Unlike many overhyped technology fads, which are driven by vendor innovations rather than genuine customer needs, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) movement is rapidly expanding because the growing array of on-demand applications truly addresses longstanding shortcomings in traditional on-premise applications.

Business Objects has shaken up the text mining and analysis market by announcing it is acquiring unstructured data analysis vendor Inxight Software. This deal will allow Business Objects to add text mining and analysis capabilities to its BI tools and applications lineup.

Auto-ID technology began in 1999 with the formation of a consortium that sponsored research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. After several years of development and testing, MIT licensed Auto-ID technology to GS1, the nonprofit standards organization responsible for the implementation of bar code standards during the 1970s.

In large, traditionally managed organizations, a transition to agile could seem a daunting cultural shock. Management in such organizations is governed by policies that are based on deep-rooted paradigms from plan-driven approaches with a command-and-control-based structure. These organizations by nature have become so rigid in their management style, that agility seems to them an impossible dream.

The Advisor you are reading here is published within Cutter Consortium's Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) & Governance Advisory Service. The ERM taxonomy represents more than just slick terminology to attract readers. It speaks to evolving wisdom about how risks should be managed today and how organizations are responding to this new thinking.

The past year or so has been a happy time for software as a service (SaaS) proponents, with Salesforce.com, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, and others loudly singing the benefits of the on-demand model for CRM, sales force automation (SFA), and even ERP applications.

The term "innovation" has become quite fashionable these days. Every company or organization aspiring to gain or hold some meaningful position in the market is forced to "be innovative" -- if it is not, it is out. As with any term that is mainly a tool for marketing campaigns, the meaning of "innovation" has evolved during the last few years and become very ambiguous.

I believe that it is essential to benchmark the performance of offshore vendors periodically to maintain a healthy relationship all around [1]. So in this Advisor, I would like to communicate about this aspect of managing sourcing relationships: using a set of metrics.

Business performance management, corporate performance management (CPM), enterprise performance management (EPM), and the real-time enterprise (RTE) are catchy terms used by vendors and consultancies to promote their different offerings.

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.