People seem to have an innate need to be social -- to connect to each other and be part of the herd, both for safety and productivity. Today, the herd is much more geographically distributed and may consist of a social network, an online community, or other ongoing collaborative interactions.

I've been researching the state of the art in mining social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, CNET Reviews, Epicurious, IMDb, TripAdvisor, Yahoo! Finance, Amazon, and WebMD.

I met with several CIOs recently and discussed their approaches to cost containment. In the discussion, one made the interesting point that cost containment is merely the current crisis. CIOs have regularly faced others: innovation (last year), alignment (the year before), demonstrated value of IT (the year before that), and so forth. And, he assured us, we'll certainly have new crises next year.

A harsh economic recession calling for renewed cost reduction with an emphasis on tactical solution-delivery projects causes concerns over the effectiveness of enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) and puts agile methodologies back in the limelight. SOA and agile are commonly seen as opposites, but opposites that don't attract.

So long to the gorilla dust at GM. That's what billionaire entrepreneur founder of EDS and ex-General Motors executive Ross Perot called the annual optimistic projections of GM executives during the 1980s, as it continued to lose market share. "When gorillas fight, they throw dust in the air to distract one another," Perot said.

Technology adoption depends on context. When a company is in trouble, it tries lots of things to regain its competitive edge. When an industry sector is in trouble, it reinvents itself. But when trouble fails to distinguish among companies, sectors, or even continents, then drastic steps are necessary to right the ship. These days we find ourselves in a major economic crisis.

In the world in which we live, a world that changes almost daily, there are truths and untruths. There's hype, and there's reality. There are technologies that work, and there are technologies that stay forever in the trough of disillusionment. There are subtleties and nuances. There are smart people and nasty people.

One of the roles of a product manager is to ensure the technical integrity of the product. The product manager should focus on verifying the product's conformance to the design specification for functionality, performance, reliability, service, and support. All are vital attributes of a new product and are key to the future acceptance of the product by users.

"The cloud" is important, yes, but in my view it isn't rocket science (or even atmospheric science). I think of it as just another step in outsourcing and pushing everything into a commodity, which for me creates only "modified rapture."

Plans are important to me; they are not important to everyone. The same is true of many intellectual products in our workplaces. One challenge for managers is to arrange situations where the right people become interested enough to think and communicate their thoughts.

IBM has announced the availability of what the company is calling "stream computing" software that can analyze high volumes of continuously streaming data -- both structured and unstructured -- in real time.

"Humans need to belong to groups and find significant value in communities -- physical or otherwise."

-- Gabriele Piccoli

Most people know that innovation requires time to think, reflect, experiment, fail, revise, and explore. But many have likely not contemplated how directly cost pressures can impact innovation efforts. Psychologist Donald T. Campbell developed a model of innovation in 1960 that can help us understand just what's at stake. The Campbell model was inspired by Darwinian evolution. It portrays innovation as a two-step process, as follows:

Blind Variation + Selective Retention

The Agile Triangle way of measuring performance can be useful in looking at business goals in new ways (the triangle involves value, quality, and constraints -- as introduced in my Advisor, "Flex Your Agile Triangle and Add Value," 30 April 2009).

Most of the attention being paid to cloud computing has focused on public cloud providers, such as Amazon and Google, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors, such as Salesforce.com.

The waves of the business cycle are becoming ripples. The recent American combination of minimal inflation and very low unemployment may not be an aberration, but the beginning of a new worldwide trend. Smarter government policy, globalization, changes in employment, advances in information technology, and emerging markets all cushion shocks and dampen the familiar boom and bust.

While EA and service-oriented architecture (SOA) have their own advocates and camps of followers, recent developments have seen many of the EA approaches and frameworks looking to offer increasing support for SOA. The fact that business is increasingly conducted in a collaborative fashion, using distributed Internet technologies, makes this very welcome.

It's not the technology, stupid; it's the processes. Processes are good, bad, ugly, or indifferent depending on how well -- or poorly -- you provide incentives to promote their efficacy. Let me repeat: it's not the technology. In fact, among the triumvirate of people, process, and technology, technology is the least likely case of failure. Then comes people.

Last week, I discussed SAP AG's new Business Objects tool that combines BI reporting and analysis with functionality that is like an Internet search engine: SAP Business Objects Explorer (see "SAP Business Objects Explorer: BI Search Meets ERP, But Will It Accelerate Adoption of BI Search?," 19 May 2009).

As methods such as agile development, agile testing, and agile project management are increasingly deployed to enable organizations to respond faster to the increasing turbulence of the global business and government environment, the roles of sponsors and business experts in the project space must change.

Agile sponsorship is based on a few, very powerful concepts:

At the Cutter Summit 2009 conference in early May, I was talking with an executive from a company that contracts for large government projects.

With the ongoing proliferation of certifications available to business professionals of every type, it's no surprise that risk management has popped into the picture in the cost, IT development, and project management communities.

Regardless of a company's objectives, it must invest in operational and strategic technology. Operational technology has obviously become commoditized as prices have dropped and the industry has consolidated, but if acquisition, deployment, and support best practices are ignored, all of the advantages of commoditization disappear.

Many client organizations nearing the end of an outsourcing contract start to consider whether they should retender the deal.

Businesses depend heavily on use of the Internet to perform their activities. But have business personnel received enough training and ongoing awareness communications about how to use the Internet securely? Has your staff received any training or awareness communications at all?