey [1] helps shed some light on the effect that the economic downturn is having on corporate BI and data warehousing efforts. The good news is that the impact appears to have lessened, as more organizations report that the economy is no longer having a significant negative effect on their BI and data warehousing initiatives.

Fundamentally, agile business is about a dedicated and unremitting focus on two principles: