The current economy has made enterprise architecture (EA) more significant for the IT industry than ever before. Most organizations have been forced to accept the enterprise-level transformational capabilities and associated impacts of EA as practice -- and plan to leverage its functions both in strategic and tactical ways.

Web 2.0 and social networking sites are continuing to develop in response to user needs. They provide an important new form of communication and social interaction with numerous repercussions in the world outside, as reflected in recent stories about Facebook and YouTube celebrity and use in the 2008 US presidential campaigns.

Informatica Corporation has made several recent announcements pertaining to cloud data integration. These include the Informatica Cloud 9 data integration platform, specific cloud services for data integration, and on-demand data quality and address-correction tools and services -- including data quality software for use on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform.

Whenever the topic of quality assurance (QA) over a project is brought to a conversation, testing is the first thing to come to most people's minds. QA actually goes far beyond just testing code. In any case, being test centric can become more effective from the standpoint of QA at the project level if we expand our view of testing by taking the following five considerations:

Cada vez que el tema de la calidad (QA) en un proyecto entra en una conversación, pruebas es la primera cosa que viene a la mente de la mayoría de la gente. QA en realidad va mucho más allá de las pruebas de código.

Effective governance is most critical in difficult times. When an enterprise faces stagnant or declining revenues with no clearly visible path back to growth, cutting costs is almost certainly appropriate, especially if governance was ineffective in the good times and practices got, well, sloppy. IT has no special status; it may justify a less-than-proportionate cut versus the overall enterprise -- or maybe the opposite.

Life is a Bell Curve. Everything depends on which side of the top of the curve you sit.

With an appropriate level of collaboration, a team can be productive and efficient in delivering its goals. It can be effective in its mission -- whether the mission is to provide operational excellence, service or solution fulfillment, or decision making for strategic business and technology alignment.

Every once in awhile you come across a book that’s about one thing butreally hits home in another area (such as enterprise architecture). This time the book is The Checklist Manifesto -- How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande.

Reverse logistics is making a comeback as a supply chain opportunity, but this time it has a new style. The fundamentals of cost reduction, supply chain velocity, and flexibility in responding to demand fluctuations, which were in vogue in the past, are being refashioned to leverage the process to foster new insights and better collaboration with customers. This makeover is starting to catch the attention of companies that are trying to build greater customer intimacy.

Of all the factors that determine your power as a negotiator, none is more under your control than the investment you make in becoming a more skilled negotiator. Negotiation is an area of personal competence and involves theory, practice, and skills.

Data warehousing, BI, and analytics, in general, are undergoing profound changes. These are resulting from a global, just-in-time, "always-on" business environment that is redefining organizational requirements pertaining to how data is collected, processed, and used.

Innovation in high-tech industries is often driven by technology roadmaps, through cycles of technological substitutions: 1G (TACS) is substituted by 2G (GSM), which is substituted by 3G, and then 4G/WiMAX; 130 nm CMOS is substituted by 90 nm CMOS, which is substituted by 65 nm CMOS; Application 1.0 is substituted by Application 2.0, which is substituted by 3.0; and so on.

This is the next in a series of Advisors that attempts to answer the question "What do agile executives and managers actually do?" A previous Advisor identified a number of practices or areas of responsibility for agile leaders (see "Making Middle Managers Catalysts for Agility," 25 November 2009).

I've been spending the last few months working on a very practical business process project with an organization that is serious about improving its business processes.

The business sector is continually watching consumer-spending statistics -- and for good reason.

Enterprise architecture is a strange, somewhat amorphous domain. Like all new fields, it is made up largely of people who set out in life to do something else. I understand what this is like. I started life as a mathematician and then a philosopher and accidentally wandered into computing and somehow never emerged.

An evolution in the nature, methods, and motivation behind perpetrating security breaches has had a profound impact on the business environment. This shift has caused a fundamental altering in the way that an enterprise views information security, privacy, and compliance. The ever-growing compliance framework being built around those concerns fuels the need for the convergence of these disciplines within the enterprise in a more holistic manner than previously imagined.

Back in October (see "Master Data Management Picks Up Speed," 27 October 2009), I said that I was witnessing a growing interest by end-user organizations in master data management (MDM).1 Several recent developments have taken place that illustrate just how fast the MDM market is advancing.

In a previous Advisor on leading organizations (see "Making Middle Managers Catalysts for Agility," 25 November 2009), I identified a number of practices or areas of responsibility for agile leaders.

One of the keys to effective organizational risk management is transparency. Sharing information freely is a vital consideration. The more we can do to ensure that everyone in the organization is attuned to the bad things that may happen to us, the more we can affirm that they'll be sufficiently sensitive to address such concerns. That's the argument.

Today's Internet is still predominantly "wired" for a browsing or surfing mode.

Cutter Consortium's recent Latin America Summit was a terrific opportunity for CIOs and summit speakers to discuss what constitutes "good" IT.

Sometimes I'm late to the party, but I always show up, say, "fashionably late." So, to keep up with other Cutter practice areas, here are my predictions for what will be facing enterprise architects in 2010.

Too often people leave conflict resolution to chance, relying on people's skills and ad hoc efforts. Conflicts happen every day, and good planning can both reduce the incidence of conflict and bring conflicts to resolution more quickly and productively, generating better outcomes and preserving relationships.