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.

If you are considering outsourcing, then your evolving business case must address at least three go/no-go decisions:

Your initial business case is based on best estimates, so your first go/no-go decision determines whether a competitive process is a go.

A recent BI and data warehousing survey, conducted by data warehousing and analytics vendor Kognitio and solutions provider Baseline Consulting, has received a fair amount of attention in the IT press. The most controversial findings have to do with the value of analyzing data obtained from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on.

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.

Pure agile methods in real organizations do not work in practice. This is not because agility is not valuable. Far from it: project sponsors and other business stakeholders are seeking out agility together with development professionals.

CIOs are warming up to the idea of semantic technologies -- IT artifacts capable of making explicit the meaning contained in the relations among information objects. When properly elicited and structured, relational and semantic technologies can help to expose and maximize a certain degree of "intelligence" that we seek from our systems.

In 1968, an ecologist named Garrett Hardin published an article in Science titled "The Tragedy of the Commons."1 This article described a dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently and rationally, driven by their own self-interest, will ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen.

There's no lower-hanging fruit than thin fruit. The adoption of Web-enabled smartphones is outpacing just about every technology in history.1 As form factors have improved, so has functionality. Lots of assumptions have been challenged along the way. For example, how many of us believed that no one would watch video on a one-inch-by-one-inch screen?

A "fuzzy" project is one where something feels out of sorts. Maybe the goal statement is a bit aggressive, and the project manager (PM) wonders whether or not it can be achieved. Maybe the proposed solution just doesn't seem to do the job. Or maybe the assumption of a cause-and-effect relationship between goal and solution is a bit of a stretch.

Back in October, I wrote that the question of whether the cloud model is reliable enough for corporate IT would not be answered soon, adding that no amount of reassurances from service providers or IT analysts would really settle the question (see "Viability of the Cloud Model Still Up in the Air," 20 October 2009).

In this series of Advisors, we are exploring some typical problems traditionally trained managers run into when their firm begins to use agile.

There are two major strategic bets that went bad in the news this week that are interesting from an enterprise risk management perspective.