I happened across a really interesting exhibit on industrial design at the San Francisco MOMA last week.

A recent survey conducted by Cutter Consortium helps shine some light on corporate spending trends for text mining and analysis as well as organizations' overall attitudes toward the importance of having the capability to analyze unstructured data.

Maybe I am getting old. Lately I have been reflecting on the debates regarding methodologies that this industry seems to have all the time, no matter the decade. Every generation of IT people seems to spontaneously generate a new, great methodology that will transform and replace all that came before. Oh yes!

One of the saddest patterns I've seen several times in my career is that of an agile island. The story usually goes along this route: a highly motivated middle manager finds herself in some difficult situation and decides that agile is the right way out of her turmoil.

For some time now, I've been looking for a word or a phrase or some way to distinguish among classes of architects.

The person who cuts my hair has a formal license on the mirror. The guy who fixes the pipes in my old house has a license, as does my doctor, my lawyer, and the guy who flies me around the country. Heck, even the kid next door has a driver's license. But the person who developed the architecture, wrote the code, and manages my IT operation is not only unlicensed, he or she has no formal proof whatsoever of competence beyond a college degree and some experience.

It's been a challenging year, both politically and economically. It's also been interesting to watch the reactions. As the job market has tanked, many have given up on the job hunt, turning their searches instead to themselves to explore new careers and new possibilities.1 As government belt-tightening has taken place, private firms are stepping in to fill the void that hitherto would have been handled by the government sector.

Web conferencing today is essentially what it was back in the mid-1990s.

For many companies, customer relationship management (CRM) can be summed up with a line that sounds like the ending of a bad science fiction movie: "If only that power could be harnessed for good."

Traditional contracts for outsourced software development focus on the desired requirements and the time and price it will take to deliver these requirements. The aims of traditional contracts are to create a predictable delivery cost and to shift the risk of cost overruns to the contracting party.

The Web has changed how we gather information, do our work, buy goods and services, connect with our friends and family, spend our leisure time, and even find a partner or lost friend. It has also transformed the business landscape by changing how organizations conduct their business, connect with their customers and suppliers, and collaborate.

As business and technology leaders, we may occasionally be tempted to pine for the days of old when the pace of life and business was slower and when change management had more to do with the coins in our pocket than ongoing transformational change. We may long for the time before we hopped on the technology bullet train that seems to be stretching our businesses vertically and horizontally daily. Those days, of course, are gone forever.

Despite all the great methodologies we have in IT, delivering a project to production still feels like going to war. Developers are nervous because they have the pressure of delivering new functionality to the customer as fast as possible.

According to our latest survey,1 the primary domains in which organizations use, or plan to use, text mining and analysis tools and applications fall under the three principle areas of CRM: sales, marketing, and customer service.

"I'm breathing. Are you breathing, too? It's nice, isn't it? It isn't difficult to keep alive, friends -- just don't make trouble -- or if you must make trouble, make the sort of trouble that's expected.

Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are not just social networks or simple services for sending short messages, but rather complex platforms for multiuse of the Internet and creation of innovative models of business development. Social media has already become good business for its creators; it now offers big opportunities for companies and businesses to attract customers and increase profits. Amid the evolution of business technologies and practices, maximum closeness to the customer should be considered one of the recipes for business success.

Many companies are hard-pressed to see any benefit from social media activity in which their employees engage during regular work hours.

Business architecture provides a basis for transforming how business communicates and collaborates to achieve its goals across business units and product lines.

Although Jobs is certainly involved in design, SVP of Design Jonathan Ive leads the actual design of Apple products.

On 17 July 2011, the Boston Globe reported on the predicament of a driver seemingly "caught in a dragnet."1 John Gass's Massachusetts driver's license had been revoked; "An antiterrorism computerized facial recognition system that scans a database of millions of state driver's license images had picked his as a possible fraud ...

Deciding what, and what not, to outsource puts firms at risk of becoming less innovative by outsourcing activities that should not have been. This is one of the seven deadly sins of outsourcing.1

Firms need to be able to quickly anticipate and exploit opportunities that arise in the market, while at the same time resisting the urge to put all their eggs in the same basket. This is a frustrating issue -- one that can possibly be illustrated best by Nokia's example.

The latest big acquisition to affect the enterprise software and BI and data warehousing (DW) markets is HP's announcement that it will acquire KM/enterprise search and unstructured data analytics

The commercial Web has a curious history when it comes to intermediaries. In the early days of Web commerce, the idea that the intermediary was dead quickly gained mindshare.

Agile 2011 is a community of peers. Some of those peers are new to the agile community, which is why we just shake hands when we greet each other. Some of them I’ve known for years.