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.

I was reading a book about systems design recently, in which I found the following offhand quote: "Software is not is not a science, therefore...." I was immediately taken aback, since I've been studying systems (software) design for a rather long time, and I have always taken the position that software design and development is (or ought to be) a science -- a place where there are postulat

Shortly after any new idea, the inevitable query, "how long will this take?" is sure to follow. We hope that this question sparks an analytical estimate of the work involved and the effort required, but for some of you, this question may only rekindle images of your last project's death march, where an unrealistic deadline was foisted on you. In this Advisor, we look at the estimation process and some approaches for mitigating a few of its inherent challenges.

Whether or not you think it has anything to do with global climate change, you have to admit that the weather this winter has been different and dramatic.

A fundamental of configuration management is a baseline: a description of a large group of items. Baselines can be powerful tools to help manage an endeavor.

While many organizations that embark on outsourcing initiatives spend significant resources on defining the scope of the providers' responsibilities for tendering and contractual purposes, the same level of effort is seldom put into defining the responsibilities of the information and communications technology (ICT) organization that will remain (known as the retained organization).

Most talk pertaining to on-demand and cloud-based BI and analytics has focused on commercial providers offering such services. Last year, however, we saw the introduction of the concept of the private analytics cloud located behind the end-user organization's firewall.

Everything I never knew I always wanted.

-- From the movie Fools Rush In

Now why didn't I think of that?

-- Everybody

One of the leadership tasks in an agile organization is to develop a framework for value determination and use.

On the surface, business process in any of its various guises appears to be a simple, even natural, activity, but it is not. Business process change -- significant business process change -- in the real world is a very difficult thing to pull off. This is because business processes occur in one organizational dimension and "management" occurs in another.

For many years, we have been recommending that IT organizations think of themselves as a service business, with five fundamental service portfolios (you can refer to my previous Business-IT Strategies Advisors and Executive Reports for further discussion of these portfolios):

Having been in the computer business for quite a while, I've seen a number of shifts in the underlying architecture of hardware and communications. First, there were mainframes, then minis, then PCs, then local area networks, client-server, and, most recently, the Internet. Now we are faced with a combination hardware/communication/software leap onto "the cloud."