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

The iterative and incremental approach to software development has become a well-established best practice, as evidenced by its centrality to any number of software development methodologies, including agile and variations on the Unified Process.

On a broader scale, this approach provides a valuable strategy for developing an effective enterprise architecture program. We won't bother to argue that a "big bang" approach to EA doesn't work: many able experts have overwhelmingly made that case.

Mobile technology, its applications, and the services that are delivered over the wireless channel continue to evolve. A recent survey by Cutter Consortium spans from consolidated hardware form factors, such as the laptop, to evolving applications, such as Twitter and location-based contextualized messaging services exploiting the capabilities of such devices as the smartphone (for more on this survey, see Cutter Benchmark Review, Vol. 9, No. 3).

In a strange twist of fate, the annual MySQL Conference was just getting underway in Santa Clara, California, USA, when news hit that Oracle Corporation was acquiring Sun and, along with it, MySQL. That the most aggressive enterprise software company was buying the world's leading open source database struck like lightning.

It's déjà vu all over again. The cycle has repeated. The economy is and will continue to shed jobs. Businesses are trying to get leaner. Again, IT is expected to not only shrink itself, but help other units in the firm shrink themselves. A key approach for doing so involves reengineering the business process (BPR).

My last Advisor (see "In Time of Testing, Remember Values, Communication, Slack, Part I," 26 March 2009)1 raised this question: how do you perform in such difficult times while maintaining the company's values? Is it possible at all? The answer is "yes," and the evidence can be found in history.

With the current state of the economy, there has been a seemingly endless stream of articles about scarcity and the natural human reactions to it. Almost to a one, the articles examine the propensity of individuals to focus on what they might not have if the situation doesn't improve, prompting the reaction of thrift. People save. People hoard.

Before you do anything else, please go and read the Boston Globe article headlined "Electronic Health Records Raise Doubt" (13 April 2009).

People have diverse beliefs as to what a successful contract is. Some would consider a contract successful if it did not end up in court. Others believe it to be successful if they did not need to manage the contractor too much. In a recession, it will be about getting it cheaper than before.

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.

As an architect, I'm constantly challenged to help organizations come up with better ways to do things. Unfortunately, in IT, we don't usually bring in architecture before there is some kind of mess to clean up.

Every time I am asked to look at a suffering project, I see the same very basic failing: all the project objectives are vague.

This applies to projects costing more than US $100 million and ongoing for eight years, as well as smaller projects. In fact, I have concluded that management everywhere has not got a clue as to how to set clear objectives for projects. The problem is management's vague, nice-sounding phrases: though not in deadlines, sales targets, and budgets.

Silicon Valley startup Kickfire, Inc. has developed a new data-warehousing appliance based on the open source MySQL database. Kickfire is a "true" appliance. By which I mean it packages both software and hardware designed specifically to support data warehousing and BI applications (as opposed to just providing specifications or reference architectures for various hardware/software bundles).

Many economists believe that the risks present in the current global economic downturn have the potential to repeat the Depression years of the 1930s.

In a recent discussion among international members of the Centre for Art and Leadership at the Copenhagen Business School, we considered the broad question: "What can art do for business in the current financial crisis?"

When the times get rough, competition gets tougher; that's a general law. Software companies have dozens if not hundreds of employees on their "underutilized" lists. The companies that view their employees as assets and not as cost fight to keep their jobs.

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times."

-- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities