APOLOGIZE, v.i. To lay the foundation for a future offence.

-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Ah, another day, another data breach; another insincere apology most probably written by a corporate lawyer.

Outsourcing is inevitable. In X years, all companies will be outsourced, primarily to SaaS applications. The only question is, "What is X?" And this isn't a conclusion I have come to lightly. Nor is it the position of an outsourcing zealot. In fact, I have some deep concerns about what might happen to companies in this "brave new world."

Consider some well-known examples of user interfaces, varying from extremely simple to extremely complicated.1 At one end of this spectrum we have the Google search engine, which initially captured our attention not only because its "secret sauce" -- the page-ranking algorithm -- gave better results, but also because the search page was so extremely simple: the Google logo, a search box, a s

Google's introduction of the Chromebook has serious implications for cloud computing and IT -- and threatens to shake up enterprise computing. Google is hoping that companies will find Chromebook's reduced maintenance and lower cost of ownership too good to resist. But Google does not expect companies to embrace Chromebook overnight.

There are many ways people interact with e-government applications. Some people work for the government and others work for companies that supply solutions to this very large and interesting market. However, most people interact with e-government applications as end users.

Cloud services can supplant or supplement traditional outsourcing, and it is easy to enter into these arrangements without considering the impact sufficiently or to treat them in the same manner as conventional outsourcing. Agreements are one mouse click away, but there can be unforeseen repercussions, depending on the specific services used.

We first started hearing about streaming analytics (especially by IBM) back in 2009.

Outsourcing firms tend to market themselves as partners in innovation, and firms consider adopting an outsourcing strategy as a way to attain competitive edge. While outsourcing is a promising approach, it can also be a risky endeavor, as it may deter the firm's inherent ability to bring innovative products to market.

A participant in a recent technical debt workshop was quite anxious to determine the best indicator for quality (or lack thereof) of code. Specifically, the participant inquired whether technical debt analysis is more insightful than bug tracking, or is it the opposite way around?

In my last Trends Advisor ("Learning from Disaster -- Again," 28 April 2011), I talked about disaster planning and how the recent earthquake had reawakened our thinking about the unthinkable.

Tyler Cowan, an economics professor at George Mason University, came out with an interesting little electronic book (US $3.99 -- it's more of a long essay than a book) earlier this year entitled The Great Stagnation (Dutton Adult, 2011).

In my last Advisor, I discussed the characteristics that you should expect from an enterprise application architecture (see "Are You Ready for New Media?" 27 April 2011). This week, I'll explore two fundamental concepts of the application architecture: layers and tiers.

First, it is important to know that the Adaptive Project Framework (APF) is not a methodology. If you are like a cook and need a recipe in order to manage your project, APF is not for you because it doesn't contain any recipes.

According to our research, interest in using predictive analytics by end-user organizations is very high. More than half of organizations say they consider predictive analytics strategically important. Yet use of the technology, although increasing, is still fairly limited. So what are the biggest issues standing in these organizations' way? Cost? Although always an issue, it is by no means the biggest.

Many of the discussions I am exposed to as an agile consultant are about this question, "Have Agile methods crossed the chasm?" The client wants to know whether he or she will be using a software method that has reached a certain level of maturity and acceptance. Needless to say, the question is of critical importance.

"We don't pay people to sleep."

Let's face it. We are at the end of Moore's Law. The common version of this law says computing power doubles every 18 to 24 months. Advances in silicon engineering have made this possible. But this natural law of silicon is driven by the fundamentals of materials science and the laws of physics.

Let's face it. We are at the end of Moore's Law. The common version of this law says computing power doubles every 18 to 24 months. Advances in silicon engineering have made this possible. But this natural law of silicon is driven by the fundamentals of materials science and the laws of physics. Unless we find a way to change the gravitational constant of the universe or surpass the speed of light, we are likely to face another four decades of computing unlike the past four decades.

Businesses are faced with ever-increasing complexity, competition, and cost pressures. Vendors espouse new products and "silver bullet" solutions, but more often than not, they fall short of expectations, and worse, add to the complexity of IT challenges. Yet there is hope for getting a handle on this complexity and finally addressing the challenge of business/IT alignment. The approach is not based on a new product or technology but on an architectural foundation that brings the complexity of IT into focus from a business perspective.

Everyone is talking about big changes in IT. They are indeed big -- bigger, in fact, than the ones we discussed before the dot-com bubble exploded. What are you going to do about them? Here are five areas that require your immediate attention:

Devices

Software

Social media

Cloud

Businesses are faced with ever-increasing complexity, competition, and cost pressures. Vendors espouse new products and "silver bullet" solutions, but more often than not, they fall short of expectations, and worse, add to the complexity of IT challenges. Yet there is hope for getting a handle on this complexity and finally addressing the challenge of business/IT alignment. The approach is not based on a new product or technology but on an architectural foundation that brings the complexity of IT into focus from a business perspective.

The "smart" phone is becoming more dangerous to information than the PC. Can we learn from the past to secure the mobile workforce and stop a global mobile-security meltdown?

IT folks have always been worried about mobile device security, but the fear was a little vague. Were phones really that dangerous? Would phone viruses become a reality or just a lab experiment? Now our fears are crystallizing into a real vision.

Despite the hype, despite the maturity of some vendors and their offerings, the cloud/software as a service (SaaS) world is still in its infancy. There are mature offerings, but there are also immature offerings.

Last June,1 I wrote that traditional enterprises are interested in taking advantage of the Internet-scale "big data" processing capabilities offered by MapReduce2 and open source derivative Hadoop,3 which are used primarily by such Internet-based companies as Google, Facebook, and Yahoo!

The most important way to reduce risk in innovation is to establish efficient innovation processes and consider risks versus benefits at each stage of development for new ideas. General practices that can help to build efficiency and reduce tendencies toward a risky "all or nothing" approach include: