You may have heard a big gasp the other day. That was the sound of Oracle Corporation sucking the air out of the other BI vendors' lungs with the announcement that it plans to buy business performance management and OLAP database vendor Hyperion Solutions Corporation for approximately US $3.3 billion.

Last weekend I had a conversation with an uncle who recently retired from his accounting job at a large university. His family was financially secure, the children were grown (with his first grandchild on the way), and he was healthy after going through a medical scare years ago.

In my last Advisor, "Collaborative Leadership Basics, Part 7: The Single Most Powerful Tool for Managing Peer Motivation" (25 January 2007), I told you about the best tool available for managing peer motivation.

In March 2006, the stories in the press about avian flu and the possibility of a large-scale pandemic were everywhere. The H5N1 virus had seemed to have escaped from its mostly Asian setting to have been found in Poland, Turkey, Azerbajian, Germany, Denmark, and Israel in rapid succession. Governments across the world, which had been mostly reactive to a possible pandemic in the early 2000s, were in full throttle mode to upgrade their pandemic planning and began in earnest to stockpile drugs like Tamiflu.

My last Advisor presented a few of the ownership challenges experienced by sourcing vendors and discussed how the vendor team can approach their part as owner of sourcing initiatives (see "Smart Sourcing: The Ownership Factor for Vendors," 14 February 2007).

Now that companies are making progress with service-oriented architecture (SOA), they are starting to experience some of the costs of success. As more services are developed and more applications are built using those services, the services need to be enhanced to support additional requirements for multiple, simultaneous users.

I was struck by the results of a little micro-survey I conducted over the last six months with three CIOs from mid-sized companies. This was a very informal survey that happened during the course of casual conversations over coffee breaks, lunches, or between sessions at a conference. The topic of measuring IT performance came up.

Until this title is put in context, it seems like a strange position for anyone to take. It sounds like you are leaving your team holding the bag. Bear with me though.

Business process management (BPM) is a hot management topic and an equally compelling IT product subject these days. True believers are setting up business process management as one of the last remaining sources of competitive advantage as other sources have evaporated. While BPM is a management philosophy first and a class of packaged applications second, you wouldn't know it from the way vendors convey the value of their products.

At the beginning of the year, I said that I doubted that the US Congress would get around to enacting any sort of new data breach regulations because it would simply be too preoccupied with trying to come up with a solution to the disastrous situation in Iraq (see "BI Trends and Developments to Watch for In 2007," 2 January 2007). But n

Recently, I was reviewing an article about a new partnership between Apple and Nike. The partnership had to do with a newly designed Nike running shoe that hooks up with the Apple Nano iPod. The ad on the iPod Web site goes like this:

There are moments in a consultant's life when you find that even your worst assumptions are way too optimistic to match reality. I had such an experience recently while preparing for a retrospective.

The northeastern US recently was pelted by record snowfalls, crushing ice storms, and bitter cold. In Wellington, New Zealand, it was a comfortable (but drizzly) 62 degrees Farenheit, while it was 10 degrees in New York City. No doubt the folks in New Zealand might have shrugged their shoulders when they heard about the plight of New Englanders and those in upstate New York.

More respondents are considering outsourcing some work this year than last, according to those surveyed for the January 2007 issue of the Cutter Benchmark Review . While the percentages of development haven't changed from year to year, we do see a sizable decrease in outsourcing of maintenance (67% to 61%) and help desk (45% to 38%). Last year, 80% of respondents indicated that they were not likely to consider backsourcing, while this year showed a sizable drop in this response (51%).

A key market driver that is helping to accelerate the use of business rules management systems (BRMSs) in corporate IT departments is the embedding of the technology by enterprise software vendors in their various offerings.

The notion of business architecture -- or at least the use of it -- has been evolving rapidly only over the past few years, whereas the concepts that make up the foundation of that business architecture have been around for awhile.

In the December 2006 issue of the Cutter IT Journal ("Sourcing: Out or In?"), I wrote an article titled "Smart Sourcing: Myths, Truths, and Realities." In that article, I presented a set of seven steps for performing re

User participation is beneficial for software projects and increases the likelihood of success. Yet, we take it for granted that some form of participation is necessary on all projects. There are different ways in which users can participate in an IS project.

Last year, several of the leading BI vendors -- starting with IBI and Cognos, followed by Microstrategy and Business Objects -- introduced new products that combine the reporting and analysis capabilities of BI tools with the ease of use of familiar search engines.

Over the past few months, I've asked a number of CIOs and CTOs whether, if they had a technology do-over, they would still install their enterprise applications. Not one of them said they would. Why not? Because it took each of them years to get the software to work and, in some cases, the projects cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

In my last Advisor (see "A Recipe for Success," 8 February 2007), I introduced David Anderson's recipe for success: focus on quality, reduce work-in-progress, balance capacity against demand, prioritize.

When you are an organization that has been around for 142 years, it can be assumed that you know how to manage risk. When you haven't issued a profit warning ever in those 142 years, it can be assumed you know how to manage risk very well indeed. When you unexpectedly issue one, like the British bank HSBC did, eyebrows go way up.

Over the years, I have learned one thing really well. That is, it doesn't matter how good or how influential a consultant you may be -- when it comes to making a change happen in an individual client organization or for the entire client company, you really don't own anything. In my experience, you are a facilitator, supporting your client executive(s) to make the change happen.

Every once in awhile, you stumble across something interesting in a related area that could have some relevance to your job or otherwise. This week I'd like to share such a discovery with you. While researching collaboration, I bumped into SCORM, the Shared Content Object Reference Model.

Business process management (BPM) is a hot management topic and an equally compelling IT product subject these days. True believers are setting up business process management as one of the last remaining sources of competitive advantage as other sources have evaporated. While BPM is a management philosophy first and a class of packaged application second, you wouldn't know it from the way vendors convey the value of their products.