Although some may argue that IT's capacity to contribute to business competitiveness has faded, we suggest instead that it has evolved and expanded, maturing and changing within a subset of companies that have effectively managed to use IT in various ways. In this two-part Executive Report series, we examine the status of the use of IT to improve organizational capabilities and promote business value, identifying varieties of use and directional trends as well as managerial challenges and critical success factors through five case studies.

The accompanying Executive Report examines Apache Hadoop, with an eye toward its application in more mainstream organizations.

Business resilience has become increasingly important in the wake of an unusual period of natural disasters around the globe, and new technologies and organizational models have yielded improved capabilities to move forward in the face of any disaster. Threats, both natural and man-made, continue to proliferate, as all the possibilities of business, financial, and physical risk meet the evolving threat environment of increasingly pervasive IT.

Business architecture (BA) is rapidly becoming a mainstream concept for many business and IT professionals. Consequently, it is essential for professionals to establish a BA practice that can provide value in the strategic planning and operational efficiency of an enterprise. In the accompanying Executive Report, we present a comprehensive real-world case study of a US healthcare organization and explore the four stages involved in establishing the BA practice.

Complex project management (CPM) dominates the project management environment that has emerged over the past 20 years. The days of traditional projects, where the goal and its solution were completely and clearly defined at the outset, are history. They have been replaced by projects whose goal may be clearly specified but whose attainment (the solution) is not known.

The effort to make enterprise architecture (EA) more agile is a broad topic. On one hand, there is the successful agile development movement that has influenced and improved system development and project-delivery processes.

As a business leader you are probably just starting to contend with social networks in your business and often find them to be of questionable value. The "social enterprise" is being touted as the next big thing: the new way to do business and a "social" way to do business. But the next big thing in collaboration is crowds, not the social enterprise.

Enterprise architecture has moved away from a purely IT role and is increasingly involved in business architecture and strategy planning. This is particularly evident in the rapid adoption of capability-based analysis.

This is a positive change. Enterprise architecture -- as the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure -- has become more widely recognized as the embodiment of strategy.

Whether you lead IS departments, manage IT projects, provide information and services to internal and external clients, develop software, or procure hardware, there's never enough time to get all the work done. To be a successful IT leader, you must develop time management skills to set priorities, optimize workflows, manage urgent needs and interruptions, and set an example for others in your organization.

Over the last decade, we've been engaged in an enthusiastic and far-ranging exploration of various kinds of openness. We've explored open data standards and open application platforms as well as the concept of open innovation in which we seek to leverage both the intellectual property and exploitive capability of external individuals and organizations.

Agile methods provide a very efficient way to develop software, but in the rush to experience the virtues of this effective development method, an important question is left unanswered: Does efficient software development (read "agile") necessarily bring a real advantage to the owner of that software? In the accompanying Executive Report, we explore this question.

Improving the effectiveness of resource allocation decisions for cyber security is an extremely important issue, especially since resources are constrained and organizations would like to have the best security they can for their budgets. The accompanying Executive Report discusses several relevant issues to such decisions.

In just over 20 years, the IT outsourcing (ITO) and business process outsourcing (BPO) markets have grown to exceed US $420 billion in annual revenues globally. In that time, research studies have shown growing success where limited outsourcing objectives on cost and service have been pursued. However, the record on innovation, cost-plus innovation, and strategic advantage from outsourcing has been more disappointing.

The processes for developing strategic plans are well known. There are several approaches and variations, and many books are written on the topic. But once the strategic plan is in place, the process of maintaining alignment of the project portfolio to the strategic plan remains a challenge for most organizations.

Agile and lean methods are a means to an end, and that end is increased capability and productivity for your teams and organizations. This leads directly to cost savings and revenue. All too often, however, adoption and transformation initiatives fail to bring such results.

A decade after the infamous corporate disasters of the 1990s, the business world is facing another financial crisis. The source this time stems from a combination of lax government regulation and the behavior of numerous financial institutions that bought and sold financial instruments they knew little about, never examined, or knew to be defective.

For many large organizations in both the private and public sectors, delivering usable BI applications is growing simultaneously more important and more difficult.

Many companies are considering or have undertaken a strategic business architecture (BA) initiative. During the past several years, interest in this newly realized architecture of the business has sparked interest and gained momentum.

Given the potential impact of great IT or bad IT, why isn't the business community more tightly integrated with the delivery of IT services? Conversely, given the game-changing role that technology now plays within business, why aren't IT executives more proactive in tailoring their services to those business demands?

Given the potential impact of great IT or bad IT, why isn't the business community more tightly integrated with the delivery of IT services?

At the consumer and small business end of the market, customers are flocking to the public cloud due to bargain prices for a plethora of IT services, ranging from simple file backup to sophisticated ERP systems.

The accompanying Executive Report describes an approach that uses enterprise architecture (EA) for compliance with business governance requirements such as the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX).

The accompanying Executive Report addresses the alignment of enterprise architecture (EA), strategy, and portfolio management.

The accompanying Executive Report describes an approach that uses enterprise architecture (EA) for compliance with business governance require

At the consumer and small business end of the market, customers are flocking to the public cloud due to bargain prices for a plethora of IT services, ranging from simple file back