Memo to Self: Do not start on a long trip in a new rental car whose whiz bang user interface is unfamiliar to you.

Memo to Microsoft and Ford: Do a much better job on the next generation of user interfaces for your cars!

It's been a challenging year, both politically and economically. It's also been interesting to watch the reactions.

Technical paralysis sets in when it becomes impossible for an organization's information systems to be modified in a timely manner to respond to business, technical, or legal changes. Let me give you a couple examples from my own recent experience.

Events move along quickly today, partly due to the onrush of new technology, but also due to the economic and market upheavals of recent years. New risks are emerging in every sector, from missed opportunity to IT security threats, economic hazards, and natural disasters. Companies need to develop the capacity to recover from serious threats and the agility to respond quickly.

There have been an increasing number of references made recently to the concept of analyzing information emanating from social media sites to gauge consumer sentiment and using these findings to perform rea

If you're doing agile consulting, you may meet two different types of clients: the chaotic client, where your major challenge is to introduce at least some discipline into the development work, and the disciplined organizations that welcome you with their process handbook and ask you "to help us write the chapter on agil

The causes of corporate death that are most often heard at the coroner's inquest fall into two major categories: death caused by a weak/inappropriate strategy or death caused by operational ill-execution.

The causes of corporate death that are most often heard at the coroner's inquest fall into two major categories: death caused by a weak/inappropriate strategy or death caused by operational ill-execution.

Recently, I was reading yet another article on the impact of CAD/CAM 3D printing on the engineering and manufacturing of sophisticated parts and products. Increasingly, organizations are looking at the idea of engineering-to-order (ETO) as a means of capturing the demand for more and more sophisticated products.

Strategic IT planning is central to establishing the IT vision and, more importantly, the vision of how IT will propel the business (or government agency) forward.

All the talk in the press lately about the US national debt (and the political system's inability to deal with it) got me thinking about another kind of debt near and dear to an architect.

We as a nation -- and each CEO as the individual custodian of a business enterprise -- are going to have to rethink how we define "secure." On most planets there is no way anybody would consider him or herself safe if the average evil-doer could penetrate a defense simply by walking around it. Nevertheless, that is precisely the situation when it comes to cybersecurity.

We as a nation -- and each CEO as the individual custodian of a business enterprise -- are going to have to rethink how we define "secure." On most planets there is no way anybody would consider him or herself safe if the average evil-doer could penetrate a defense simply by walking around it. Nevertheless, that is precisely the situation when it comes to cybersecurity.

The move to the cloud, SaaS applications, and even infrastructure is changing corporate IT. Much of the transactional work will be gone forever. There are impacts on the nature and the size of IT staffing. The walls of the enterprise have been breached, and new offerings may level them totally, spreading the net of providers well outside the boundaries of the traditional enterprise.

The consumerization of enterprise software encompasses the adaptation and use of consumer-oriented software, devices, and marketing and delivery practices to support corporate business users.

Software configuration management (SCM) and build management are misunderstood disciplines. Many organizations have practices in these areas that either hinder productivity or sacrifice too much traceability in the name of improving short-term productivity. SCM and build, when done correctly, can provide a framework that allows a team to develop code quickly. However, it's also possible to establish practices that can hinder your development team.

Leaders of technology companies should take change management more seriously. While this is also true of changes to requirements, products, and other elements normally handled by change-control systems, here we're talking about the type of change management that's associated with organizational change.

China's transformation toward a technology powerhouse gives Western firms new opportunities for IT services sourcing. However, with it comes significant managerial challenges.

Business architecture not only provides a vision for aligning stakeholder value and customer experience across business units and product lines, but it also allows executives and portfolio managers to

The general thinking in the cloud provider community -- public or private -- has been to assume that anyone moving applications into the cloud is creating new servers and building new systems and applications, not migrating existing applications and systems.

Project managers (PMs) are used to working fairly solo. If you have a PMO of, say, 15 PMs, each of whom is running, on average, five projects, then that's 75 projects that may be going on at any given time in the organization. Are we going to involve senior management in every one of those 75 projects? No. Should we, as project managers, expect that our senior management wants to have intimate knowledge of the status of each of those 75 projects? No.

Project managers (PMs) are used to working fairly solo. If you have a PMO of, say, 15 PMs, each of whom is running, on average, five projects, then that's 75 projects that may be going on at any given time in the organization. Are we going to involve senior management in every one of those 75 projects? No. Should we, as project managers, expect that our senior management wants to have intimate knowledge of the status of each of those 75 projects? No.

Analyzing social media data in support of corporate BI practices is currently limited; however, it does appear that the practice is increasing. Moreover, interest among organizations in the possibility of analyzing social media data in the near future is quite strong.

Technical debt is not a new concept. The term itself was coined by Cutter Fellow Ward Cunningham more than 10 years ago. Certain components of technical debt, such as the Cyclomatic Complexity software metric, have been in use since 1976.

"I feel that people I trusted ... have let me down."