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

It was always inevitable. If we ever solved the business technology alignment problem, we were told so many times over the decades we'd reach optimization nirvana. Is this the end of IT? Yes. It's 2015, and everyone's a chief information officer, or more accurately, everyone's a chief BI officer.

So how is this possible? I've engaged in client work for more than 40 years now. During this time, I've seen a lot of technology come and go. Early on, I recall clients describing "distributed systems" as putting a keypunch in the next building. I recall initial attempts to network, meaning simply getting anything to happen.

Business Process Management (BPM) provides a proven method for analysis and design of business processes that can provide agility and flexibility and improve alignment of business goals with IT systems. However, to achieve these benefits, BPM must be aligned with the overall enterprise.

The traditional way of managing projects was born out of knowledge. Soon, project managers started managing projects mindlessly, and all the issues of project management began to surface. With a view to finding a solution to those problems and advancing the ways of managing projects, agile project management was born. While the founders of agile project management had a great degree of clarity about what it means to be agile, the clarity seems to be getting lost by the time it reaches the front-line agile project manager (APM).

Despite operating in a period of economic uncertainty, the majority of end-user organizations have either increased spending on their BI and data warehousing initiatives in 2010, or their spending has remained constant.

Un cliente potencial del sector financiero me contactó hace unos meses para preguntarme acerca de la adopción agile. Ellos querían determinar si se deberían adoptar Scrum o TSP/PSP.

I was approached a few months back by a potential customer from the financial sector to ask me about agile adoption. The organization wanted to determine whether to go for Scrum or for Team Software Process/Personal Software Process (TSP/PSP).

I came across a recent article titled "Common ERM Challenges," which appeared in the March 2010 issue of Risk Management, the monthly publications of the R

I noticed on recent trip to New York that "The Miracle Worker" was back on Broadway. Unfortunately, after only a few months, it closed before I could see it. But that ad for the current run got my mind going about the most the most important thing in semantics and data modeling.

Everyone knows estimating work in IT can be difficult.

Whenever you ask an IT expert for an estimate, the sequence of events can look like this:

While many users may join Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other popular social networks in the hopes of connecting with other users of similar interests, the majority of these social networks are actually leading to the foundation for the 21st-century collaborative enterprise.

In the first part of this series (see "Economics 101 and Social Media Strategies, Part I: Diminishing Marginal Utility," 3 March 2010), I maintained that the benefits of social media are subject to the same economic principles as just about any other good or service.

Mike is the CIO of a medium-sized industrial firm. His firm outsourced the provision of IT services to a major multinational outsourcing firm. The outsourcing arrangement has now been in place for seven years, and therefore his own internal IS team and the outsourced providers have had ample time to learn how to work with each other.

In December, I said that, to the best of my knowledge, MapReduce [1] -- the "non-SQL" data-crunching programming model -- and its open source implementation, Hadoop, were being used primarily by such Internet companies as Facebook, Google, and MySpace to optimize their online operations, as opposed to being used by more traditional enterprises looking for a way to support their data analysis capabili