The software as a service (SaaS) model has matured as a viable strategic alternative to conventional software service options. With SaaS, customers do not own software but instead share a common code base and set of data definitions that clients are unable to modify. Customer-specific configurations and functional extensions are logically separated from the common code, and customers maintain them.

After almost four years, BI software as a service (SaaS) provider LucidEra is calling it quits. LucidEra, which was founded in 2005, offers a number of on-demand BI applications, including those for customer lead insight and pipeline and order analysis.

The use of social networking sites by activists covering the recent Iranian election protests is a vivid example of how Web 2.0 can upset even the staunchest government's attempts to stifle dissent and the spread of "nonofficial" (i.e., uncensored) information.

"Maintenance has lived in a twilight world, hardly visible in the formal accounts of societies make of themselves," or so wrote David Edgerton in his The Shock of the Old (Profile Books: 2006). The same could be said of the software world.

In a recent Agile Product & Project Management E-Mail Advisor (see "Service-Oriented Agile Projects -- Contradiction or Necessity?" 4 June 2009), I assert that "agile projects have often struggled with delivering ...

Since mankind has been making images of things, mankind has seen those images fade. Our perception of the past is deeply reliant on our perception of the artifact that represents the past. Aged, yellow photographs in our hands match the mystic past of faded memories in our minds. Grainy, worn-out super-eight home movies from the 1970s leave much obscured.

Going through an outsourcing exercise, even if theoretical, can prove illuminating.

In today's tight economic environment, business executives may well see "the cloud" as the answer to their cost-cutting prayers. Bloated and unproductive EA initiatives are rightly going to receive short shrift in this climate -- eclipsed behind the cloud, if you'll pardon the metaphor. How can EA get both leaner and meaner while remaining relevant to the business agenda?

It can be difficult enough to get a project team to focus on delivery of value when we are starting a project; it is all that much tougher to remain focused on this prize as the project plays out. One of the main reasons for this is that the tools we use to manage projects tend to divert our focus elsewhere.

The use of social networking sites by activists covering the recent Iranian election protests is a vivid example of how Web 2.0 can upset even the staunchest government's attempts to stifle dissent and the spread of "non-official" (i.e., uncensored) information.

Ineffective risk management is a symptom of a disease that has been spreading throughout corporations over the last two to three decades, leaving tremendous devastation in its path. The disease has been difficult to detect and, in many cases, the symptoms are masked. However, over time, this disease has wreaked havoc on employees, business, and even entire industries.

In recent years, many agile software development teams have used a Planning Poker practice to estimate the effort needed to complete the features chosen to be implemented in an iteration and/or release. Planning Poker is "played" by the team as a part of the iteration planning meeting, which is attended by product managers, project managers, software developers, testers, usability engineers, security engineers, and others.

Ever worry about stealing someone else's idea? Or worse still, stealing your own ideas while working from one client to the next? The ethical high road is a challenging one to take on an ongoing basis, when so many potential ethical lapses are the result of lapses, rather than intentional commitment of the act. Nowhere is this more true than in risk management.

The world of business technology is dramatically changing. Everything about it is changing, including what we acquire, deploy, support, the way we support it, and -- perhaps most important -- the way we manage it all.

Personally identifiable information (PII) plays a key role and is involved within many business processes. PII is stored in an extremely large number of corporate systems and data storage repositories.

The idea of running IT as a business has gained much traction in recent years -- especially with the continued upsurge in all things IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL).

Is your perimeter secure? The answer to that is simple: NO. As business has become more distributed, outsourcing has gone global, supply chains are more connected, employees have become teleworkers, customers demand better information, and so on, we have systematically punched holes into perimeter security until it now resembles Swiss cheese.

When all resources are well in place, what is it that stalls a project, drawing extra time and energy? Why so managers have to remind teammates so often to keep their emotions in check? Most leadership workshops seek to understand emotional intelligence and to teach a whole set of emotional management skills. Is there truly clarity on what emotions are and how to live with them?

Data warehousing database vendor Greenplum has launched what the company calls its "Enterprise Data Cloud" (EDC) initiative. EDC builds on Greenplum's flagship massively parallel data warehousing database -- optimized for analytics and dynamic scalability -- and the concept of self-service provisioning.

Business leaders have an obligation to make sure that all information within the organization is adequately protected. You cannot outsource your organization's responsibility and accountability for appropriately and diligently safeguarding information that you have entrusted to third parties.

Outsourcing is no longer a novel or innovative strategy. It has evolved into just another choice a manager can make as he or she thinks about how to do more and better with less. As the industry has matured, its actors have gotten better at defining sourcing strategies, crafting deals, surviving transitions, and putting in place the capabilities to manage complex, multiyear relationships. Yet in survey after survey, we can still see significant levels of dissatisfaction, in particular with regard to the value realized after the initial cost savings:

In his recent Advisor "Service-Oriented Agile Projects -- Contradiction or Necessity?" Cutter Senior Consultant Paul Allen wrote that "agile projects have often struggled with delivering ...

After a number of years of near-total dominance of the Internet search space by Google, there suddenly are a number of major new announcements. Microsoft, for example, has just introduced its new search engine called Bing, which is intended to be a more "semantic" search with greater focus on presenting the results to make them more relevant and useful to the user.

Over the past few months, we have talked with IT leadership in large and small companies. The discussion focused on how well IT is performing for their company. Following are the main points common to all the companies with which we've been involved lately:

Perhaps you remember the public service campaign from 1960s television that went something like, "It's 10 pm. Do you know where your children are?" For IT, we could rephrase it as; "It's 2009. Do you know where your data is?" You probably don't, especially if it's in the hands of your partners or outsourcers.