Content management represents a critical area of infrastructure for the enterprise. As content becomes digitized, managed, and accessible through portals, the advantages of bringing most if not all content under a single management scheme become more apparent.

As agile project delivery methods have entered the mainstream, the burning managerial question has shifted from whether to adopt them to how. Switching to agile often brings swift and dramatic change, but ensuring that this transition is positive in nature requires an informed, pragmatic approach.

Business continuity management (BCM) is no longer a luxury but an essential element of an organization's risk management program. For an organization to have any hope of survival, the BCM process must embrace risk, emergency, and recovery planning in order to manage a "crisis" or "disaster" event. Undertaking any business continuity activity should form part of a wider planning structure; it is not an end in itself but rather a means to an end.

IT technology

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology never died; rather, it became the secret sauce in many of today's most successful technologies and now offers brave IT departments the opportunity to deploy truly innovative solutions to enable business success.

We all know really good business technology consultants. We also know really bad ones -- or "evil consultants," as I like to describe them.

This Executive Report by Tanaia Parker introduces the Strategic Enterprise Architecture FrameworkSM (SEAFSM) as an approach to address the strategy-execution dilemma.

In recent years, with much anticipation, we have increasingly been hearing about the Semantic Web, yet it is a term whose definition continues to be rather fuzzy.

A mid-level manager at a large electronics manufacturing company recently confided in me that he was experiencing difficulty with his new team. According to him, the problem was that his new team was located in several parts of the world, and that none of the people he worked with were colocated with him.

The objective of this Executive Report is to provide a comprehensive framework for identifying and assessing IT outsourcing (ITO) success. Specifically, this report attempts to answer the following four questions:

What type of outcomes do organizations typically pursue from ITO?

How do these goals change over time?

From our very first security Opinion, "Pandemic I: Malicious Disruption (The Halloween Scenario)" in October of 2001, we have dealt with security problems more than any other issue. This is in part because our clients tell us it's what they worry about. And just as important, it's because the pieces of a very worrisome whole have been accumulating.

I ask managers who have been burned by mixed or bad results and have turned a jaundiced eye to the bombardment of ideas on how to elevate IT management performance to now pause and, with an open mind, explore the virtues of information technology asset management (ITAM). What they should find are many common-sense concepts about how to optimize their large, complex portfolios of IT by treating them as the assets that they are.

In recent years, the advancement and proliferation of IT have generated a surge in the purchase and application of computer-based solutions to enterprise-level problems. It is commonplace today for product vendors and CIOs to gather and exchange information and data on promising products that can increase efficiency and productivity in a cost-effective manner.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) -- a paradigm for "design, development, deployment and management of a loosely coupled business application infrastructure." 1

In late 2004, members of the Cutter Business Technology Council discussed Fellow Lynne Ellyn's assertion that "smart companies will soon borrow the best of open source practices and begin to internalize a radical new way to develop software." 1 Three years later, I'd like to reopen that conversation.

There are many opinions as to the goal of negotiations and how to approach them based on experience, culture, and industry norms, as well as ideology, and in some cases, ego. This Executive Report will help you plan negotiations that focus on obtaining sustainable results through a series of planning and analysis steps.

Collaboration

Telepresence is happening, but a lot more slowly than its advocates expected. Nevertheless, this now-nascent trend, when it does blossom, has the potential to be utterly transforming.

Perhaps one of the greatest paradoxes in management is the explicit belief that workforce quality is the driver of enterprise success while evidence from day-to-day practices shows otherwise. Some CEOs spout the virtues of their employees, yet their organizations spend little time exploring the complex and interdependent forces that drive improvements in workforce performance, which contribute directly to success in innovation, customer relationships, and financial performance.

In this Executive Report, I explore data architecture in detail, putting it into the context of your overall IT architecture strategy and describing the critical aspects that should be addressed by effective data architecture. My primary goal is to make you aware of, and understand the complexities of, the issues that your data architecture must address.

An out-of-control project is something with which far too many of us are familiar. However, failure is far from the only outcome. By focusing your efforts on certain key areas, it is possible to turn a project disaster into a project success. This Executive Report looks at the skills you need in order to reset expectations, communicate effectively in all directions, and turn conflict-ridden relationships into joint problem-solving partnerships.

IT technology

The trend toward higher-resolution displays promises to be expensive but unstoppable. Its effect on the desktop may pass unnoticed, but it is likely to cause serious retrofit of anything handheld.

We're bombarded with articles, papers, reports, and books on technology trends. Every year the major trade publications unveil their "top 10" list of technologies to watch. Even the major news magazines weigh in with their top technology picks for the year.

CIOs and IT managers and professionals can no longer afford to simply ignore social networks, dismissing them as a platform for fun for young people. However, in order to harness the opportunities social networks present, you must first gain a deeper knowledge of social networks, including an understanding of how they work and their inherent power.

Progressive organizations recognize that well-understood requirements are at the root of delivering relevant products. These organizations commit resources to improve skills for discovering and communicating requirements and for integrating these techniques with agile development.