One of the attributes that most distinguishes leaders from other people is the ability of leaders to envision the future and articulate this vision to their followers.

A client group recently asked about the use of maturity models to measure its current progress in applying IT governance processes. We assured them that maturity models are indeed used for that purpose, and we discussed how to go forward with applying the concept to the group's circumstance.

Is your organization going green, whatever that means? Well, that turns out to be a lot more than just server virtualization at the data center. Is the enterprise architecture (EA) team involved? Well, it should be. Let's take a look.

Open source software (OSS) has entered the enterprise through a variety of different avenues over the past several years. It has become extremely important within the infrastructure area revolving around the Linux operating system platform, where it has gained support from such leading software vendors as IBM and Novell. Support from major vendors has added to the credibility of open source, and its use is broadening in the enterprise.

I've been seeing an increasing interest by organizations in master data management (MDM) for the past nine months or so.

In his book Business Agility: Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World, Michael Hugos, who is also a columnist for CIO magazine, talks about two fundamental business strategies: responsiveness and efficiency.

Our two-decades-old World Wide Web architecture is long past due for an upgrade. During what we might call the "Web 1.0-2.0 epoch," demand for computing has grown across every enterprise, in every sector, around the globe. We continue to struggle to meet this demand using our traditional approaches to building and managing enterprise information systems.

All of us know the joy that one can experience from a good movie. Dramatic tension creates humor, intensity, excitement, and exhilaration. For a movie, that's a wonderful experience. In our work environment, that wonder is gone. We really don't want or need drama in our management work, and yet we encounter it on a ritual basis.

A business can gain significant value from the Semantic Web by drawing on its capability to combine and interoperate with several technologies and services, encompassing data warehouses, disparate operating systems, and myriad types of messaging. The resultant "cohesive" technological platform allows in-depth user participation and collaboration that also reveals new and meaningful relationships among information silos and applications that may not be obvious otherwise to the business.

I live in the state of New Hampshire, in the Northeast corner of the US. It's a major pumpkin-growing region of the country, and October is harvest season. Truckloads of pumpkins head south and west, and local farm stands are bursting with the orange globes. But what do you do with all the misshaped or leftover pumpkins? Chuck 'em, what else?

Since my article appeared in the August issue of Cutter IT Journal (see "In Search of Low-Hanging Fruit: Improving Security and Privacy with Penetration Testing," Vol. 22, No. 8), I have talked with several clients and read other articles that have cited additional reasons for not properly auditing the security of networks and applications.

Our inability to permanently kill very solvable problems is hurting the credibility and effectiveness of our profession. We cannot get out of our own way on so many issues, and it's not just the technology professionals I'm indicting here: just as many business professionals continue to misunderstand and mismanage the business technology relationship.

Back in June, I discussed how, after almost four years, BI software as a service (SaaS) provider LucidEra was considering calling it quits (see "As SaaS Provider Quits, What Happens to Its Data?" 30 June 2009).

The first priority in all wars is to live to fight another day. The economic war faced by most companies will be replete with reminders that survival is the near-term, full-time agenda. This is true for the IT department and for IT professionals, too. Being part of the survival plan requires a laserlike focus on eliminating any waste, frivolous activities, and all of the "nice-to-haves." Start by getting rid of the toys and hip trophies (e.g., BlackBerrys, iPhones, pagers).

Counting by numbers, Scrum is currently the leading agile methodology.

Like many people, I grow increasingly unhappy with the level of public discourse. In an age of "in-your-face politics" and "hardball" discussions in which two extreme positions are posed as the way to present public policy, it is difficult to imagine what the future of the world may be like. Then, the other day, I had a discussion that made me think that all was not lost.

Increasingly, we find business processes that are offered in alternative ways using different channels. For example, purchasing vehicle highway tax in the UK over the counter or online over the Internet. At the same time, as well as offering a process in its entirety over one channel, the same process can be supported by different channels at different points in the process.

In a recent interview, Mike Culver, the cloud computing evangelist for Amazon.com, clearly stated the cloud computing value statement for his company: "Amazon's goal is to take the fixed cost out of computing!" That's pretty simple. There has been a great deal of discussion of the TCO of one thing or another over the years, but rarely is the entirety of the operational overhead really factored in. We can learn what the TCO is for a desktop or a server or an Oracle product, for instance, but nobody goes to the trouble to include all of the factors involved.

A couple of recent client engagements with very large companies reminded me about the fixation on process in many companies. Having used agile, iterative methods for so many years, I lost track of how pervasive process orientation can be in some organizations.

Enterprise mashups increasingly are becoming part of companies' toolkits when it comes to integrating data for BI and other decision-support applications.

Today's business-IT divide reminds me forcibly of an anecdote about the automobile market at the end of the 19th century. At that time, it was widely held that the total market for automobiles in Europe could only be around 50,000 because that was the probable number of chauffeurs that were going to be available at any one time.

Like most agile-lean enthusiasts, I regularly attend interest group meetings in my area. When discussing test-driven development (TDD) at some recent gatherings, some folks commented that they have very senior developers within their teams who claim to have become so proficient with TDD that they can actually skip the test-coding step. These developers go straight to implementing the feature because the discipline is so well imprinted in their heads that they can do it all mentally.

Como muchos entusiastas en agile-lean con frecuencia atiendo juntas de grupos de interés no lejos de casa. En algunas de las juntas recientes hubo discusiones sobre TDD (del Inglés test-driven development: desarrollo basado en pruebas), donde algunas personas comentaron que sus equipos cuentan con desarrolladores tan expertos en TDD que hasta pueden saltarse el paso de escribir pruebas primero y en su lugar programar la característica directamente porque tienen la disciplina bien metida en su cabeza y pueden hacerlo mentalmente.

As a friend of mind was fond of pointing out, jobs are self-selecting. Accountants go into accounting because they like numbers, surgeons go into surgery because they like to cut, and psychiatrists go into psychiatry because they ... have issues.