Enterprise architecture continues to grow as a job title, but what does it mean to make the transition from just a title to an actual profession?

Security and privacy challenges are growing and will more than likely become a central focus for CEOs and CIOs during this next decade. Most IT organizations have been dealing with challenges in this area for many years; however, the level of risk continues to escalate as our cyberworld becomes more and more complex.

Last month (see "Corporate Use of Text Analysis and Mining Grows," 25 May 2010), I wrote that organizations are showing more interest in using text analysis and mining tools to support their BI efforts.

In Coaching Agile Teams, Lyssa Adkins discusses the difference between cooperation and collaboration. I'd like to add another interaction dimension to these two: compliance.

Fifteen years ago, I wrote an article for IEEE Software called "Are We Developers Liars or Just Fools?" (July 1995).

Vendor management is still the rage. We talked about it a lot when outsourcing trends became clear -- when more and more companies were outsourcing a greater amount of their infrastructure and applications to partners down the street and around the world. The major outsourcing deals of the 20th century were inked in the 1990s.

In the earlier Advisor in this series ("A Sustainability Strategy That BITES — Creating an Actionable Agenda: Part I," 2 June 2010), I outlined the need for a business, IT, and environmental sustainability (BITES) strategy and discussed what green IT means and how IT (besides itself being green) as an effective tool or means could help in many different ways to enhance enterprise environmental sustainability.

"In the absence of a long-range plan, short demands will always drive out long-term needs."

The possible negative impact of mishandling digital assets is rising as assorted government and industry regulations crack down on lax organizations. It is no longer just a matter of direct cost of the damage done by a breach; it now includes legal costs in the form of fines and possible prosecution.

Outsourcing is closely tied to an IT organization's staffing plans. Overall, our survey of IT managers suggests that outsourcing is up. In fact, the trend for outsourcing appears to have really caught on. The number of respondents who outsource work now or plan to outsource jumped to 71% in this year's survey. That's up by about 13% from the 2009 survey.

There have been a number of recent developments pertaining to the use of MapReduce1 and its open source equivalent, Hadoop.2 These developments are important because they should help spur greater use of MapReduce and Hadoop by traditional enterprises looking to take advantage of their big data assets by implementing applications that can rapidly process vast amounts of dat

IS strategy is the organizational perspective on the investment, deployment, use, and management of information systems.1 Even though each individual business and IS executive may have his or her own particular view of IS, organizational IS strategy reflects the collective view shared across the upper echelon of the organization.2 An IS strategy determines if, when, how, and the extent to which a company will innovate with IS.3 Research by Daniel Chen et al.

One of the beautiful things about agile is its simplicity: Scrum consists of three roles, three artifacts, and three plus one practices; XP provides 21 practices; and FDD comes on a single sheet of paper. In fact, we have printed an overview of Scrum onto a beer mat. Sounds easy, doesn't it?

A variety of psychological tests have shown that people are bad at estimating risk.

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.