As we all know, Abraham Lincoln was largely self-taught in the midst of meager means and living on the frontiers in the US states of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois -- far from centers of learning and culture east of the Appalachian Mountains. For Lincoln, the book represented the path, and he sought them with great effort.

A process, in my honest opinion, is the product of its era. It reflects the needs, the constraints, and the predicaments of its time. As those change, the process needs to evolve in tandem. If it does not, it is likely to become obsolete.

Many of my long-time readers might remember that I live out in the woods in the US state of New Hampshire. Just recently, my 20-year-old garden tractor began to die. In looking at a replacement, I started to go over the options.

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant Mitchell Ummel's introduction to the August 2012 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Cloud Computing Standards" (Vol. 25, No. 8).

Back in January, when discussing trends for predictive analytics in 2012, I predicted that some of the issues holding organizations back from realizing their predictive analytics dreams would be offset by new options for implementation (see "The Year Ahead: Will 2012 Be a Breakout Year for Predictive Analyt

There's a critical moment in enterprise governance that ties to when we start taking decisive executive action. I like to think of it as the "lifeboat" moment. It's when we determine that the challenges we face are too great to overcome and that we need to start salvaging what we can before the entire organizational "ship" goes under.

I'm conflicted about this topic, so it's a good thing Cutter promotes debate. I'm having one with myself, and you can watch.

The 2012 Summer Olympics, officially "The Games of the XXX Olympiad" (I don't want the IOC branding police after me), have finally concluded, but the buzz about NBC's coverage in the US still goes on.

Back in late November 2009, I was conducting a group coaching session and the topic was how to keep staff motivated when, because the economy was so bad, the participants were unable to provide an elaborate party, gifts, or bonuses by end of year. After much brainstorming and discussion, one of the things that everyone agreed to do was to hand-write a thank you note to each of their direct reports.

Mobility is becoming increasingly important to business as the BYOD movement brings powerful tablets and smartphones to the enterprise. Mobile business intelligence has proven popular in recent years, principally by offering a means for busy executives and salespeople on-the-go to carry with them instant access to important indicators. Mobile BI capable of reaching back to analytics on the corporate server or in the cloud could be served up from dedicated apps on mobile platforms or accessed through mobile-friendly webpages.

Mobility is becoming increasingly important to business as the BYOD movement brings powerful tablets and smartphones to the enterprise. Mobile business intelligence has proven popular in recent years, principally by offering a means for busy executives and salespeople on-the-go to carry with them instant access to important indicators.

Do you want to lead an organization that's nimble and flexible so it thrives under conditions of change, complexity, and uncertainty? Of course you do. So first you'll want to distinguish change as a noun from change as a verb (stay with me here, you'll get value from this, I promise).

For more than a century, the business world has been conducting a huge, uncontrolled experiment in motivating people. In parallel, the world of academia has been scientifically researching the same subject.

Consumerization is the trend for new technologies to first emerge in the consumer space and subsequently make their way into the enterprise world. As enterprise users start comparing the quality of the user experience with consumer applications versus their enterprise counterparts, the demand for better enterprise applications will continue to soar. When designing and architecting new business applications, enterprises need to keep the following considerations in mind:

Everything in life is a game. Someone is always keeping score. We're all being measured, whether we like it or not. Gamification is a technique that business leaders need to become familiar with in order to take advantage of this fact, since it takes measurement, behavior analysis, and engagement into the business setting in ways that can enable organizations to meet their objectives.

I've been reading a lot of articles lately about investors and analysts having lost faith in social media companies, particularly Facebook. Now, I readily admit that Facebook has made mistakes -- especially its hugely stock-deflating IPO debacle.

You may not like what you are about to read. Most senior executives are steeped in a way of thinking that was already obsolete when you learned it. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it is. More on how it happened below, but first....

Dear Agilist,

Everywhere I go I hear the same thing: "Culture and management are the major impediments to enterprise agile adoption."

If you're trying to start an EA group, immediately after you've discussed what the EA organization is going to do with your boss, the discussion immediately turns to people: What kind of skills should they have?

Just a couple of years ago, we were witnessing -- and some of us were deploring -- the "irrational exuberance" as well as the uncontrolled fears of many customers and decision makers about cloud computing.

Business intelligence does not refer to a product you can buy or to an application you can build. Instead, it is a new way of delivering and managing the decision support function in an organization.

We back our qualitative work as Cutter consultants with plenty of quantitative data. We measure and report on productivity through the Productivity Index.

The late management theorist Peter Drucker once said that everyone in an organization has to ask him or herself, "What information do I need to do my job? How am I going to get it, and from whom? And how do I know that it is true?" Furthermore, each person must also ask, "What information am I responsible for?

We back our qualitative work as Cutter consultants with plenty of quantitative data. We measure and report on productivity through the Productivity Index.

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