The connection between IT investments and success with the customers who pay the firm money is often indirect, ambiguous, and difficult to establish.

Here's an interesting finding from a recent Cutter Consortium survey: approximately 20% of end-user organizations with business performance management initiatives are using so-called Web 2.0 technologies to support their performance management efforts.

As more organizations face transitions to agile methods and these transitions involve larger segments of such organizations, the need for transition or transformation strategies increases.

It is often said that there are only two things you can be sure of in life: death and taxes. Well, in today's world, I think you have to add three more things to that list -- change, technology, and learning.

collaboration = innovation

During my years as an application architect, I always appreciated good project management. In fact, I tried my own hand at being a project manager but fortunately had the sense to recognize quickly that I wasn't very good at it.

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) methodology has much to say about the management of technical changes to an organization's IT portfolio and less about the business change introduced by those technical changes. However, given the amount of attention ITIL pays to the subject of change suggests that organizations that respect ITIL will develop this specific analytical capacity just by adopting the methodology.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show more than 10 years ago to discuss "network computers." This was when a lot of ahead-of-their-time ideas were out there, like Apple's Newton and IBM's voice-recognition applications.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show more than 10 years ago to discuss "network computers." This was when a lot of ahead-of-their-time ideas were out there, like Apple's Newton and IBM's voice-recognition applications.

Ah, the word "politics" sounds ugly. Yet IT managers always talk about the negative role of politics in making IT investment and prioritization decisions. It would seem that "politics" is something to be avoided, that somehow a more rational decision-making approach could avoid politics.

Actuate Corporation has launched a new on-demand business performance management service. "Actuate OnPerformance," as the software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering is called, is based on the Performancesoft Suite, which Actuate acquired when it bought Performancesoft Inc.

I'm a bit of an armchair climber and mountaineer. I don't have much talent or experience, but I'm fascinated by the trials and travails of climbing high mountains like Everest, Annapurna, and others that rise to over 8,000 meters above sea level.

Andrew Keen's book The Cult of the Amateur pours buckets of cold water onto the heads of Web 2.0 enthusiasts, accusing them of "worshipping the creative amateur" -- regardless of how poorly educated and inarticulate they may be.

The financial community recently seems to have added a new twist to the advice given in Shakespeare's Henry VI (Part 2) with regard to lawyers in the wake of the US $130-billion-plus write-offs that are increasing daily due to the subprime mortgage debacle.

A few years ago, I wrote about "Applistructure" as the latest trend to combine enterprise infrastructure with enterprise business applications. This was all the buzz at the time. A recent Google search for the term reveals numerous articles from late 2005 by analysts and pundits predicting great things. Then ... nothing. No references for 2006 nor 2007.

While most of us worry about IT's strategic impact (does IT really matter?), events have turned again to require that we worry about IT's cost. There's little doubt that IT does matter in many industries. However, when times get tough, management's attention returns to the issue of cost.

Here's the problem. Generally, we don't understand IT's cost. Many CIOs cannot answer the following simple questions.

What are our five highest-cost applications -- and what does each really cost?

So much emphasis has been placed on negotiation in outsourcing contracts that an inexperienced person could believe it is the pinnacle of the outsourcing lifecycle and involves the greatest amount of work and the greatest risk of signing a bad contract. If it does become the pinnacle, then something has gone seriously wrong in an earlier stage.1

In the August 2007 Cutter IT Journal, I wrote an article titled "Beyond Collaboration to Action as a Service." In that article, Dave Gibson and I put forward a vision where more than just people enable collaboration.

When I teach architecture courses, one of the things that I try to convey to the class is the different levels of complexity/interconnectedness/theory that exist within architecture. It is not the goal of the course to make people experts at metamodels, but it is important for an architect to understand that architecture is founded on architecture of its own.

In December, I discussed several trends and developments in "mobile BI" -- the ability to view and interact with performance-related information on mobile devices like smartphones and PDAs (see "Business Performance Management and Mobile BI," 26 December 2007).

What Is Personal Agility? Personal agility has two major components, the first of which is "personal responsibility." Let's start there.

One of the great things about working with Cutter Consortium is that I get to work with a lot of really smart people. One of those people is Mike Rosen, who is the Enterprise Architecture Practice Director for Cutter as well as a Senior Consultant.

collaboration = innovation

Last November, I said that Oracle would more than likely end up buying BEA Systems (see "Oracle and BEA: Fusion Confusion or Beneficial to End-User Organizations?" 14 November 2007). I added that my initial reaction to this possible acquisition was that it would be good for Oracle.

In my previous Advisor ("The Architecture of the Customer Experience, Part 1," 2 January 2008), I produced the beginnings of an ontology that is useful for thinking about how customers interact with firms.