The waves of the business cycle are becoming ripples. The recent American combination of minimal inflation and very low unemployment may not be an aberration, but the beginning of a new worldwide trend.

In my last E-Mail Advisor ("Hidden Pitfalls of Agile: User Contact," 12 November 2009), I talked about a potential pitfall you may encounter when transitioning a traditional organization to agile: the impact of direct user contact. This Advisor is about another pitfall: transparency.

The other night, fellow Cutter Senior Consultant Mike Rosen and I just missed each other in New York City at a conference where we were speaking. As I was coming into the hotel, Mike was leaving to fly to San Francisco for another gig. I had wanted to chat with Mike, but our schedules made that impossible.

For most companies, business transformation is usually linked to strategic activities, such as entry to a new target market segment, introduction of a new service or solution offering, attainment of competitive advantage, and improvement of customer satisfaction.

Yesterday, I participated in a "virtual trade show" called "Pragmatic BPM and SOA: Strategies That Work." I was a bit surprised when I was invited to participate because I thought BPM/SOA was basically old news. It's been four years since I wrote about the relationship between these, but based on the comments and questions, it seems that most people haven't been paying much attention.

Enterprise data integrity, security, and confidentiality have long relied on combined network- and application-based security. As enterprise architectures become more complex -- both increasingly distributed and centralized -- the old models for securing data are no longer applicable when the data can be anywhere, accessible from any place and at any time.

Starview Technology has introduced the latest version of its Complex Event Processing (CEP) platform. Until recently, Starview has kept somewhat of a low profile and didn't always immediately appear on the radar when it came to CEP software vendors. This is unfortunate, because Starview has been shipping products since 2003.

One of the most difficult parts of project portfolio management is deciding how to rank the projects -- that is, determining which should be done now, later, and, most important, never. There are several ways to rank a project portfolio. Each is useful in specific situations and not so useful in others.

Three years ago in June, Toyota and its Lexus brand took the top spot in 11 out of 19 vehicle categories in the J.D. Power and Associates' automotive quality survey. Yet less than a month later, Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe bowed deeply in front of the world's press, publicly apologizing for the numerous quality problems that had been plaguing Toyota automotive products.

If a factory is torn down, but the rationality which produced is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic pattern of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves... There's so much talk about the system, and so little understanding.

Creating and maintaining a social endeavor is as much art as it is science, and after a decade of working with online communities and social networks, I have come to believe that they can't be managed but only influenced. In many cases, the communities are left to police themselves. A good example of this is the SAP developer community (called the Business Objects Community) with more than 70,000 developers a day participating.

Creating and maintaining a social endeavor is as much art as it is science, and after a decade of working with online communities and social networks, I have come to believe that they can't be managed but only influenced. In many cases, the communities are left to police themselves.

If you're of the same generation as I am, you probably remember the TV show "Dragnet" and Sergeant Joe Friday's famous line "Just the facts, ma'am" (his actual words were, "All we want are the facts, ma'am," but that's a different story).

Larry Gelwix has been the head coach of the Highland High School rugby team in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, for 36 years. During that time, his team has accumulated a 413-9 win/loss record; the most impressive record achieved by any sports coach -- professional or amateur -- ever. Wouldn't it be fantastic if our projects had a similar success/fail rate? Some aspects of Gelwix's coaching style are well in tune with some agile-lean values and principles:

Larry Gelwix ha sido el entrenador en jefe del equipo de Rugby del Highland High School en Salt Lake City, Nevada, E.U., por 36 años. Durante ese tiempo el ha acumulado un record de 413-9 juegos ganados-perdidos; el cual es el record más impresionante que ningún otro entrenador deportivo - profesional o amateur - a logrado jamás. ¿No sería fabuloso si nuestros proyectos tuvieran una taza de éxito-falla similar? Algunos aspectos del estilo de entrenamiento de Gelwix están a tono con algunos valores y principios agile-lean:

If it can be done, there is little that can beat a colocated and relatively homogenous team for cohesion, establishing a sound group dynamic, promoting communication in both verbal and nonverbal ways, and ensuring understanding. However, the real world is not always like that. In some cases, virtual teams are a fact of life and offer compelling advantages.

Back in April, I discussed MapReduce and its open source implementation, Hadoop (see "Hadoop, MapReduce, Cloudera, EC2, and BI," 14 April 2009). At that time, I said that I thought Hadoop offered exciting possibilities for enterprises to carry out large-scale data analysis and mining.

Crowdsourcing, as a making process, has problems because of its perceived lack of management control and the related uncertainty and risk regarding outcomes. At the same time, crowd creation1 appeals as a potential source of inexpensive innovation infusion, got from a global talent pool.

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.

"If you don't like change, you are going to like irrelevancy even less."

We've observed considerable interest in "IT governance" lately. For example, we've just completed a Cutter Benchmark Review (CBR) survey on the current IT governance practices around the world. We've also written several Advisors about the results and the interest we've seen in clients.

I am spending a fair amount of my time doing business process modeling (BPM) on either BPM or EA projects. BPM is becoming more and more important as organizations are increasingly committed to improving the way they do business.

The rate of change is only part of the challenge facing project sponsors. It is the agility of the response to the change that is also a key factor.

Believe it or not, IBM has developed an internal, private cloud-based BI analytics environment -- called "Blue Insight" -- designed to support its overall corporate sales, marketing, and product development needs. Moreover, IBM is now marketing and producing a version of this tool.

Many enterprises interested in agile adoption believe that their strategy should consist of sending a technical leader or manager to a training course and then having him or her take over a project (of course, there are also those who try to "save" money and buy a book on agile in replacement of training). But if you were to ask executives from companies that have succeeded in migrating to agile, the feedback would be not to cut corners, but to take the necessary training and get coaching.