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.

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.