According to a recent Cutter Consortium survey, the number one problem confronting organizations in their efforts to implement text mining applications is data integration/data volume issues associated with handling unstructured and semi-structured data. Approximately 80%-90% of corporate data resides in unstructured and semistructured format.

I've been working with a client that is trying to learn about SOA, helping the team to implement a pilot project. Although it's a fairly junior team, the problems they are encountering are not limited to inexperience. I've seen the same confusion at many different clients. They don't understand the relationship -- or difference -- between SOA and the user interface (UI).

Open source BI tools leader JasperSoft Corporation has released an open source data extract, transformation, and loading (ETL) tool. Called "JasperETL," this tool adds data integration capabilities for data warehousing and BI to the JasperSoft BI Suite, which consists of JasperServer (report server), JasperAnalysis (OLAP), JasperReports (end-user reporting), and iReport (report designer).

A year ago, my friend and Cutter associate Enterprise Architecture Practice Director Mike Rosen was waxing enthusiastic about a new Bluetooth headset that he had just acquired. What impressed him was the "smart button" on the device. Depending on what you were doing, it would put a call on hold, retrieve a call, or do a couple of other things.

One of the reasons the Agile Manifesto has had significant influence on software development is its simplicity: individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, responding to change over following a plan.

Once conventional becomes, well, conventional, offering an alternative reality bears similarity to standing in front of a downhill runaway train and thinking this will stop it. It's conventional wisdom's fierce momentum that prevents a competing worldview from getting any mindshare.

Offshoring risks are many and they are generally understood in the same contexts as risks related to IT project or information security management. First, in terms of probabilities that identified undesirable events will or will not occur as the project or initiative is executed. And secondly, in terms of the source of the occurrence of those bad events -- financial, people, technical, geographic, and so on. But another approach to risk assessment exists that can provide managers a fresh understanding of the risks involved in offshoring.

There is a lot of talk in the EA community about the increased focus on the business architecture (see for example, Enterprise Architecture Practice Director Mike Rosen's "The Rise of Business Architecture," 10 January 2007).

collaboration = innovation

Quite often, people complain that they have been asked to provide an estimate before they have enough information.

This usually happens in the very early stages of a software project, but will also occur anytime we need to look at a major change. We need to figure out how long it will take to get the job done.

Good governance has been a topic of great interest in business in recent years. Recent corporate governance failures and corporate scandals including Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom, which gave rise to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (also known as the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act), are certainly one factor.

The recent announcement by TJX Companies, Inc. that its computer systems had been compromised, leading to credit and debit card purchase information being stolen and used for fraudulent purposes, dramatically underscores the nasty experience that companies can expect to go through should they suffer a customer data breach.

The Wall Street Journal reported recently that Wal-Mart is rolling out new software that will allow it to better allocate the amount of workers based upon customer occupancy in stores at any given time [1]. The approach is rather crude but when Wal-Mart does anything involving technology it is worth exploring.

Continuing with my ten tips for an agile project manager, tip number four is "practice management by wandering around" (MBWA) (for tips one, two, and three, see "Ten Tips for an Agile Project Manager, Part 1," 10 August 2006, "Agile Project Success Factors -- Red

"At TJX, we are fully committed to operating our business with the highest standards of business ethics, not merely in accordance with applicable law. We expect our vendors to maintain these same high standards." Or so reads a statement on the Massachusetts, USA-based $16-billion, off-price apparel retailer's Web site.

Ensuring success in a globally operating virtual team requires autonomous local decision making. To achieve this, you need well-defined handoffs between players that allow this autonomy, while guaranteeing an expected outcome. Such an arm's-length approach creates a relationship that is focused upon results that produce few or no surprises. Scrupulously negotiated handoffs enable you to steer clear of the pitfalls of micromanaging both deliverables and people in a remote location.

I've been working with a client that is trying to learn about SOA, helping the team to implement a pilot project. Although it's a fairly junior team, the problems that they are encountering are not limited to inexperience. I've seen the same confusion at many different clients. They don't understand the relationship -- or difference -- between SOA and the user interface.

We've noticed several basic themes about portfolio management in our client work this month that support a fundamental truth: portfolio management (e.g., project prioritization) is basic business governance of IT. This has a number of consequences.

When it comes to an enterprise-wide roll out of a compliance initiative for a large or medium-sized company, it definitely takes more than one expert to resolve all the challenges.

"Organizations need to address privacy not only because it is legally required and the right thing to do, but also because it is necessary for keeping customer trust, maintaining customer loyalty and support, and improving the corporate brand."

-- Rebecca Herold, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

With all the excitement last week resulting from Hewlett-Packard's announcement that it was entering the data warehousing market, another important industry development slipped by largely unnoticed. That was BI leader Cognos acquiring operational BI and dashboards vendor Celequest Corporation.

Earlier this month, Apple CEO Steve Jobs appeared at the annual MacWorld conference to show off the company's new iPhone.

In my last Advisor, "Collaborative Leadership Basics, Part 6: Why Team Member Motivation Is a Better Predictor of Team Effectiveness Than Are Technical Skills," 14 December 2006), I told you why motivation is more important than technical skill-set in predicting team effectiveness, and thus performance.

As any parent with small children will tell you, getting them to eat their vegetables can be a trying experience. If only their determination not to eat a single pea, carrot, or green bean, regardless of the coaxing, bribery, or threats involved, could be channeled in more positive directions.

I don't think failure is inevitable in outsourcing agile projects. An outsourcing strategy that fits the nature of strategic stars such as agile projects could have prevented the disaster. However, before I start to lay out an appropriate outsourcing strategy for agile projects, here is one major piece of advice: If you have the choice, don't do it!