The change in information available to consumers is so profound that it requires a new word. Customers are no longer merely aware; they now enjoy true informedness.

Enterprise search -- the ability for employees to use a search engine to locate and retrieve relevant information pertinent to their jobs as easily as it is for them to dredge up the latest consumer information on the Internet -- continues to generate a lot of attention in the press and at conferences.

We're all familiar with glib, well-dressed consultants. As this implies, however, we do not always have a positive image of consultants. The fact is that "good" (versus "evil") consultants are extremely important contributors to the overall business technology relationship.

Anyone with basic project management exposure has learned about the "Iron Triangle" of trade-offs between scope, schedule, and resources. You can't manipulate one of these variables without affecting the others, and it is not feasible to fix all three during project visioning.

Whenever any organization says that problems with an IT project effort are "99% fixed" -- as US Airways President Scott Kirby did a few months ago when describing the then less-than-stellar introduction of its "integrated" reservation system -- my risk antennae start to tingle (for more background, see "Flying Is So Muc

collaboration = innovation

Here's the mantra: "Plan so that you can do what you want; prepare so that you can do whatever you need."

It's time for my annual report on the Cutter Summit, which took place 29 April - 2 May 2007 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Each year the Summit has a specific theme, which for 2007 was innovation.

Companies hope to fulfill the goals of new market entry, enhanced customer management, and product development through strategic sourcing arrangements. This evolution represents a corporate transformation as profound as the emergence of the multinational early in the 20th century. What role will strategic sourcing play within this transformational evolution?

I attended my son's graduation from college yesterday. That should be an unqualified joyous celebration, except my son graduated in engineering from Virginia Tech University, in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. Twenty-five days earlier, a student killed 32 people on campus and then killed himself (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_massacre).

Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about five exabytes1 of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks. [Lyman, Peter, and Hal R. Varian.

Last week, I discussed business process management vendor TIBCO Software, Inc.'s purchase of BI analytics vendor Spotfire (see "TIBCO Buys Spotfire: BI to Become Just Another Process?" 8 May 2007). The week before, it was Business Objects' acquisition of business performance management vendor Cartesis S.A.

In my last Trends Advisor (see "Privacy, Confidentiality, and Security," 26 April 2007), I talked about privacy, confidentiality, and security and how easy it was for me to find an old friend with the help of Google. Since that column, Google has announced an agreement to access the public records of four large US states.

In my last Advisor ("Part 9: The Power of a Clear and Elevating Goal," 22 March 2007), I told you that research consistently shows that very high-performing teams have a clear and elevating goal that energizes everyone on the team; provides crystal-clear direction, thus replacing the need for supervision, since the people

In this second of a two-part analysis (see "Taking the Slow Trip to Monte Carlo," 19 April 2007), Carl Pritchard looks at the implications of using the Monte Carlo tools on a small and larger scale and ultimately making Monte Carlo part of the routine.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives have been evolving rapidly in the industry over the past year or so. During this period, most practitioners and their organizations have agreed upon one thing: SOA has to be business driven. I strongly believe that an SOA architect plays a significant role in the success of the initiative his or her company is pursuing.

A rather fantastic news story broke about a week ago in the Wall Street Journal, detailing the travails of a whistleblower who exposed a massive IT project run amok at Kaiser Permanente.1 The story focuses on the drama unfolding between the whistleblower and senior management. The even larger story from my perspective is a sadder, more prophetic and familiar one: how an organization can squander its wealth when even the most rudimentary precepts of sound IT management are ignored.

The third building block in our model of architecting outsourcing relationships -- strategize -- is where we conduct the planning that enables objective and knowledgeable decisions throughout the remainder of the lifecycle. This building block is crucial to the effective navigation of the entire outsourcing lifecycle.

I love technology. I have to admit it. I love my computer and my integrated PDA and phone, even though they give me a lot of grief. I can't imagine not having all my stuff online and easily accessible. I love having information at my fingertips with the Web. I love being able to communicate so easily via e-mails, text messages, and instant messages.

In the 8 September 2006 issue of MSNBC Newsweek, journalist Andrew Romano tells us something of his relationship (close but not huggy) with his sister:

Last week, I wrote about Business Objects buying business performance management vendor Cartesis S.A. in response to Oracle's acquisition of Hyperion Solutions in February (see "Business Performance Management Full Speed Ahead -- Business Objects Buys Cartesis," 1 May 2007).

In Part 1 of this article series (see "Easy As Implementing a Package ... Part 1," 1 March 2007), I described the productivity characteristics of large IT package implementations, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications.

Recently, I saw an interesting opening slide in a presentation made by a German IT consulting company. To demonstrate the company's slogan, "Knowing upfront what comes out in the end," the slide showed an ancient cave painting with a bunch of Stone Age hunters fleeing from an attacking saber-toothed tiger.

I was looking for a catchy phrase I could use to quickly and simply articulate how we should think about Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance, particularly now that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) have signaled their intents with the simplified Accounting Standard 5 (AS5).

You've probably been aware for some time that Amazon.com has made its catalog available online via Web services. Typically, when a Web site references a book and provides details about it, the information is obtained using one of Amazon's Web services. This has worked well for both Amazon and the users of the services.

The project management office, or PMO, is a concept that has been around for a half-dozen years or so, has proven useful in many instances, and is ubiquitous in medium- and large-sized IS departments.