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.

If your enterprise is like most others, you probably have some trusted old systems that have served well but have become problematic for one reason or another. Perhaps the platform is no longer supported, or growth and add-ons have evolved into an expensive and difficult-to-maintain application mess.

As the level of consciousness enhances, it will no longer be the survival of the fittest, but the survival of the wisest.

-- J.M. Sampath, 2000

For those of us who love and work with technology, it can be very difficult to relate one-to-one beyond the superficials, because doing so makes us emotionally vulnerable. However, that level of authenticity is required if leaders are to influence and persuade others to agree with and implement their ideas and visions for results. This is particularly true when the leader is less knowledgeable than the followers doing the project tasks.

Complex event processing (CEP) and stream-computing analytics software designed to analyze high volumes of continuously streaming data -- both structured and unstructured, in real time -- has received a fair amount of attention over the past 12 months or so.

When you make a new thing using a collaborative iteration process, you encounter the question of closure at each iteration. And, of course, you have to decide when you've got what you need or what they want, and make a choice when to quit altogether.

"In agile there is no quality assurance." That is one of the major misconceptions about agile, expressed either with triumph or as an accusation, depending on the speaker's position. It doesn't matter which of these two parties you belong to; both points are wrong. In fact, the agile movement has led to a revival of quality culture in software development.

Social media represents an incredibly important opportunity to leverage existing technology onto internal and external strategic and operational business objectives of all shapes and sizes. Who, for example, would have suspected that new product lifecycles could be affected by wikis, blogs, file sharing, and opinions?

The seductive beauty of owning your own house is that you can put up a fence, plant your garden, and paint your deck the way you want to, not the way your neighbors want you to, unless you moved into one of those subdivisions that control all of that. Ownership is synonymous with individual control and is instinctually attractive.

We are seeing significant developments involving the incorporation of social computing techniques with enterprise software. This new breed of enterprise collaboration tools blends the social networking models made popular by the consumer Web (i.e., Web 2.0) with enterprise content management techniques.

When experienced consultants walk into an organization, the first thing they try to assess is the control structure that defines the company. We're all familiar with the venerable "command and control" power structure; some of us are just as familiar with collaborative management structures.

One question people keep asking is: where are organizations using on-demand -- software as as service (SaaS) -- and cloud-based BI and date warehousing solutions? A survey we conducted last July that asked 79 end-user organizations about their various BI and data warehousing efforts helps provide some insight into this question.

Recientemente dí una presentación a una audiencia de alrededor de 70 personas en un banco grande. El nivel de experiencia varió de entre 1 y 20 o mas años, y me atrevo a decir que el promedio debe haber sido de por lo menos 10 años.

I gave a presentation recently to an audience of about 70 people at a large bank. Experience varied between one and 20-plus years, and I would say the average might have been no fewer than 10 years. To demonstrate how low the success rate in projects is, I asked those who had been in at least one project that finished on time and on budget to raise their hands.

Last week, the insurance company Lloyd's of London released a new report in its "emerging risk series" of publications. The Lloyd's series examines in depth an issue that is perceived to be potentially significant but which may not be fully understood or allowed for in insurance terms and conditions, pricing, reserving, or capital setting.