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.

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).