The beginning of a new year is a good time to make resolutions, and the beginning of a new decade is an even better time. The resolutions that I'm going to concentrate on in this Advisor (I reserve the right to add to it later) include a number of words and phrases that I believe confuse those of us in enterprise architecture and/or systems development as well as our clients.

In many organizations, IT has become crucial in the support, sustainability, and growth of the business.

Welcome to the fifth-anniversary edition of my New Year's resolutions for enterprise architects. I hope the following five will provide food for thought and some inspiration:

Fatigue makes cowards of us all.

-- George S. Patton Jr., Letter of Instruction Number 1, Third Army

You've got to be in top physical condition. Fatigue makes cowards of us all.

-- Vince Lombardi

Fatigue comes to each of us every day and affects us at work. There are things we can do to reduce or increase the fatigue and ways we can work through and around the fatigue.

The presumption behind sourcing is that the vendor will, and generally does, bring in technical depth and hands-on expertise for IT projects and programs where it is engaged. Traditionally, inhouse architects, designers, and other senior technologists would be involved in complex technology initiatives. As they helped to solve problems -- say, configuring networks, servers, and firewalls or defining key interfaces with external partners -- enterprise architects would add back to the organizational knowledge ecosystem.

Although it may not be as trendy or sound as cutting edge as some of the other analytic applications I've been covering (social network analysis, data mining, etc.), I can almost guarantee that more organizations will be examining workforce analytics as the new year progresses. Here's why.

Innovation is everyone's job. Regardless of where we sit in an organization, innovation is essential to survival and therefore a core competency of every competitive organization on the planet. But how will 21st-century companies innovate?

My last Advisor on leading agility focused on the fact that agility was not reaching far enough into organizations (see "Making Middle Managers Catalysts for Agility," 25 November 2009).

There are analogies that make it possible for a new field like software engineering to make progress, and there are analogies that confuse the basic issues. One of the latter is comparing software elements (objects, components, services, etc.) with Lego blocks. Now, my criticism is not against Lego blocks; I love Legos, my kids love Legos, and my grandkids love Legos....

Why is it that silos, like weeds in a garden, sprout perennially and require vigilance and hard work to remove? Those whose work spans silos see clearly the cost of silos in terms of cash and calories. Organizations with strong silos have a harder time coordinating processes and integrating data across those silos.

Occasionally, I will ask my students, "Why is the Roman Coliseum still standing?" The answer that I'm fishing for is, "Because the folks who tried to tear it down in the Middle Ages for building material were not as good engineers as the folks who put it up hundreds of years earlier." All this was recently brought to mind because I've been reading a series of historical novels set in 9th centu

Business intelligence (BI) solutions continue to rise in importance in the corporate decision-making processes at every level. At the same time, the size of the data sets that need to be analyzed and the complexity of integration processes have resulted in strains in traditional data warehousing infrastructure models and significant gaps in capability to provide a growing number of less sophisticated users with the insight that they require.

Several weeks ago when I issued my predictions for the coming year, I said that I expected that the use of software and services for analyzing social networking/media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Yelp, would begin to increase in 2010 (see "BI and Data Warehousing Predictions for 2010," 22 December 2009).

This week, we're taking a look back at the five most intriguing articles published in Cutter's Agile Product & Project Management practice over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and pare it down to just five articles.

This week, we're taking a look back at the five most intriguing articles published in Cutter's Enterprise Risk Management & Governance practice over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and pare it down to just five articles.

This week, we thought we'd take a look back at the five most intriguing articles published in Cutter's Business Technology Trends & Impacts practice over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and choose just five articles.

This week, we're taking a look back at the five most intriguing articles published in Cutter's Business-IT Strategies practice over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and pare it down to just five articles. Look for these lists from each of our nine practice areas for a compilation of Cutter's 45 most intriguing articles of the year.

This week, we're taking a look back at the five most read articles in Cutter's Enterprise Architecture practice over this past year. Each article offers unique insight into the challenges of creating and deploying a successful enterprise architecture. Look for these lists from each of our nine practice areas for a compilation of Cutter's 45 most intriguing articles of the year.

This week, we're taking a look back at the five most intriguing articles published in Cutter's Cutter IT Journal over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and pare it down to just five articles. Look for these lists from each of our nine practice areas for a compilation of Cutter's 45 most intriguing articles of the year.

This week, we're taking a look back at the five most intriguing articles published in Cutter's Sourcing & Vendor Relationships practice over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and pare it down to just five articles. Look for these lists from each of our nine practice areas for a compilation of Cutter's 45 most intriguing articles of the year.

This week, we're taking a look back at the five most intriguing articles published in Cutter's Business Intelligence practice over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and pare it down to just five articles. Look for these lists from each of our nine practice areas for a compilation of Cutter's 45 most intriguing articles of the year.

A few months back I was at eBay's headquarters in San Jose, California, USA, having a conversation about performance reviews with one of its executives. Like most large companies, eBay offers bonuses to its employees based on individual performance, which is expected to have improved from the previous work period, be it yearly, semiannually, or quarterly.

Hace algunos meses estuve en las oficinas generales de eBay en San Jose, California, conversando con uno de sus ejecutivos acerca de evaluaciones de desempeño de empleados.

It's hard to discuss transformation when the current state is so anchored in the previous century. But as more and more 20th-century warriors pass the baton to the next generation of business technology leaders, we'll see major changes in the whole business technology relationship.