Back in December 2003, I wrote an article discussing how Intel Corporation and SAS Institute had teamed up in order to advance the application of mobile BI technology (see the 2 December 2003 Business Intelligence Advisor, " SAS, Intel, and Mobile Business Intelligence").

In the process of reviewing the Oracle bid to buy PeopleSoft, it's come out that in late 2003, Microsoft and SAP spent several weeks discussing the possibility of a merger. And last week it was announced that Sun and Fujitsu would be entering into a partnership. All of these moves hint at future consolidation in the computer industry.

If you haven't read the 21 June 2004 issue of BusinessWeek, I recommend you grab a copy. It's the BusinessWeek annual issue on the top 100 InfoTech companies in the world, and the article I recommend is the lead for the InfoTech section entitled "Big Bang," by Stephen Baker and Heather Green.

This Advisor continues the discussion begun in Part 1 (see " Harvesting Inventions -- Approaches for Identifying and Selecting Inventions to Paten t," 2 June 2004).

This week I offer some sample approaches to implementing a patent funnel.

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).