Advisors provide a continuous flow of information on the topics covered by each practice, including consultant insights and reports from the front lines, analyses of trends, and breaking new ideas. Advisors are delivered directly to your email inbox, and are also available in the resource library.
Are *You* Ready for a Good Project Manager?
Best Buy: Its Turn in the Competitive Enterprise Risk Barrel
ISO 14000: It's All in the Green Family
Giving BA a Professional Frame of Reference
Whether it is the collapse of a particular bank or the global financial crisis, weakness in critical thinking and inadequate strategic analysis in decision making appear to make significant negative contributions. Business analysis (BA) offers an answer by sharpening the capabilities of critical thinking and analytical decision making.
Cloud Computing: Not Just Servers, Storage, and Apps
Cost of Delay Strategies in the Presence of Technical Debt
In his book The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development, Donald Reinertsen formulates the principle of quantified cost of delay as follows:
Reframing Software O&M Yields Greater Business Performance
It's widely understood that most of the life of any product ever fielded is spent in production. Specifically, despite the time and costs of initial development and installation, most of the time invested in the life of a product is during the postinstallation phase, commonly called "operations and maintenance" (O&M).
Characteristics of Collaborative-Agile Business
Whether it is the collapse of a particular bank or the global financial crisis, weakness in critical thinking and inadequate strategic analysis in decision making appear to make significant negative contributions to corporate collapses. Business analysis (BA) offers an answer by sharpening the capabilities of critical thinking and analytical decision making.
How to Help Them to Help You to Help Them
Building on the November 2010 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "E-Government: Embracing the Challenges and Opportunities" (Vol. 23, No. 11), this Advisor further explores how local governments and citizens may use IT to better communicate and collaborate. While the focus here is on IT use by municipalities, these concepts translate into the worlds of business (with customers), nonprofits (with clients), and other domains.
How Smart Is Watson, and What Is Its Significance to BI and DSS?
Like many folks, I've become fascinated watching IBM's Watson playing the TV quiz show Jeopardy! As a result, I've been examining everything I can about it. In a nutshell, Watson is a pretty amazing system, and it's got me thinking just how smart it is and about what its significance may be when it comes to BI and decision support and corporate computing in general.
V is for Victory -- and Visualization
In my last Advisor (" 'Click here to Learn This One Crazy Secret...'," 27 January 2011), I dropped the "V" word, "visualization," and it probably hit you like a sack of feathers unloaded from 100 feet in the air.
Devops: The IT Version of Think Globally, Act Locally
Seven Key Steps: Defending Your Decisions, Part II
In my previous Advisor ("When It's Snow Go: Defending Your Decisions, Part I," 10 February 2011), I told the sad tale of the massive traffic jam that a snowstorm caused in the Washington, DC, area in late January.
Mobile Opportunities at the Edge of the Enterprise
Discussions of mobile computing are generally focused on smartphones and consumer capabilities. In the US, smartphones had about 17% market penetration at the end of 2009, but this is growing at about 35% year on year.1 Most businesses have yet to take advantage of these capabilities internally. Having a mobile strategy is a critical component of an organization's technology plan.
V is for Victory -- and Visualization
In my last Advisor (" 'Click here to Learn This One Crazy Secret...'," 27 January 2011), I dropped the "V" word, "visualization," and it probably hit you like a sack of feathers unloaded from 100 feet in the air. What is it about visualization that makes it such an important topic that we choose to take up your time with it ... again?
Moving from "Nice-to-Haves" to Priorities
Your Web site is a mess. The social media initiative that you so desperately wanted to get going never got off the ground. You're not tweeting. You're not on Facebook, and you're not seen as a thought leader in the IT community. These were all priorities once, but now they've all fallen by the wayside. Why? Because other priorities came to the fore.
Developing a Useful Direction for Cloud Computing
How to Avoid Stupidity: First, Acknowledge It
When all's said and done, getting anything right depends on the people in our lives: smart people, stupid people, and nasty people, among other descriptors we might use. Worse, all these people exist in the insane asylums we call teams, organizations, and corporations. But tell me how many organizations are sane and improve the mental health of the inmates?
Cannibalization in Expanding IT Product Portfolios
In today's ever-changing business environment, IT service providers need to implement an effective strategy and business model to tackle the problem of cannibalization within their portfolio of business software. The cloud supply chain illustrates the link between the provisions of business software through the cloud. Game-changing technology, such as cloud computing and resulting portfolio changes within the IT industry, determines daily life within business.