For a long time, I have been advocating that the right analogy for enterprise architecture is urban/transportation planning versus building architecture.

IT managers need to have a split personality: they must be both conservative and innovative. On the one hand, they have to maintain older systems and keep current processes working smoothly. On the other hand, they have to continually examine new IT technologies that can alter the business. Around 1990, a "game-changing" technology, the Internet, emerged. New businesses that embraced the Internet in innovative ways -- such as eBay, Amazon, and Google -- thrived.

SAP AG just launched a new Business Objects BI product that combines BI reporting and analysis with functionality that is like an Internet search engine. SAP Business Objects Explorer combines the BI, search, and navigation capabilities of the Business Objects line with SAP's Business Warehouse and data warehousing accelerator appliance.

The term "service-oriented architecture" is relatively new, but the architecture is not. Even though architectures that used the CORBA or DCOM specifications in the 1990s were not called "service-oriented," they were essentially service-oriented architectures. Some other organizations preceded CORBA and DCOM with their own specifications and developed what we would today consider an SOA.

A business needs outstanding leadership to successfully navigate through today's complex, competitive world. Identifying and understanding the strategic orientation of your business toward customers and innovation is one thing; however, it is quite another to successfully reorient the organization in another direction.

I remember a time when I was deeply interested in maturity.

Throughout history, major shifts in communication technology have brought on major changes in politics and business, exploited by imaginative politicians and businesspeople. In the 1930s, for example, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolph Hitler reached out via the radio to far more people than had ever heard directly from politicians. Businesses quickly began to use radio to advertise.

Vendors such as Lawson and SAP have recently announced increases in their annual support fees to many already struggling clients. In any economy, organizations would meet these increases with skepticism. This article details options for organizations in response to these potential increases.

There are so many different frameworks with which architects work -- TOGAF, Zachmann, FEAF, ITIL -- to name just a few. All have different goals, strengths, weaknesses, audiences, and so on. The one that I find to be the least well known among architects is COBIT.

Despite the promises of service-oriented architecture (SOA), many organizations are increasingly encountering difficult governance issues as they start to ramp up their early SOA efforts. SOA governance tends to get approached in primarily two ways: as a technology or as a cultural phenomenon. The most fruitful approach lies somewhere in between.

Organizations today may choose from a broad range of on-demand and "cloud-based" BI and data warehousing options, ranging from reporting, dashboards, and focused analytic applications (offered as licensable services) to hosted data integration services and full-blown managed data warehouses.

Over the holidays I read a wonderful book by Atul Gawande called Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance.1 The book tells a variety of stories about improving all aspects of the medical profession. One thing that occurs in all the stories is the importance of metrics.

The goal of portfolio management within an IT environment is to help improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of IT efforts within an organization. You do this by ensuring that all projects and existing systems are visible, planned for, and aligned to the goals of your organization.

Recently, I was in Tampa and Chicago during the same week to speak at data management and business process conferences. It gave me a chance to find out what some of the best and brightest in the business were forecasting for the future of technology. I would imagine that all told there were more than 1,000 technology folks at these conferences.

It started innocently enough. A US educational institution (which we shall call WhoU) was looking to update and standardize the PII of current and former students in its electronic database and upgrade its software to automate much of this process on a going-forward basis.

This Advisor is the first in a series that will examine the role of the product manager in an IT business along with some of the alternatives for defining that role and its ultimate contribution to the corporation.

While the notion of core/context capabilities is central to the whole capability-driven approach, it is sometimes quite difficult to take a strictly binary view. Graduating capabilities in terms of their degree of commoditization can help, and it is possible to use several classifications along a spectrum from high to low commoditization.

Although a relatively new practice in modern IT management, business intelligence (BI) has turned out to be central to achieving and maintaining competitiveness in enterprise operations. Yet the more the BI culture develops and becomes adopted by contemporary organizations, the more obvious the challenges and limitations of some BI approaches become.

A schism has been brewing between traditional RDBMS (relational database management system) fans and proponents of the MapReduce data-crunching technology pioneered by Google and made popular by the open source Hadoop framework.

In recent months, I've been casually tracking, on a nearly daily basis, the latest generation of Web-based mashups through a community portal I configured using a mashup of Joomla! and Yahoo! Pipes called MashUpUniverse.

The Web, in the last couple of years, has changed dramatically. Tens of millions of people are now -- for the first time -- actively participating in online communities. Social and professional networking sites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, have attracted millions, and the average age of users continues to rise.

I have been thinking about measuring performance, again. Part of this thinking results from reading Implementing Beyond Budgeting: Unlocking the Performance Potential by Bjarte Bogsnes.

As more and more enterprises realize a need for architecture, the vendors of tools that support architecture are jumping on the opportunity. I'm seeing a growing trend in the acquisition of enterprise architecture repositories. Unfortunately, I haven't yet seen most organizations realize the value that these tools can bring.

Information security incidents and privacy breaches often result from risky behavior by personnel who are unaware that the way they are handling information is unsafe. A significant factor for this problem can be attributed to a lack of security policies, along with inadequate or nonexistent training and lack of awareness communications. According to a recent Cisco study:1