I'm a firm believer in complex projects having a team composed of both specialists and generalists. The argument in support of the generalist is that he or she has the ability and skills to keep options open and may see solution details that would otherwise be missed.

There is nothing better than risk mismanagement and not learning from past mistakes to steal away from an organization's or even an industry's future. The banking and mortgage underwriting community is -- once again -- painfully relearning this truism.

On a recent drive to a client site, my navigation system suggested that I drive away from my destination rather than drive toward it. In clear, succinct, familiar tones, my online guide told me to "Continue 1-point-2 miles. Then turn left." Like a lemming, I obeyed.

There's a brand-new layer of digital intelligence being conceived upon the world's century-old electric power grid by way of your regional electric power utility, through your new smart meter, and extending into your future home and business energy management systems and smart appliances. It's called the Smart Grid.

The Electric Power Research Institute defines it as follows:

Outsourcing is continuing to evolve toward a wider uptake by businesses of different sizes and in different domains, as well as toward more comprehensive process-oriented offerings. Outsourcing to departments or workgroups, in which related processes are brought together, represents an important development in business process outsourcing (BPO).

One of the most dramatic outcomes from our 2010 survey on IT budgeting (see "IT Trends 2010: IT Shop Holds Own in Turbulent Economy," Cutter Benchmark Review, Vol. 10, No. 1) comes from a question about the work that respondents are currently or planning to outsource.

In August, I said that we are seeing an increasing number of organizations developing mobile BI applications (see "Mobile BI Comes of Age," 10 October 2010).

We all talk about acting in a culturally correct manner. We know that some cultures take a negative view of giving someone a thumbs-up sign or even shaking with the left hand. And when we travel to emerging markets, we try to follow these cultural rules.

"I really like these agile ideas and our pilot project was quite successful," an executive told me recently, "but now it comes to transforming the organization, and we must not be dogmatic here.

The devastation in traditional publishing needs precious little mentioning.

As I outlined in my previous Advisor ("Getting a Grip -- Demand Management, Part I: Basic Concepts," 15 September 2010), demand management means handling business demand for IT in such a way that it reaches a harmonious and beneficial relationship wi

I've written lately about movements in the architecture community toward certification and toward EA as an official profession. A related movement is the emergence of EA in academia. Currently, the list of EA programs offered by universities is rather small, but it is growing.

Server virtualization has made considerable headway in the enterprise. But the use of virtualization for desktop (client) computing has been rather limited. This has been primarily attributed to technical issues that have made for a poor end-user experience and difficulties in managing and scaling virtual desktop infrastructure environments.

I've been checking out the new BI search1, 2 platform from Endeca Technologies: Endeca Latitude. Latitude is based on a hybrid search/analytical database designed to provide nontechnical end users with self-service BI exploration capabilities.

What do you think about variability? Let's say you get a new job offer and the organization you would lead continually deals with variability. Would you take the job?

"This is a deeply challenging time for BP. The Macondo (aka, Deepwater Horizon) incident was a tragedy that claimed the lives of 11 people, caused injury to many others, and had a widespread environmental impact. Our response to the incident needs to go beyond deepwater drilling.

"Every IT leadership institute I have ever been to has drilled into me that we serve the business." So said a CIO to me recently with a both mildly defiant yet puzzled look. She was not quite appreciating my advice to be bold and dare to lead, yes, the business. Why not take the perspective of the CEO? Or the majority shareholder?

My son loves to play hockey.

A few years ago, when applications started exploding into collections of services -- in the service-oriented architecture (SOA) sense -- a challenge that soon appeared was the number of new skills that an IT architect needed to succeed in this new world. With Web-based collaboration platforms, such as the one just described, we will face the same issue.

Some people label it as Enterprise 2.0; others see it just as a new faster pace in ongoing business transformation. Whatever you call it, there’s a seismic shift underway. Process is at the heart of it, and CIOs have a critical role in enabling the enterprise to ride this incoming tide.

The enterprise of the near future will be different in three important ways:

Offshoring in IT is, arguably, the most significant phenomenon to occur in recent decades.

-- David Avison and Gholamreza Torkzadeh

It's no secret that corporate use of social media as a valuable source for better understanding and engaging customers is still fairly limited at this time. Likewise, current usage of data acquired from social media sites to bolster corporate BI efforts is also quite limited.

It's amazing how organizations spend vast sums in the interest of discovering the newest, latest, and most advanced business practices and technologies. They throw their energies behind radical change, while ignoring the improvements that can be made through effective implementation of existing practice.

It's time we stopped this debate over the roles and responsibilities between the project manager (PM) and the business analyst (BA) and focused our efforts on realizing the benefits of the PM and BA partnering to deliver maximum business value to their clients.