Last month, I wrote about the difficulty IT organizations have in achieving effective integration with business (see "An Attitude Persists: Thinking Business? -- Hah!" 5 May 2010).

The recently published Information Systems Transformation: Architecture-Driven Modernization Case Studies, which I wrote with Philip H.

As project managers, being aware of ourselves is one of the better things we can do. What may help us with this awareness is to utilize the behavioral mirrors of the people who work with us.

Several readers have contacted me asking how complex event processing (CEP) and other streaming analytics systems compare to BI and real-time analytics, such as business activity monitoring (BAM). This is a logical question, given that CEP and real-time BI and data warehousing are sometimes spoken of together.

Because this week is “International Green IT Awareness Week,” I thought I would take a look at how “green IT” and enterprise risk management intersect.

First, what is “green IT”?

In honor of this week's International Green IT Awareness Week, I was asked to write “something green.” I thought of writing something in green ink, but realized that wasn’t what was desired.

There has been much talk and action about business-IT alignment and misalignment and their impact on business. Now, one more factor -- environmental sustainability -- needs to be included in the business-IT nexus. With growing concern about the deterioration of our environment, businesses -- IT and non-IT, small and large -- are required to minimize their environmental impacts and take on a new agenda, environmental sustainability, into their portfolio.

-- Vandana Shiva (in Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis)[1]

[From the Editor: In recognition of International Green IT Awareness Week (1-7 June 2010), we offer the following excerpt from Brian Donnellan's article, "Green IT Metrics: Enhancing Brand Value While Meeting Compliance," which originally appeared in the Cutter Benchmark Review (Vol. 9, No.

IT outsourcing, as a valid business strategy, encompasses such IT services as software and Web development, technical and customer support services, data analysis, customer relationship management, and business intelligence (BI).

SAP AG's announcement that it is acquiring Sybase Inc. for US $5.8 billion primarily has to do with the enterprise software giant getting its hands on Sybase’s mobile computing infrastructure, which SAP can use to significantly bolster its mobile applications initiatives.

Here's a notion that I mentioned at a meeting last year. It caused a little stir in the room, so I thought I'd pass it along here. Writing about politics, T. D. Weldon had a helpful idea in The Vocabulary of Politics (Penguin Books, 1953).

One common belief in the industry is that the capability of delivering things quickly is a key competitive advantage. I would like to revisit the way this belief is often used in practice and propose a better way to use it.

In a recent e-mail exchange with Cutter Fellow Lynne Ellyn (SVP and CIO of DTE), she mentioned that one characteristic of agile leaders is providing focus and clarity for an organization or team. Her comments sparked my thinking about why it’s so hard to be a good agile leader.

The promise of business intelligence (BI 1.0) is finally turning the performance corner. While we're still cleaning, migrating, and securing data -- and worrying about platform compatibility -- we've also connected BI to business performance management, a step that reflects rising expectations about what the BI endgame looks like.

If you are embracing transformation as an approach to make your business operations more effective, you are not alone. In fact, a majority of companies and government agencies in the US and other countries are considering transformation. However, it is absolutely essential that you recognize the reasons for the transformation before jumping onto the bandwagon.

Recently, I participated in a design review where the tension in the room was palpable. Talk about the business/IT divide; that was nothing compared to the development/architecture divide. The development team was defensive, resented being there, and was less than effusive in its answers to questions.

In a recent article, Cutter Fellow Stephen J. Andriole quite aptly called governance a “necessary evil” (see "You Have the Right to Decide, Influence, or Just Watch: Governance Where IT Counts).

It appears that the use of text analysis and text mining software by end-user organizations has increased, as approximately one-quarter of organizations surveyed indicate that they are now analyzing text/unstructured data in some capacity to support their BI efforts.

The Agile Triangle, shown in Figure 1, was introduced in Agile Project Management 2nd Edition) and has been the subject of several Cutter Advisors. The Agile Triangle encourages teams to be flexible, agile, and adaptable -- it alters how we view success.

Over the past few weeks, I have been reviewing the plethora of events in the news -- from the swine flu to volcanoes -- that have offered superb opportunities for lessons about what and what not to do in regard to implementing enterprise risk management.

There was a time when we had one telephone bill. Each month, AT&T billed us for a certain number of hard-wired telephones and long-distance charges. At that time, we also had a TV antenna mounted on the roof (remember antennas?). Then came cable and satellite TV and the antennas slowly disappeared. For a while, we used our landlines to "dial up" the Internet.

There's a certain element of frustration associated with staying focused on what matters at a management level, and it's been exacerbated of late as I've begun a quick swim through the books I've finally pulled off my shelf.

To keep up, I follow a number of enterprise architecture group discussions on the Internet. The most common questions I've encountered in these discussions revolve around communication: (1) how do you communicate with the business management and (2) what do you communicate to business management? Clearly, these are major issues affecting all EA groups.

A recent report lists the following top 10 factors as challenges to projects [1]:

Lack of user input

Incomplete requirements and specifications

Changing requirements and specifications

Lack of executive support

Technology incompetence