Perhaps because it is so new, social media could be one of the least understood emerging technologies around. In this three-part series of Advisors, I will apply three tried-and-true economic principles to this rapidly evolving medium:

Again and again, I'm reminded that customer relationship management (CRM) involves more that just up-selling and cross-selling. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether organizations sometimes use CRM merely as an excuse to placate themselves for failing to address bad business practices.

When people tell me they are already practicing risk management on their projects, more often than not my skepticism is justified since all they are actually accomplishing is a cursory job of risk identification.

So said Theodore Roscoe of the US Navy's Mark XIV torpedo during the early stages of World War II in his book, United States Submarine Operations in World War II (US Naval Institute Press, June 1949).

Both the most devout and more moderate Luddites will have to gasp on this one.

Value comes from embracing and managing risk. An absence of risk generally equates to an absence of value. But value must be measured, and the results, good and bad, must be analyzed for enterprise learning and to enhance future business developments, particularly with regard to developing more robust and complete business cases and promoting better-informed decision making for the future. A more positive and structured approach to enterprise governance of IT will help ensure the delivery of value. This is best achieved by building on what you have.

In my last Advisor (see "How The Checklist Manifesto Breaks Down Problems," 10 February 2010), I recommended the book The Checklist Manifesto -- How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande and promised to draw some parallels

Businesses and governments collect a large amount of personal information, some of it quite sensitive, about their clients, employees, patients, and citizens. At the same time, a random scan of media reports on any given day will find multiple stories of personal data lost by or stolen from corporations and governments.

A meeting was held at Motorola near Chicago several years ago, and nobody came. Well, almost nobody -- one guy did turn up. It was a good meeting, and several important decisions were made. Sandeep in Bangalore, India, dialed in, and so did Pat in Cork, Ireland, and Yaron in Tel Aviv, Israel.

I've noticed a growing interest by end-user organizations in using data mining technology -- particularly for predictive customer analytics. Several trends account for this. First, organizations now find themselves with so much data that they are looking for ways to capitalize on this valuable resource.

In 1980, Michael Porter wrote in his classic book Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors that there are two generic strategies for companies competing in broad markets.

In this series of Advisors, I'm exploring some typical problems traditionally trained managers run into when their organization starts to use agile (see "Hidden Pitfalls of Agile: Self-Organization," 14 January 2010, "Hidden Pitfalls of Agile: User Contact

My 16 April 2009 Trends Advisor, "As the 'Net Kills Newspapers, Who Pays for Free?" received more comments than most. It raised the question: who pays for journalism and research when advertising disappears?

With the spate of unusual winter weather in the US this year, a classic IT quandary actually made itself evident once more. Is more technology actually better? It's analogous to the situations that actually arose as many parts of the country wrestled with the daunting notion of how to manage snow measured in feet, rather than inches.

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.