As it was two millennia ago, today a decimation of sorts remains a distressing part of our cultural experience.

I recently had an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) procedure performed on my knee. The report was full of such words as joint effusion, medial patellar plica, acute medullary bone contusions, and medial femoral condyle. While my doctor could easily read and interpret the report for me, my attempts to understand the report were doomed.

I am sitting here, sipping my free cup of coffee at McDonald's, looking across the parking lot at the huge going-out-of-business banners strung across the entrance to my local Circuit City store.

"I wonder," I joked with the McDonald's manager, who I know pretty well, "if they had to pay for those banners up front and in cash?"

There's an embedded hierarchy in the deployment of Web 2.0 technology. Our interview, observation, and survey data all suggest that the lowest-hanging fruit -- surprise -- gets picked first.1 Wikis, blogs, and social networks -- perhaps because of their C2C origins -- have been deployed more than the other technologies.

I am sitting here, sipping my free cup of coffee at McDonald's, looking across the parking lot at the huge going-out-of-business banners strung across the entrance to my local Circuit City store.

"I wonder," I joked with the McDonald's manager, who I know pretty well, "if they had to pay for those banners up front and in cash?"

Before I start to lay out an appropriate outsourcing strategy for agile projects, here is one major piece of advice: If you have the choice, don't do it!

Here is a question: "What will the computing environment of a midsize enterprise be in 2020?" That is, it seems to me, a fair question. The year 2020 is just about 11 years away (10 years if you're in government), and a decade is just a blink of the eye. What programming language will you be developing systems in: Java, .NET, Python, Ruby -- something else? What database management system will you be using? What computing platform will your organization be using: centralized, decentralized, on the cloud?

Gaining momentum for any type of IT architectural effort partly depends on the organization's level of architecture adoption maturity. Push too soon, and the necessary infrastructure won't have had time to mature, and your solutions won't scale.

Here is a question: "What will the computing environment of a midsize enterprise be in 2020?" That is, it seems to me, a fair question. The year 2020 is just about 11 years away (10 years if you're in government), and a decade is just a blink of the eye. What programming language will you be developing systems in: Java, .NET, Python, Ruby -- something else?

IT shops generate oodles and oodles of metrics. IT hardware and software can spit out hundreds of operational metrics, mostly to monitor system performance and diagnose system errors. On the hardware side, routers, switches, and data devices produce metrics that let operators infer the volume and kind of use patterns at work.

Despite often-touted alternatives and real drawbacks, the enterprise data warehouse remains a very popular architecture for providing the data integration and management foundation for end-user organizations' BI environments. Moreover, my research indicates that use of enterprise data warehouses will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.

Making business decisions is never easy. It becomes progressively more complicated as those around us offer their "two cents' worth" on 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.

Times of crisis provide the opportunity to ask whether any innovation and agility is still possible. The answer is not simple. One way to treat a crisis is by cutting costs. This is not a bad solution, and it is often very justified, but one must be aware that it may create extra danger for the future.

Many software development organizations have a growing realization that they need a more formal process than "seat of the pants." They are aware that many development methods are overly bureaucratic and unhelpful, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises. They hear that agile processes may help, but how do they make the transition to a modern-day process? How do they determine how much agility the agile processes on offer today really possess? How do they determine how much agility they need, anyway?

If cloud computing wasn't the number-one IT buzzword in 2008, it had to be pretty close. In all likelihood, it will probably hold this place in 2009. But let's face it, cloud computing is still in its infancy. This becomes vividly apparent when you consider the almost complete lack of (open) standards pertaining to almost everything associated with using cloud architectures.

Organizational skepticism about the virtues of a new technology idea are likely to run, at least in part, in direct proportion to the economic climate in which the company finds itself. When times are tough, it is essential that managers follow the basic rules of winning buy-in from key constituencies for their IT investment ideas. Here's how.

First, remember what buy-in means. It is not acquiescence or compliance but enthusiastic, active support for an investment proposal from relevant employee populations in the organization.

Are you ready for a fresh perspective on agility, architecture, and SOA? Then check out Building the Agile Enterprise with SOA, BPM and MBM, a book by Fred Cummins (Morgan Kaufmann, 2008). Don't let the title scare you away.

Many are engaging with Web 2.0 technology in their personal lives, and increasingly at work. Even if you don't think there's much new in Web 2.0 technologies, that it's merely a renaming of extant things, you can't ignore the power of them as presented now, and as widely adopted. It is perhaps the level of adoption of these technologies, combined with the potentialities for social interaction of different kinds, that make Web 2.0 so interesting from an ethical perspective.

Our research indicates a gradual but certain increase in the use of real-time data warehousing techniques -- such as trickle-feeding data from production sources or using technologies that capture changed data -- by end-user organizations to enable real-time updating of their data warehouses.

In my experience, firms that take on agile transformation initiatives have two very different types of leaders involved in the process. The first is an executive sponsor who has the resources and patience to stay the course while others around that individual get used to what it takes to be agile.

There are four critical areas in managing large projects: people, product, plans, and tools.

There's a compelling phenomenon that happens with the commonplace aspects of our lives. The boredom that is frequently associated with the average concerns in our day-to-day existence evolves into a willing ignorance that those concerns even exist. In our cars, we sometimes become oblivious to the fact that speeding inherently carries with it a higher level of risk.

It is just over a week since US President Barack Obama's inauguration, and people are wondering what to talk about next. There are a number of obviously significant issues (war, global warming, the economy, etc.). All are of momentous concerns, and how Obama handles them will affect many of us.

A center of excellence (COE) is not a new concept in business management. Even in offshoring, the creation of IT development centers to more effectively coordinate the application development work of distant service providers is a well-established type of COE. Yet the COE concept in offshoring has matured from its development center roots, taking on a more strategic aspect. The features of the evolved offshoring COE that offer value to managers are worth exploring for what they say about the evolution of offshoring as a management discipline.

A good friend of ours who is very active in business strategic thinking in many industries has mentioned to us that only 20% (or less) of business strategies and goals actually are worked on. This squares with our own experience in working with more than 100 companies worldwide. How can we plan IT to support business strategies if 80% of those strategies do not in fact drive business activities? On the other hand, we know that business managers undertake many initiatives that are not, strictly speaking, connected to the business strategy statements.