No matter how disciplined a company is about its IT governance, the average enterprise has many years of legacy applications in its portfolio that need to be rationalized.

No matter how disciplined a company is about its IT governance, the average enterprise has many years of legacy applications in its portfolio that need to be rationalized.

Back in 2010, in a report on mobile BI (see BI Unwired: The Case for Mobile, Vol. 10, No. 9), I commented on a mobile BI application in use at that time at global nutrition company Herbalife.

We have all witnessed profound implications and disruptive shifts during the past decades when the power of emergence is unleashed because of leveling.

I haven't the slightest idea how to change people,but I still keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out. -- David Sedaris, American writer (1956-)

One of the topics in technology news these days is Big Data. So that raises a few questions. First, what do we mean by Big Data? And then, more pertinent to this Advisor, what are the architectural issues with which we should be concerned?

Readers are probably familiar with the concept of a body of knowledge (BOK).

One of the topics in technology news these days is Big Data. So that raises a few questions. First, what do we mean by Big Data?

I'm currently working with a medium-sized organization confronting collaboration problems. How do we unleash our true collaborative power? It's not an academic question. We are in a hypercompetitive industry with new competition hitting us from every direction.

It still amazes me how many enterprise data warehousing/business intelligence (DW/BI) projects struggle, often to the point of paralysis, with the "Inmon/Kimball" debate. This impasse revolves around whether a DW/BI program should insist upon routing all information through a complex, third normal form (3NF) data layer o

I would like to follow up on a story mentioned in my previous Advisor ("Who Watches for the Watchers When the Watchers Don't Watch?" 12 January 2012).

It is often attractive to executives to seek and apply so-called best practices when looking for ways to improve their performance. Despite purported track records of such practices as promoted by well-meaning expert thinkers, there lay hidden pitfalls that entrap many ope

In technology architecture, it's easy to spot a wrong solution but almost impossible to design the perfect system. The primary reason for this ever-changing nature of the solution is its evolution toward staying relevant to the changing business use case.

The general literature on leadership is very confusing. There are over 250 different definitions of leadership in the literature! Many of these definitions are not operational in that they don't provide guides to action. What specifically does a leader do? There is confusion over how leadership contrasts with the words "management" and "authority." Educational institutions like the Harvard Business School say their mission is to train leaders, but every professor has his or her own definition of leadership.

I started to see this trend play out last year, and this year I expect it to be more popular based on the advice I have been giving some of my vendor clients.

Agile adoption for data warehouse and BI is on the rise. Agile can shorten development cycle time, improve quality, and help ensure that you build the right BI solutions for business decision makers. However, conventional IT organizational structures, policies, processes, and procedures are sometimes inconsistent with the tenets of agility. Values like customer collaboration, face-to-face interaction, and continuous delivery of value are often impeded by IT organizational protocols.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Susan Cain titled, "The Rise of the New Groupthink."1 It was a controversial article, and she took her lumps the next day in the "Letters" section. In the online comments, folks were more in agreement.

[From the Editor: This week's Advisor is from Vince Kellen's introduction to the January 2012 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Hot IT Trends 2012" (Vol. 25, No. 1).

Agile adoption for data warehouse and BI is on the rise. Agile can shorten development cycle time, improve quality, and help ensure that you build the right BI solutions for business decision makers.

Management guru Peter Drucker is famous for saying "You can't manage what you can't measure." From a different perspective and equally guru-like, W.

An important development bound to positively impact the use of the open source Apache Hadoop technology in the traditional enterprise is the introduction of packaged Big Data appliances from the enterprise hardware and software vendors. These offerings -- from Oracle, EMC Greenplum, Dell, and NetApp -- bundle Hadoop distributions along with database, storage connectors, and other software for integrating Hadoop applications with various data sources and into an organization's data center.

An important development bound to positively impact the use of the open source Apache Hadoop technology in the traditional enterprise is the introduction of packaged Big Data appliances from the enterprise hardware and software vendors.

Those of you have been following my Trends and Enterprise Architecture Advisors will recognize that I have become increasingly concerned about software reliability and security and the role that design and complexity play in these areas.

Agile development has revolutionized the way systems are developed from a waterfall or phased-based approach to an iterative-based approach that continuously reexamines development progress, current priorities, and sufficiency of solution.

Mobility is one of the top priorities for organizations in 2012. When it comes to utilizing mobile devices in the enterprise, organizations basically have two options for supporting employees with smartphones and tablets.