One of the interesting dilemmas facing current IT development managers is what to do with the applications that were written in what used to be referred to as 4GLs (fourth-generation languages). In the 1980s and 1990s, a number of such languages were developed that were designed first to handle management reporting tasks and then to develop basic PC and client-server applications.

An old boyfriend of mine, while a young adult, once spent a Saturday with his best friend taking apart and reassembling his car's engine. The intent wasn't to make improvements. They were simply curious about the engine's assembly and about their own ability to do something that was more ambitious than other such experiments they had tried.

As technology continues to improve and advance, businesses are using software applications, components, and other technology tools once reserved for IT use in ways that IT departments sometimes have no control or even knowledge of. This ubiquitous adoption of technology at many levels within a company -- as well as the increasing complexity of internal systems, external partnerships, and shorter application-development cycles -- has left IT executives scrambling to find a solution to manage the enterprise technology roadmap.

We have been working with public sector and commercial clients in upgrading their IT investment prioritization processes. While doing so, we have found it helpful to apply a prioritization maturity model to establish the company's goals and outcomes. Clients of Cutter's Business-IT Strategies Advisory Service are no doubt very familiar with the concept of maturity models in software development.

I've been talking for some time now about why Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS) should be considered an important part of an organization's service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiative.1

Data integration tools vendor Informatica Corporation is buying Identity Systems, Inc. (ISI), a provider of identity search, matching, and resolution software, for approximately US $85 million.

Business process management (BPM), also called business process modeling, is a hot topic these days: as a standalone solution; as the impetus for the customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) categories; and perhaps most importantly, as a critical enabling technology for the orchestration function in service-oriented architecture (SOA).

In working with a number of software companies over the years, I've come to find a single metric that is very effective in determining how "agile" these organizations are: the length of the tail. The tail is the time period from "code slush" (true code freezes are rare) or "feature freeze" to RTM (release to manufacturing).

It seems as if every time you turn on the television there's an advertisement regarding identity theft or a newscast about how someone lost their laptop containing the personal records of hundreds of thousands of people.

I noted that Joseph Weizenbaum died last month. Weizenbaum was an early computer scientist, most famous perhaps for the creation of Eliza, a very early artificial intelligence (AI) program fashioned around a simple pattern recognition (stimulus-response) model that mimicked the approach used by psychologists and psychiatrists in talking to patients.

Example:

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.

I'm a strong proponent that everything we do in an IT organization should be driven by business needs and issues. One reason many IT managers are out of sync with their business client is that they haven't really established what the business needs and issues are.

Awhile back, Cutter Senior Consultant Mike Rosen and I wrote an Executive Report (see "Enterprise Architecture: It's Not Just for IT Anymore," Vol. 9, No.

Disasters happen, and projects do go wrong. Very often this sets off a chain of events that causes more hardship down the line and incurs costs that someone will be looking to recoup. However, all too often, the distress of the situation blinds the people involved from the opportunities that remain to break new technological ground, introduce new products or capabilities to the market, and solve problems that could not be solved before.

Like other metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs) require modification to remain accurate. Reasons for modifying KPIs can range from the implementation of new business processes and corporate objectives and strategies to responses to changing market conditions or business environments.

I've been working with many companies lately whose IT systems are dominated by enterprise resource planning (ERP). This is not surprising, since an ERP system is an essential part of most IT portfolios today. In many organizations, the ERP system contributes as much as 70% of the total IT capability.

If you start with agile management, you will hit a point of frustration eventually: the more reliable your planning process becomes, the more frustrating are its results. You will find that your real velocity is way beyond what you would like it to be -- and probably beyond what you promised to your stakeholders.

I recently spent some time on hold with -- and occasionally actually speaking with -- "technical support" representatives.

The expectations for our leaders have never been larger. More than ever before, the essentials of leadership include the courageous use of human experience and the individual desire to create a difference and succeed in a world of rising complexity.

IT can be the facilitator of efficiency and sustainability within a corporation. By driving sustainable practices from the bottom up, IT can help build a better, greener company around itself. There are some simple policy modifications that can be taken immediately to reduce the environmental impact of IT's use in the company, and then there are some cultural changes that take longer to enact.

In the education business, there is a recognized theory of cognitive development that is based on the work of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and his study of children. Piaget identified four stages of development. Each represents the understanding of reality during that stage, but the last is an inadequate approximation of reality.

I have met many engineers, programmers, administrators, and others who have great imagination (I used to be one of them; sometimes I stray back into that fold). Ideas come to them, and they try those ideas. Sometimes, some of those brilliant ideas work right now in the system we are building. Often, however, that isn't the case. Poor odds don't deter these imaginative people. Close oversight is necessary; well, maybe not necessary, as there are other choices.

IT can be the facilitator of efficiency and sustainability within a corporation. By driving sustainable practices from the bottom up, IT can help build a better, greener company around itself. There are some simple policy modifications that can be taken immediately to reduce the environmental impact of IT's use in the company, and then there are some cultural changes that take longer to enact.

The majority of organizations plan to increase spending on business performance management in 2008. This finding comes from a Cutter Consortium survey conducted in January 2008 of 101 end-user organizations based worldwide.

Entrenched political infrastructures will not fall in line easily around the idea of tackling the governance issue. To the contrary, business units and IT spend most of their time working around the concept of governance because no one believes that it can change. This fact is clearly visible in most organizations.