What should your "enterprise social media adoption roadmap" look like?

Consider this Advisor a very pragmatic recommendation to the software development manager/director/VP. I have a feeling that the opinion I express here might get me in hot water, but what would life be like without some risk?

I was recently asked by a client to evaluate a product in terms of scalability. The client had invested in a custom case management system that had 100 users and wanted to know whether the current architecture would support scaling to 3,000 users.

Security of information is a hot topic these days. That is probably because cyber crime has reached a level of popularity that far outstrips the drug trade in terms of ROI for everybody from old-fashioned Mafiosi types to any kid in the Ukraine with a computer. And given the fact that crime on the Internet is all about money, any CEO who does not take all of the steps necessary to secure their organization against cyber attacks is rolling the dice with their company's assets. At least that's what current doctrine would like you to believe.

First came the realization that the collective knowledge of an organization or, for that matter, the individual knowledge of its members, is not solely held in libraries of documents.

In the first installment of this Advisor series (Reflections on Innovation, Part I: An Idea, 29 September 2011), I suggested that you can conceive the idea of something -- its perfect,

Adopting agile as an operating methodology involves more than just operational change, it encompasses a mindset change.

Business process modeling lies at the core of all attempts to visualize and manage business processes.

Recently I had occasion to review software engineering position descriptions to try to understand what skills were sought after for entry-level software engineers. Much to my chagrin, I found that the top-level requirements, and for the most part the secondary requirements, made no mention of knowledge of how to develop secure software, how to avoid coding vulnerabilities, how to do threat modeling, and so on.

A recent experience with my ISP got me thinking a lot about the role social media can play in customer service and how companies looking for immediate payback may be missing the bigger picture when it comes to social media monitoring and analysis.

In the literary classic The Great Gatsby, Meyer Wolfsheim hints at some shady business "gonnegtions" (an intentional mispronunciation of "connections"), suggesting that there's money to be made if the protagonist is a fellow "businessman" (read: criminal). Over the past few weeks, we've seen the Occupy Wall Street movement

The "secret sauce" of agile productivity at the team level is that everyone does the most important thing at any point in time. Instead of following a rigid plan in which it takes months, and possibly years, to act on feedback, agile methods are geared toward immediacy of feedback and subsequent adaptation.

A few weeks back, I wrote an EA Advisor in which I suggested that IT architects and engineers ought to have differing roles: architects should deal with high-level design and engineers with the detail technology ("

Have you ever overloaded your dishwasher? You focus completely on getting every last dish, every last glass, and every last utensil loaded. Then you breathe a sigh of relief as you press start. An hour later, as the wash cycle completes, you return to find that the dishes, glasses, and utensils aren't really clean. Have you ever had three loads of laundry to do, but because of lack of time or lack of quarters, you forced it into two loads? What happens? The clothes just don't get clean.

We have to strip away the myths and misunderstandings about collaboration if we are going to find strategies to overcome them. And overcoming these obstacles to collaboration, while difficult, is very possible.

For several years now, so many pundits, experts, and concerned citizens of the IT world have prattled on about IT alignment with the business. So much so that whenever you hear any phrase that starts with “IT must be aligned with the business,” you already know what's coming next.

Yawn.

If your company is adopting agile methods for software development, you've probably been told you need ScrumMasters or agile coaches. But who should fill those roles? No matter the name, the essence of the role is to help teams learn new skills, continuously improve, and make the transition to a new way of working.

Architectural principles are a common part of most EA programs, but as with anything, some principles are better defined than others and some EA programs better understand the role of principles and how to use them.

Architectural principles are a common part of most EA programs, but as with anything, some principles are better defined than others and some EA programs better understand the role of principles and how to use them.

[From the Editor: This week's Advisor is from Dennis Adams's introduction to the October 2011 issue of Cutter IT Journal "Creative Destruction: How to Keep from Being Technologically Disrupted" (Vol. 24, No. 10).

For the majority of end-user organizations, analyzing unstructured data for BI and other decision-support needs is still a fairly new practice; it's of serious interest but, at this stage, primarily in the investigation and experimentation stages.

Around 2 pm on the 23rd of August, as I sat working at my desk in my basement office, I became mindful of an increasingly loud roar, followed by an eerie feeling that I had been teleported aboard a moving passenger train.

"What's after agile?" People have been asking that for a few years now.

A reader asked me about the state of cloud computing.

A recent Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey sponsored by Microsoft on cloud computing has highlighted the fact that lack of awareness of cloud computing benefits is a big hindrance to wider adoption.1 This is no surprise, as the technology is still maturing and many concerns about security, privacy, and reliability persist. Additionally, misconceptions such as thinking that cloud computing is just about provisioning infrastructure on demand may mask the possibilities the cloud can deliver.