"There is no doubt that agile is much more suited for innovative companies than traditional waterfall methods are. But is agility the natural path to innovation?"
-- Jens Coldewey, Guest Editor
"There is no doubt that agile is much more suited for innovative companies than traditional waterfall methods are. But is agility the natural path to innovation?"
-- Jens Coldewey, Guest Editor
This month's CBR is particularly important because what we have on our hands may be shaping up as a big crisis that, to be successfully addressed, requires joint efforts from different communities that seldom interact. I am not going to use cheesy terms such as "a perfect storm," but what we can see is, on the one hand, dropping enrollments in computer science degrees and increasingly limited number of mainframe skills being developed in universities; while on the other hand, mainframes continue to run many of the large mission-critical software applications of modern organizations. On the "third hand" (or the underhand as the famous blues song goes) is the lack of awareness and planning for the impending mass retirement of the baby boomers who hold the great majority of mainframe skills and knowledge today.
BI is an area of great interest, one that deserves our attention and analysis. Therefore, for this issue, we tapped the expertise of two individuals with a few decades of combined expertise in the field. Our objective is to benchmark the state of BI and allow our authors to comment on the emergent lessons.
"All the technology in the world does not, by itself, constitute MDM. The technology has to be accompanied by a strong set of organizational rules, business rules, and well-defined data elements that can be universally understood by the user community."
-- Al Moreno and Greg Mancuso, Guest Editors
"Through collaboration, we can find how to deliver the right results for all stakeholders in the organization, for as the Japanese proverb says, `None of us is as smart as all of us.'"
-- Pollyanna Pixton, Guest Editor
Not another meeting! All that collaboration takes too much time. People need to stop talking and start building.