The practice of accomplishing tasks through collaboration and of solving problems through aggregating knowledge is as old as humanity.

A customer-centric business is an approach to business operations for sustainable profitability through customer loyalty due to the actions of an empowered workforce. In addition to business benefits, a customer-centric approach provides an overall framework for the design, development, operation, and management of IT. This Executive Report by Keith Sherringham and Bhuvan Unhelkar addresses the implementation and operation of a customer-centric business for aligning business and IT.

In the complex project world (aka agile and extreme), there are some basic tenets that seem to buck traditional project management (TPM) thinking about how to manage complex projects or at least offer a fresh approach to successfully managing and completing such projects.

In recent years, both the enterprise risk environment and enterprise security measures have evolved considerably. Risk is now being brought into the fold of a unifying concept -- enterprise risk management (ERM), which attempts to consolidate heretofore siloed risk management efforts within a single, centralized structure.

The accompanying Executive Report examines the future of business with respect to collaboration, which through information and communications technologies (ICT) results in a flattening of the organizational structure.

Mobile BI is hardly new. As long ago as 2001, a number of BI vendors introduced software and services that allowed users of BlackBerrys, PDAs, and other mobile devices to generate, view, and drill down on reports based on corporate data.

Debt, especially financial debt, is a familiar concept. The longer a monetary debt is left unpaid, the more interest accrues. Eventually bankruptcy may be declared. Similarly, in software development, every time something is executed incorrectly, it may be thought of as technical debt.

The idea of managing demand has gained much traction in recent years, especially with demand for resources outstripping the available budgets. Increasingly this squeeze is now affecting the relationship between IT and the business. Any successful business model must be built on effective management of demand as well as supply. Yet demand management seems to be deficient or absent in many organizations.

The accompanying Executive Report presents a vital aspect of knowledge management (KM) in organizations: bridging the gap between the tacit, subjective knowledge stored in people's heads and the explicit, objective knowledge stored within the organization's IT systems.

A common aphorism suggests that "good project managers always get projects done on time and on budget." This is simplistic and propagates a destructive and dangerous misconception. Imagine a project manager working on a project that is likely to complete on time and on budget.

Although offshoring has existed in a variety of forms for decades, its controversy continues unabated. The debate includes whether offshoring actually saves money or not, what activities are and are not good candidates for offshoring, and most controversial of all, its effect on employment in the consuming countries.

In his powerful manifesto The Future of Management, Gary Hamel argues that a disruptive change in culture and management practice is required for many organizations to survive in the new global environment. Agile business is the key to successfully executing this change.

The global financial crisis, the Iceland volcanic ash events, and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico have alerted us once again to the nature of risk, including both the opportunities and the potential impacts it can have on the business. In response to the demands of the modern dynamic business world and to general uncertainty in a global environment, businesses are seeking to formalize a risk-based approach to business (also called enterprise risk management -- ERM) because of the importance of risk to profit and cash flow.

Companies don't set out to alienate their customers. That's often just how it works out. Many interactions leave the consumer feeling dissatisfied, sometimes even downright hostile. All too frequently, technology plays a role in these customer service disasters.

Enterprise architecture (EA) is grossly misunderstood. It's not an IT issue; it's an enterprise issue for the following reasons:

Architecture for anything is the total set of descriptive representations relevant for describing a complex object such that it can be created and constitutes a baseline for changing the object once it has been instantiated.1

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If you hear the words "social media" and think Facebook and Twitter, then you have some idea what it is.

Recent years have shown a range of vital changes to core IT concepts, resulting in evolutionary developments from cloud computing to enterprise risk management. In particular, in the area of software development and deployment, agile development methodologies and service-oriented architecture (SOA) have seen wide-scale implementation in response to the need to embrace rapid change to business conditions.

Social media is everywhere, all the time. It's about participation -- by everyone. It's also fueled by consumerization, where technology innovation and adoption are driven by requirements and preferences that originate with consumers (and consumer vendors) rather than cubicle-constrained professionals and their corporate technology providers.

The accompanying Executive Report explores the collaborative relationship that can and should exist between a project manager (PM) and a business analyst (BA).

Change is a fact of life. While change can have many benefits, it is hardly ever easy and often brings huge stress to an organization. Many people fear change and prefer to stay in a situation that feels familiar and comfortable. Since all change also alters the dynamics within an organization, it can evoke anxiety and stress and stir conflict.

In the accompanying Executive Report, we consider the pressures on organizations to master the art of change and present a fractal metaphor for the tandem role of strategy and architecture. This metaphor derives from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos's observation that strategy happens fractally at Amazon -- set at different scales throughout the business. Strategy is a mechanism for business leaders to create coherence of purpose and identity among organizational elements and to create cross-organizational synergies.

After decades of attempting to reach end users, business intelligence (BI) vendors and user organizations need to rethink what the intelligence is for, who it is for, and how to best serve that end user.

Agile development and cloud computing represent two recent evolutionary trends that have become important components of the emerging IT environment. Both represent responses to similar pressures that have resulted in what might be termed a "tectonic shift" in technology, and both signify the current phase of an extended revolution. The fact that they should fit so easily together, then, should be viewed with little surprise.

Working in technologically and organizationally complex, globalizing environments, modern middle managers (MMs) are now found to be the glue that holds organizations together. 1 Senior managers will make the agenda-setting decisions that determine an organization's course, but MMs have considerable influence on the long road to implementation. They make day-to-day choices and key tradeoffs that escape top management's attention, know-how, and interest yet are central to performance.