Security and privacy concerns remain the leading issues preventing more organizations from using on-demand/cloud-based BI and data warehousing solutions. Infrastructure control issues and strategic considerations pertaining to the perceived value of in-house BI operations follow this.

Capital assets are long-term investments whose ROIs are expected to more than repay their capital. Conventional software components rarely satisfy this definition. A prominent reason is that our industry demands components be used as is, much like physical parts. Yet unlimited malleability is software's greatest asset (and its greatest liability).

In his recent Advisor "Achieving Agile Software: Fail to Scale -- Prepare to Fail" (25 June 2009), Cutter Senior Consultant Paul Allen had raised the issue of the connection between agile and SOA.

The first week of July was a momentous occasion in the annals of cybercrime. Coordinated attacks on US and South Korean government systems created charges and countercharges in an international, Internet-based whodunit.

Cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) have captured plenty of industry and press attention, but they have also created an equal share of confusion and even controversy. While there are solid reasons to be cautious about how to approach these rapidly evolving Web-based alternatives, there is also growing evidence that they are no passing fad.

It's no secret that these are tough times. Technology budgets are being slashed over and over again. But the need to develop new products, solve tough R&D problems, creatively improve customer service, and reengineer business processes has never been greater.

Within the world of IT vendors, the gap between rhetoric and reality looms large.

Like you, I try to keep up with what's going on in the industry by reading magazines, articles, and so on. Perhaps it's the economy, or just coincidence, but in the past few months, there seem to have been more than enough articles about the impotence of IT.

The Internet is undergoing a rapid transformation from a web of hyperlinked documents to a web of semantically linked data. Recent observations lead me to believe we're seeing the emergence of what may qualify as Web 3.0 (or Semantic Web) applications [1]. These applications are consumers and providers of semantically linked data.

The option of using on-demand and cloud-based BI and data warehousing (DW) solutions is causing some end-user organizations to forego or reconsider renewing some of their existing BI/DW software licenses. At this time, however, this trend is limited.

We all know by now that the relationship between the parties of an outsourcing contract is paramount to the success of the deal. While there is a fair bit of advice out there, it is mainly process-oriented (e.g., communicate frequently, plan together, have improvement workshops). But what if you genuinely do not like your counterpart on the other side?

I disagree with the premise that prosperity breeds innovation and scarcity kills it. People innovate when there is a need to find a new or better way to do something. The decline in our economy has created a tremendous need for everyone to find innovative ways to prosper with less.

While organizations seem intent on adopting methodologies, the diversity in the tools they choose to apply to support them is virtually limitless.

Remember ^KB, ^KK, ^KC, ^KV, and ^KY? These are the WordStar commands for marking, copying, moving, and deleting blocks of text. For those old enough to remember, WordStar was the dominant word-processing software in the early 1980s that was dead by the early 1990s.

In Part II of this series (see "Managing the Complete Product Lifecycle, Part II: The Technical Product Manager," 3 June 2009), we talked about the product manager role that is primarily focused on the technical integrity of the product.

Recently, we've written about some core strategies that help ensure the success of enterprise architecture, such as developing key EA capabilities (see "Six Key Capabilities on Road to EA Success," 18 March 2009) and employing an iterative and incremental approach to EA programs (see "Take Iterative Steps: Start Small, Empower Team Via Vision, Value," 29 April 2009).

In the run-up to the Iraq War, there was a systems dynamic model published on the High Performance Systems (HPS) Web site (now known as isee Systems).1 The model showed clearly a number of feedback loops that were likely to produce bad rather than good outcomes from the invasion.

I've been thinking a lot about the possibilities offered by adding a "social layer" to an organization's BI environment. I'm talking about combining social computing concepts (blogs, wikis, and social networking) with BI capabilities (query, reporting, dashboards, and analysis).

Many information security and privacy practitioners spend a lot of time thinking up hypothetical situations to use in training content for information security and privacy as well as awareness communications. What a waste of valuable time! All you need to do is scan the headlines for a few minutes, and you're sure to find many security and privacy incidents that have occurred throughout the world.

Making business decisions is never easy. It becomes progressively more complicated as those around us offer their "two cents' worth" about how we should act or what practices we should adopt. And the sheer number of those around us sometimes means that we receive input from a host of different parties, all with different perspectives.

This past week, a number of intersecting risk-rich related news stories caught my eye. First, there was the ongoing investigation into the loss of Air France Flight 447 and its 228 passengers and crew.

"Take as much of the world's knowledge as possible and make it computable"

-- Stephen Wolfram

"Alpha now makes it possible for PhD students to cheat on their homework."

-- Heard at Semantic Technology Conference

We've recently spent considerable time in IT organizations in the US and in Latin America dealing with aspects of IT financial management. Through the Cutter Benchmark Review, we've also conducted studies for four years about IT budgeting (see "Linking IT Budgeting, Governance, and Value," Vol. 8, No. 7; "The IT Budget: The Centerpiece of IT Governance," Vol. 7, No.

In recent Advisors, I have talked about data security and perimeter security (see "Are You at the Controls? Do You Know Where Your Data Is?" 10 June 2009 and "Is Your Perimeter Secure?" 17 June 2009).

1 (14 oz.) piece informative content

1 (10 oz.) default design template, whole

3 cups bullet list

1/4 cup chart wizard output

6 animations, coarsely chopped

3 tablespoons slide transition

2 teaspoons clip art

2 teaspoons banner word art

Preheat oven to 375ºF.