Mobile BI is hardly new.

Be the change that you wish to see in the world.

-- Mahatma Gandhi

"The Pentagon says it is still investigating the source of the documents. The military has detained Bradley Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst in Baghdad, for allegedly transmitting classified information. But the latest documents could have come from anyone with a secret-level clearance...."1

The value of "soft" people skills is often severely underestimated in IT organizations. For example, the psychoanalyst Erik Erickson identified trust as the foundational characteristic for identity and relationships.1 A great IT leader at any level must be able to trust and be trusted. A leader's breach of trust will rapidly spread like a fungus throughout the project team to lower morale and decrease productivity.

Master data management (MDM) is nothing new, but recent trends in the enterprise and industry seem to be breathing new life into it. All of the major platform/infrastructure vendors now have products in this space, including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP, as well as many vendors focused specifically on MDM.

As the 21st century proceeds, we are entering an era where basic assumptions about business organization and employment are evolving. This is resulting in a number of fundamental changes to expectations and skills requirements. People entering the workforce will need new sets of skills and new ways of working. This will be true across all business sectors, but the impacts within IT are likely to be profound.

According to our latest research,1 overwhelmingly, the most troublesome "big data"-related challenges organization face with their data warehousing and BI efforts are (1) meeting complex query-processing requirements, and (2) transforming and loading data due to data volumes and windows of opportunity.

A New York Times op-ed column by Thomas Friedman told of risk managers using a model to assess financial companies' net positions under different assumptions about mortgage interest rates and housing market factors.1 One of the parameters the managers were allowed to enter was year-over-year percentage growth in single-family home value.

At the end of Part I ("The BP Oil Spill: Could ERM Have Helped Avoid It?" 15 July 2010), I asked whether BP PLC Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward -- or at least BP's risk management committee -- should have been made aware of the significant operational risk incurred on the company's behalf by his operational managers

Things are changing -- again. But this time the changes are more profound and definitely more permanent. We're entering a new era of partnership between technology and business. These two camps are inseparable now, and business models and processes cannot be implemented without operational and strategic technology.

Two decades ago, I moderated a panel discussion of CIOs interested in better understanding the challenges IT faces and initiatives they might take to successfully address them. During the panel discussion we agreed on six basic themes as being critical to successful IT management. The question is: have things changed much since?

In many companies and in US government agencies, enterprise architecture (EA) governance is already considered as a consensus-driven framework to guide and direct significant architecture decisions related to IT assets and resources that may make significant architectural impacts to the business operations.

In the last few years, agile methodologies have rapidly gained acceptance and moved into the mainstream. Currently, it seems like a majority of companies are running at least one agile pilot program and many large organizations have converted completely to agile methods.

There are many opinions about what constitutes an IT strategy. In my view, the IT strategy has to start from a deep understanding of the short-, mid-, and long-term goals of the company. In the absence of clearly stated corporate goals, the CIO does not get a pass; he or she must make some assumptions based on observation. Assuming there are stated corporate goals, the CIO must have some specific artifacts to create a grounded, purposeful strategy that aligns IT actions to company needs and whose value is clear. One of these artifacts is the company culture.

High-performance analytic databases1 are receiving increasing interest by end-user organizations. This is understandable, given the ever-increasing amount of data that organizations are accumulating -- causing a data glut that is, quite simply, putting a strain on organizations' data warehousing and BI activities.

Social media represents an incredibly important opportunity to leverage new (and existing) technology onto internal and external strategic and operational business objectives of all shapes and sizes. Who, for example, would have suspected that new product lifecycles could be affected by wikis, blogs, file sharing, and opinions? That focus group in Peoria is forever gone, replaced by blogs open to customers from Illinois to California to New York to Paris to Shanghai. Innovation is now a contact sport played by a globally distributed team.

Fully prioritize your tasks, estimate them, skim them off the top until your current velocity is met, and you’re done. Agile planning is that easy ... but is this really easy?

A couple of months ago, I wrote an Opinion for the Cutter Trends Council titled "The Book Is Dead, Long Live the e-Book” (Vol. 10, No. 9).

Of Cutter Consortium consultants, I believe I may have a unique distinction: I’m a former member of the inside-the-beltway media. I was the news director at WASH-FM and the community affairs director of news radio WTOP for a number of years before jumping into the “real world” as a manager, project manager, and, later, executive.

Persistence in computer science refers to the characteristic of state that outlives the process that created it. Without this capability, state would only exist in RAM, and would be lost when this RAM loses power, such as a computer shutdown. (Wikipedia)

Governance is one of those concepts that suddenly emerged and became an important issue in IT. It is not clear when exactly the concept originated as we understand it now. In 1998, the IT Governance Institute was founded to disperse the IT governance concept. In academic and professional literature, articles mentioning IT governance in the title began to emerge during the late 1990s.

Complex Event Processing (CEP) [1] is generating increasing interest among companies due to its ability to increase operational efficiency by providing a means to identify and interpret the effect of seemingly unrelated events taking place across the organization and then notifying the appropriate stakeholders with near zero latency.

It's all about the money! This is one of most common ideas in the minds of enterprise executives. It is one of the tenets that has driven enterprises for decades because, well ... of course, businesses want to make money. Although this is true, that doesn't mean the company and its products or services need to be cost-driven.

¡Se trata del dinero! Esta es una de las ideas más comunes en la mente de ejecutivos empresariales. Es uno de los principios que han dirigido empresas durante décadas porque, bueno... por supuesto, los negocios quieren hacer dinero. Aunque esto es cierto, no quiere decir que la empresa y sus productos o servicios necesitan ser basados en costo.