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

Just a few years ago, the concept of on-demand BI was just that -- a concept. But today -- and forever going forward -- it's possible to outsource BI to a variety of providers. BI in the cloud is now possible, which potentially changes the schedule for the delivery of BI capabilities.

I've been working on a report covering complex event processing (CEP). One of the more interesting developments I've found regarding the application of CEP is that some organizations are implementing the technology in conjunction with BI to create advanced real-time analytical systems.

In an upcoming Executive Update ("The Agile Triangle Evolves as a Lean-Agile Prism," June 2010), I introduce the Lean-Agile Prism, the premise of which is to go beyond the agile triangle by giving high importance to design.

Hace poco escribí un Executive Update que introduce el Prisma Lean-Agile cuya premisa es ir más allá del triángulo agile dando gran importancia al diseño. Conforme dí pláticas sobre el Prisma, algunas personas comentaron que sólo se aplica a las aplicaciones comerciales donde el atractivo visual es importante.

© The Ken Orr Institute, 7 May 2010.

We have a number of hidden taxes, and complexity is becoming one of the worst ones. Every time we go to an airport, we encounter the Osama bin Laden tax at security, where it costs time and money to ensure our safety.

How many times have you heard the phrase "strategic technology"? Every time I read it or hear it, I bristle, especially right after I wrote it or said it and committed the error I am about to rail against. If everyone would just say "strategic uses of technology," I would feel much better.

How much e-mail do you get? If you're like most IT professionals, it's probably dozens, maybe even hundreds, of messages each day. Some of these messages even have real business value. More and more today, companies are using e-mail for operational purposes and customer communications (think mail order or travel reservations).

Environmental metrics and measurements (also known as carbon metrics or even green IT metrics because of the predominance of IT in the carbon space) play a pivotal role in reducing the carbon footprint of businesses. Reductions in carbon emissions by businesses need to be measured for justification and reporting.

Last week, Equifax Inc. picked Greenplum's analytic database and Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC) platform to power its company-wide advanced analytics initiatives (for more about Greenplum's Enterprise Data Cloud, see my 16 June 2009 BI Advisor, "Greenplum's Enterprise Data Cloud").

Governance is a loaded term. It evokes a strong visceral reaction in software development teams. It is mostly viewed as a rigid exercise of control and perceived as a threat to the autonomy of the team and its creativity. But it need not be so.