"It's like déjà vu all over again."

So spoke the former Yankee great Yogi Berra about his teammates Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris repeatedly hitting back-to-back home runs.

Anyone who follows my Trends Advisors on security will know that I am not a big fan of the current Internet and Windows operating system approaches to security. At base, this is much like the road systems in many major metropolitan areas: it is old and complex and used too much to be worked on.

Many organizations assume that if an obligation has been stated in a contract, the provider will comply with it and no further work needs to be done. However, astute organizations do not assume compliance, they ensure it. The time to discover the provider has not done so is not when your organization is seeking to invoke the clause, as the following case illustrates.

We have heard a lot recently about the ongoing and imminent integration of business and IT. Some example discussions range from "the CIO is dead" to the "cloud eliminates the IT department" and "business unit IT alignment won't matter" -- even to the agile argument that there aren't any IT projects any more, just business projects with an IT component.

Many practitioners recognize that IT governance is the cornerstone in achieving success when it comes to creating and delivering the right business value for their enterprises. In other words, IT governance is the key to business and IT alignment.

In the first part of this series (see "Economics 101 and Social Media Strategies, Part I: Diminishing Marginal Utility," 3 March 2010), I discussed diminishing marginal utility with respect to social media.

Many organizations assume that if an obligation has been stated in a contract, the provider will comply with it and no further work needs to be done. However, astute organizations do not assume compliance, they ensure it. The time to discover the provider has not done so is not when your organization is seeking to invoke the clause, as the following case illustrates.

Several weeks ago, a reader contacted me regarding a BI Advisor in which I said that I'd noticed a growing interest by end-user organizations in using data mining technology -- particularly for predictive customer analytics (see "How Do Your Data Mining and Predictive Analyti

To increase profits by increasing revenues, you have to be successful in making a particular case to your customers. You must convincingly present them with a value proposition that says: "Buy mine -- it costs more, but it's better."

I have experienced and witnessed an explosion in system design problems that are the byproduct of missing or incompetent systems analysts. Whether the development approach taken by a company is agile or traditional, the success or failure of the system is determined by the effectiveness of the analysis and design activities.

While the iPad continues to sell briskly, bloggers, pundits, poets, everyday people, and competitors wax on, admirably, jealously, and, once in a while, eloquently. More than probably any other device, this one found a truck-sized hole where none was seen. Standing in the no man's land between the cell phone and the laptop, it found this so-called desert fertile enough.

How does your organization provide feedback about the performance of its people?

The Internet changes everything -- or does it? New business models; Web 2.0; social networking; interactions with customers, employees, and partners, etc., are being revolutionized. The change is so rapid, how do we keep up?

In reading the latest Cutter IT Journal issue on cultivating leadership (see "Cultivating Leadership Throughout the IT Organization," Vol. 23, No. 3), one thing struck me. Every single article, in its own way and for different reasons, came to the same conclusion.

The ability to host high-performance analytic databases1 on public cloud environments -- particularly Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform -- has received a fair amount of attention over the past year or so. We have also seen a number of vendors (e.g., Vertica Systems, Teradata, Greenplum) offer versions of their high-performance analytic databases for use on Amazon EC2.

This article is the next in a series of Advisors that articulate the use of the Agile Triangle. It also introduces another project management tool, the Tradeoff Matrix, and describes how these two tools are used together.

The past few weeks have been both discouraging and heartening if you are an enterprise risk manager, for both the best and the worst aspects of ERM have been on very public display.

For the past decade, search technology innovation has been largely static in that it has been fixed and unchanging. Further, we, as business and technology executives, have been "snowbound" in a digital whiteout of epic proportions -- if you will, an Internet Static Age.

As important as success is to any organization, it's just as important to evaluate how we deal with the situations where the organizations don't succeed. That's truly crucial. But note how I framed it here. It's not about failure; it's about a lack of success. The two are not interchangeable.

Two of the more serious problems holding back increased enterprise adoption of cloud computing are security and portability -- specifically, a lack of any real standards in these areas. But all is not doom and gloom. Several organizations have taken up the mission of addressing these issues, and some of those efforts are already beginning to bear fruit.

Developing a risk management culture in any organization is a significant undertaking, particularly if the organization has not formally considered risk management as an integral part of running the business. Risk management culture is nothing that is hard and clearly definable, but is an attitude. In other words, "It is the way we do business here."

One very effective technique I have found to improve relationships and to drive cultural acceptance of candor, honesty, and transparency is called the "undiscussables." I have seen many variations on this technique. Mine is derived from The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook by Peter Senge et al.1

Even with all the talk about the need for real-time data warehouse updating techniques, most organizations today primarily perform daily and weekly updates of their data warehouses. The key word here is primarily. That's because most of the end-user organizations that are using real-time data warehousing techniques are doing so on a very selective basis.

What can organizations do to make sure their investments in social networking applications pay off? First, organizations need to make sure that their social networking applications are aligned with their corporate strategy. Starbucks provides an instructive example.

Cutter Consortium Fellow Ward Cunningham's quip, "A little debt speeds [software] development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite," is intuitively very clear.1 He is talking about short-term debt, which should be reduced -- and, it is hoped, eliminated in its entirety -- at the earliest possibl