It's often said that a picture is worth a thousand words -- especially in the context of modeling, whether it be software modules or business processes that are depicted.

When Adam Smith wrote about the "invisible hand" of the market in The Wealth of Nations, he was referring to strictly legal actions by individuals, which in their aggregate contributed to market efficiency. What he didn't talk about was illegal tendencies that the invisible hand might bring about.

A reader asked recently why I thought that data mining techniques are not in use at more organizations. This question is interesting in that the typical organization today tends to have huge amounts of data at its disposal. In addition, there have been significant advances in data collection, integration, and storage, with the data warehousing concept now quite widely accepted.

While conducting the IT due diligence to support one company acquisition, it became obvious that the company we were trying to purchase reduced expenses considerably by pirating software. In other words, the company purchased one set of software and simply copied it illegally to other employees as needed.

A funny thing is happening along the path of innovation for some companies. They are discovering their product development strategy is seriously endangered by a shortage of qualified technical staff. So they have responded with an obvious solution: offshoring it.

Last week, we celebrated the 40th anniversary of software engineering. Between 7 and 11 October 1968, the NATO Science Committee hosted 62 leading academics and professionals of the young computer industry in Garmisch, a beautiful place in Bavaria, Germany, at the foot of the north face of the highest German mountain.

Researchers in academia have, for several years now, been conducting all sorts of interesting research in advanced human-computer interface topics. Collectively, this research falls under the banner of augmented cognition (AugCog).

We have covered a lot of material since we published the first Advisor in this series on the principles of planning. Now it's time for a review.

I've been engaged with several clients recently to help them formulate a service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy for their respective enterprises. In my conversations with them, I've had two essential points to offer.

Web 2.0 technologies -- such as wikis, blogs, RSS filters, mashups, podcasts, folksonomies, crowdsourcing, social networks, and virtual worlds -- are very hot. Everyone is excited about deploying them, especially because they're fast and cheap. But what do they really deliver?

I have previously suggested six dimensions of impact:

Knowledge management (KM)

Last week, Microsoft shed some light on three BI and data warehousing projects it's working on: Gemini, Kilimanjaro, and Madison.

As with all enterprise search systems, the usefulness of a BI search tool depends primarily on the relevancy of the search results returned to the user when conducting searches and the ease with which users can carry out their searches successfully.

In a recent Advisor (see "To Attract Agile Change, Embrace Uncertainty," 11 September 2008), I discussed the need for managers and teams to embrace uncertainty in development efforts and, furthermore, that this is very difficult to do.

There was an interesting story a few weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal about the electronic retailer Best Buy's internal prediction market [1]. Company executives use the prediction market, called TagTrade, to see how successful Best Buy employees think a particular project, idea, or initiative will be.

We like to think that knowledge is cumulative -- what mathematicians refer to as monotonically increasing. Unfortunately, that is not the case. For example, we no longer know how to build pyramids as the Egyptians did, make violins and cellos the way 18th-century Italians did, or, surprisingly, how to build the rockets that got the first man to the moon.

We need to rethink dispute resolution. It has matured in concept and approach so that it becomes not just a useful tool in managing conflict by problem solving but a vehicle for creative collaboration. We might want to start by renaming it, because what we call it influences our perceptions of its uses.

Strategic orientation toward customers and innovation needs to be grounded, understood, and directed in response to the business strategic plan. Businesses that develop a comprehensive strategic plan will have the insight to know which strategic-orientation mode will best help them reach their goals.

Most applications, enterprises, or products will have unique architectures designed to meet their specific goals and requirements, though many of them will be very similar. For example, the architecture for a portal application at one company will probably resemble a portal application at another company of like size and business function.

There is a lot of interest at the present time in the role that Enterprise 2.0 Web applications can play in enhancing business performance. In a survey recently conducted by Trampoline Systems, a London-based provider of social networking software, 94% of UK and 82% of US businesses believe the new technologies will be beneficial to use at work. Other recent research shows similar results.

Last week, I was briefed by the folks from Success Metrics, which has just introduced a new on-demand BI offering: Birst. I say "new," but the product actually has been in use for several years now by a number of customers in various one-off applications.

Recently, I had a conversation with a senior VP of software engineering who said that certain "macroeconomic trends" were going to influence the direction of his software development strategy. Reading between the lines: the CFO was going to cut budgets in the face of the current economic downturn.

Ambiguity: source of headaches, grinding teeth, and any number of other managerial complaints for which big pharma has yet to offer us a pill.

Ambiguity: source of excitement, the thrill of the chase; the product of change, and the lair of innovation.

For some time, my favorite topic has been agile enablement, and, surprisingly, I have found a lack of decent information about the more subtle aspects of transitioning an organization that follows more traditional software engineering practices to more of an agile approach.

One of the ugly truths behind the desire for powerful enterprise software is that the business people expert in the processes the software will oversee don't know how to program and the programmers who build the software know nothing of the business processes around which the software will be built. Into this void have come a number of project methodologies in which programmers and business experts collaborate to deliver a product that sometimes in the end takes too long to build, is rife with bugs, and which everyone dislikes.

We have worked extensively with clients this year on their IT strategic plans. One way we characterize the best approach is to distinguish between the "supply" and the "demand" components of the plan. This month, we'll focus on the "supply" side and next month on the "demand" side. (Incidentally, doing an effective "demand" side of IT strategic planning is by far the more critical and least understood.