Banking and financial services companies were the first to exploit the use of rule-based systems. Today, they remain the leading users of the technology and are actively seeking to employ it to effect enterprise decision management (EDM).

No, I'm not talking about having movie stars for clients (which is probably overrated anyway); rather, I'm talking about the clients we build into our enterprise applications. A lot has actually been happening in this space lately. To put these advances into perspective, let's review how we got there.

Perhaps I paint too pessimistic a picture, and maybe teamwork effectiveness and performance is better than it was 20 years ago. Maybe our expectations have outdistanced our ability to meet them. I don't know. However, when I ask IT professionals about their experience of teamwork effectiveness -- and I've asked tens of thousands in recent years -- I get a consistent "so-so" response.

In far too many mergers and acquisitions (M&As), companies conduct only legal and financial due diligence -- not IT. While it certainly takes less time and money initially to limit due diligence to a legal and financial perspective, the end result will ultimately cost the organization much more.

Increasingly, specialist knowledge in complex organizations is tacit rather than explicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is know-what. Explicit knowledge is captured, documented, published, and shared formally through traditional journals, manuals, databases, and the Internet. Tacit knowledge -- sometimes called "tribal" knowledge -- is know-how rather than know-what.

A Cutter Consortium risk management survey explored in detail organizations' risk management practices. The participants included 180 IT managers involved in various IT positions. The survey included more than 50 risk management-related questions [1].

To regard the business as a customer -- the customer -- of the IT department is a sensible practice, with one exception: handling the strategic aspects of information technology requires an approach and attitude beyond what is generally recognized in IT as serving the needs of the business.

In the current environment, where many activities and functions of an organization are outsourced, one might wonder whether innovation could also be outsourced. Yes, innovation can be outsourced. In fact, it has been happening for some time now, although organizations don't plainly call it outsourcing. This can be done in three different ways: takeover, assignment, and joint network.

One of the biggest trends in business intelligence (BI) is the growing use of digital dashboards and scorecard applications. Organizations are implementing digital dashboards and scorecards to satisfy various daily BI needs, ranging from monitoring financial operations and highlighting sales trends to providing better visibility into supply chain processes and contact center operations.