Negotiators from different cultures differ in numerous ways. The very base concept and attitude toward negotiations vary from an extreme win-lose paradigm in some cultures, in which the assumption is that the other parties are out to beat you and that you can only succeed by limiting the gains you allow them, to win-win, collaborative negotiations in which the goal is to find solutions that meet all parties' interests.

Is yours one of the few organizations that has broken with tradition and hired a new CIO from outside technology? Don't be embarrassed if it is. More are likely to do it, albeit at a slow pace. And if more and more are doing it ... well, it can't be all bad, can it?

Pay attention to this hiring strategy. It speaks gigabytes about the future of one very important aspect of IT management; that is, who oversees it. Let us count the ways.

In the first two Advisors in this series (see "How to Talk to Architects, Part I: The Enterprise," 28 May 2008, and "How to Talk to Architects, Part II: Business and Information," 18 June 2008), we discussed the issues involved in communicating with archi

What are your most valuable assets? For many companies, especially those in the knowledge-based industries, their first response is: "Our people are our most important asset(s)." Interestingly, while for many senior executives this idea may hold true, there is confusion between the business and technical staff in terms of how they -- IT staff members -- are viewed and treated.

I've been doing a lot of research on BI search -- tools that combine the ease of use of enterprise search engines with the reporting and analysis capabilities of BI tools. The goal of BI search is to enable organizations to distribute BI functionality to (nontechnical) business users in a manner that makes self-service BI practical.

I really love maps. I'm something of a map freak. When I was a kid, my folks got me an encyclopedia that had a volume called "Places and People," and I spent whole summers browsing the maps and pictures, trying to get the relationships of those maps and the rest of the globe clear in my mind.

Project management is one thing most businesses have in common. The need to design, develop, manufacture, and market a product is a central thread across the vast expanse of industries. All companies need project management to achieve the goal of producing their next widget. Academic and professional institutions provide an almost immeasurable amount of useful tools and skill-building material on this subject. A careful observer might presume that with all the available knowledge on project management, the majority of projects would be managed effectively.

Physicists speak of dark energy, the label applied to the expansive oomph permeating the universe. The Internet has its own dark energy: the legions of nerds who code for fun, challenge, and uncertain profit. They do not make a business plan or solicit lawyers and VCs before jumping in, and they have no particular political or economic power. Yet they are the ones who developed the Internet in a backwater and declined to patent its protocols.

If you are a frequent traveler or, even more, a road warrior, you will get your full value out of this Advisor in this line: check out a company called TripIt (full disclosure: I have no stock and I do not advise TripIt, but I am writing a very interesting Harvard Business School case on the company).

On the face of it, we all can agree that how a company does its work matters a great deal. The continual interest in reorganizations, the business process reengineering explosion of the 1980s, and the now nearly universal acceptance of the business process and organizational structure as fundamental to good performance give proof to this truth.

If there was ever any doubt as to what Microsoft's strategy regarding Enterprise 2.0 might be, it was shattered with several announcements at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, earlier this month. In a nutshell, Microsoft is moving to become an Enterprise 2.0 leader by taking advantage of its wildly popular SharePoint Server.

It's in our interest as technology professionals to deliver the right message to nontechnology folks in order to help them understand major technology trends, opportunities, and best practices.

Waiting for a train recently, I had a chance to browse through a copy of American Photo magazine. I subscribe to its sister publication, Popular Photography, so I decided to sign up for American Photo as well.

I frequently read articles about outsourcing, benefits, risks, business value, challenges, best practices, concerns, and so on. I wonder whether this information, most of it around success stories, refers to a reality exclusive to American companies, or whether we have the same environment in Latin America.

How many of you come to work each Monday morning determined to perform poor-quality work?

In my last Advisor (see "It's Threat 'AND' Opportunity ... Not 'OR'," 22 May 2008), I discussed the concepts that risk as threat is a natural complement to opportunity, rather than the flip side of it. But I made the point that opportunities exist only if we have an accepting attitude toward them.

Users are not interested in programs. If they are, it is our fault. What users want is systems that produce needed outputs with the minimum of additional input and with the maximum of integration (or the ability to integrate) with other systems with which they share data.

There are many reasons that a company decides to outsource -- from the need to increase productivity and improve service quality to provide a faster response and focus on its core business -- making the transformation from a tech-focused IT organization to an area deeply involved in the business decision-making process and contributing to meeting the business objectives at the same time. Other reasons include labor tactics that consider the staff size, training, and the cost of human resources for organizations.

According to a recent Cutter Consortium survey (see Cutter Benchmark Review, Vol. 8, No. 2), executive management teams are not all that happy with what they are getting from their IT investments. This dissatisfaction appears to be a result of several things:

In the first article in this series (see "How to Talk to Architects, Part I: The Enterprise," 28 May 2008), we discussed the issues involved in communicating with architects. Although it doesn't always seem so, architects are not that different from anyone else.

If you've ever tried to prepare and serve a beloved family recipe for a large group -- say 25 people or more -- you've experienced the fundamental problem of system scalability. Processes and facilities that work fine at one level break down totally when the quantities are multiplied by 5 or 10 times. Ingredients don't mix properly, your pans or oven may be too small, cook times vary, and even if all goes well in the kitchen, the dish may be cold by the time it is served to most of the guests.

Last week (see "And the Best Data Integration Technique Is ..." 10 June 2008), I said that the debate about which data integration technique is best for BI is irrelevant, because most midsize and larger organizations are going to require a variety of data integration methods to support their BI and other decision support needs.

"Many project managers (PMs) still find the complexity of planning and delivering projects in a constantly changing environment often requires competencies that their formal training has not equipped them with," notes guest editor Rob Thomsett, in the May 2008 issue of Cutter IT Journal's call for papers.

Last year, I started introducing agile development to a highly innovative company. They are world-market leaders in their domain, and it's basically their technical expertise they hold responsible for their position.

Almost every organization has data problems. These problems can be grouped into two categories. One type of problem is having redundant, inconsistent, and often plain-wrong data. The other type is not having easy access to the data. From the inception of the data warehouse (DW), the objective of building a DW has been to solve both types of problems.