The recent announcement by the US State Department that its latest report, "Patterns of Global Terrorism 2003," contains so many inaccuracies that it is basically useless provides the perfect example of why organizations worldwide -- of all makes, industries, and sizes -- must have a well-defined data warehousing and analytics strategy in place.

Businesses need to be more agile, more flexible, more nimble, more responsive to change. That has been a mantra of agile managers and developers, but good stories help reinforce why it is so important. I recently talked with a client who related a fascinating story about one company's agility in a product release.

Over the past couple of months, I've been thinking about the "customer" problem once again. In various Advisors that I've written over the past couple of years, I have made a point to suggest that the idea (concept, term) customer is not a simple one and that there is much confusion out in the real world over what is meant by customer.

One of the steps that more and more companies are taking is to conduct "optimization audits." Great ... just what we need: another audit, another acronym (OA), and another question to answer when someone higher in the organization than you asks about how optimization audits work -- and if they're required by some government agency.

This is the third in a series of three Advisors on software architecture (see "Software Architecture: A Bill of Goods? Part 1" and "Software Architecture: A Bill of Goods? Part 2," 28 April 2004 and 19 May 2004).

The discussion continues in Part 2 (see " Harvesting Inventions -- Approaches for Identifying and Selecting Inventions to Patent," 23 June 2004).

Risk management is getting to be too complex to use on anything less than a major, multimillion-dollar project. The use of risk management on IT programs is overly complicated. This two-part Bulletin shows one way of cutting through the clutter of risk management tools, status reports, and metrics by adopting a simple, stratified approach.