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

When the going gets tough, it is an opportunity for IT to shine. The IT organization offers more leverage for a company than do other departments. The IT organization is the only organization in a company that can positively affect every other organization in that company by helping it reduce costs and/or improve the productivity of its people.

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.

I've not always been a fan of the CMM® (Capability Maturity Model). One of the problems with CMM is that it implies a level of precision that is not normally found in the real world. In my experience, I have found that not only is Level 4 very difficult to attain, but it is also hard to maintain.

With today's serious budgetary constraints, business and IT decision makers are forced to carry out rigorous due diligence in devising their business-IT alignment strategies. Practitioners must make sure that their strategies assimilate flexible business plans with scalable IT architectures and promote effective cost reductions while delivering the right business value or results.

Last week I was driving to one of my favorite restaurants, listening to National Public Radio. There was a story about the closing of an automobile factory in Fremont, California, USA (see "The End of the Line for GM-Toyota Joint Venture," 26 March 2010).

Agility is not reaching far enough into organizations. Too many agile development initiatives fall far short of their potential. Too many organizations have a few successful agile projects, but fail to sustain agility. Success on a few, or even more than a few, projects doesn't translate to wider acceptance of agile principles and practices in the organization.

The majority of organizations using high-performance analytic databases are employing them for specific, compute-intensive applications intended to supplement the analytic processing of their main data warehouse. However, it appears that analytic databases are finding growing use as primary data warehouse databases as well.

In Greek mythology, Sirens were dangerous bird-women, portrayed as seductresses who resided on cliffs and rock-infested islands. Sailors who sailed near were compelled by the Sirens' enchanting music and voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast (adapted from Wikipedia).

Last year, I wrote about a fascinating article by the New York Times business writer Joe Nocera.1 In the piece, Nocera interviewed Nassim Nicholas Taleb, distinguished professor of risk engineering at New York University and author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highl

Formula One racing, dominated by Mercedes and Ferrari, has had a curious relationship with the consumer market. Technology pioneered in Formula One (F1), such as paddle shifters, finds its way into conventional cars. Some consumer technology innovations find their way into the pro circuits. The two feed off each other.

Anyone attuned to the current political debates knows that much of the discussion is rooted not in the merits of either sides' positions, but in both sides' contentions that a failure to act will lead to damaging (if not damning) outcomes.