Since we're approaching the end of the year, I thought I'd offer some predictions and comments on some of the key developments I see taking place with the market for, and the application of, BI and data warehousing in the New Year.

Cost reductions in business operations in this turbulent economy have affected IT spending for software and application or system development as well as for integration projects. Many companies and their visionary leaders have used agile methodologies, including XP, Scrum, and Feature-Driven Development, with mixed success.

"How are you doing"

There's a nice, benign, safe question. But in today's economy, I've noted that I get one of two very dichotomous responses:

Response #1: "We're holding it together. I think we're going to make it, but it's been a tough year."

There is nothing like the prospect of getting hanged in the morning to focus one's attention.

There is nothing like the prospect of getting hanged in the morning to focus one's attention.

Participants in a recent Cutter Benchmark Review survey who indicated that their organizations are not using or testing social networks cite a lack of perceived business value as the main reason (see, "Unlocking the Organizational Potential of Social Networking," Vol. 9, No. 5). What can organizations do to make sure their investments in social networking applications pay off? First, organizations need to make sure that their social networking applications are aligned with their corporate strategy.

Participants in a recent Cutter Benchmark Review survey who indicated that their organizations are not using or testing social networks cite a lack of perceived business value as the main reason (see, "Unlocking the Organizational Potential of Social Networking," Vol. 9, No. 5). What can organizations do to make sure their investments in social networking applications pay off? First, organizations need to make sure that their social networking applications are aligned with their corporate strategy.

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

-- General Dwight D. Eisenhower

In project management, as long as things move the way they are envisaged, there is no problem. If there is a hurdle, however, the project manager is expected to respond in the least time possible. This hurdle may be either technical or human, and in either case, arriving at the best alternative or finding the exact error requires absolute openness and being in the present moment.

A project manager's inability to be open and receptive can become a block in finding creative solutions to the problems that crop up. It's like the following story:

Your IT organization has certain skills and capabilities that you deploy to solve various business technology problems. Ideally, you market these skills and capabilities to your internal clients (as well as your external stakeholders -- vendors, partners, etc.).

Slightly fewer than half of the organizations using on-demand/cloud-based BI and data warehousing solutions have had to modify their business processes in order to use the on-demand software. This finding comes from a Cutter Consortium survey conducted in May-July 2009 of 79 end-user organizations based worldwide.

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: