Enterprise data warehousing specialist Teradata Corporation is the latest analytics database vendor to join the cloud movement. Last week, Teradata introduced its first product offerings targeted at organizations wanting to take advantage of virtualization and cloud technologies for data warehousing and BI applications.

A spider is an eight-legged arachnid that has a head attached to a central body. Pull a leg off a spider and most can still walk, even if a little lopsided. Cut off the head, and the spider dies. Not so the starfish. While many people know that if you cut off a starfish's leg, it will grow back, most don't know that a starfish's major organs are replicated throughout its body.

From a certain perspective, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software architecture is just plain silly.

As the death toll has reached 1,000, there has been a lot of press coverage in the US this past week concerning the shortages in the availability of the swine flu vaccine. Planned vaccination clinics for the millions of high-risk individuals in the US, including pregnant mothers, children under the age of 10, and healthcare workers across the country, have been postponed en masse with no word on when they will be rescheduled.

Open source software (OSS) has been entering the enterprise almost invisibly for a number of years, initially in infrastructure as Web servers and replacement for proprietary Unix and then branching out into a diverse range of infrastructure components, embedded code, and applications. It has been invisible for a variety of reasons:

Many open source components initially introduced were highly technical and, therefore, beneath the radar of corporate executives.

In my last Advisor ("How EA Shapes Urban/Transportation Planning," 7 October 2009), I restated some of the reasons that my colleagues and I have chosen urban (and transportation) planning as the model for thinking about EA while developing the Business Enterprise Architecture Modeling (BEAM) methodology.

In my article in the July 2009 Cutter Benchmark Review (see "Looking at Personal Productivity Tools and Systems,"Vol. 9, No. 7), I wanted to identify some of the tools, techniques, attitudes, and environmental factors that could use a tune-up so that people could continue to get the job done but in a way that lets them go home at the end of the day without work lurking behind them.

In an outsourcing arrangement, many of the risks to personally identifiable information (PII) are the same as for internally processed information. Controlling the spread of PII within the outsourcer's IT environment is key, as is ensuring that access controls are effectively used, the outsourcers networks are secure, and encryption is used in association with organizational sensitive data and PII. Even administrative controls, such as employee background checks, have applicability in an outsourcing arrangement.

I've said for some time now that the use of mashups in the enterprise would increase, especially when it comes to their use for BI and other applications that support decisions. One reason for this is that the technology has been evolving rapidly and vendors focusing on mashups have been growing in number. End-user organizations have also expressed a definite interest in using mashups.

A big idea, that collaborative innovation requires us to reconceive our idea of "failure," seems to be taking hold. We're getting it that an iterative process will include segments that don't achieve closure, don't solve the problem, aren't ready for the market. We're getting it that, since we can't foresee an emergent outcome, we have no way of knowing when exactly we'll get there.

For any IT governance to work, we need the active participation of business management in these decision-making areas:

Project approval (e.g., project sponsorship)

Decision-making processes (e.g., setting the ground rules for making prioritization decisions)

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).