Excellence is an old topic, more honored in a book than observed in the workplace. Nonetheless, it is an important topic because of some almost unbearable forces that are shearing the workplace.

Software development has been full of fast-paced advancements, with a focus on increasing efficiency and reducing cost/efforts for stakeholders. Applying these changes forms a crucial part of the reusability concern that has been at the forefront of new business initiatives or development. Reuse has been central to many of the development models as have such tenets as "don't reinvent the wheel" and "don't repeat yourself."

Risk management is a formal process owned by senior executives responsible for keeping everyone safe and sound day and night. They report to internal and external audit committees or, actually, prefer to avoid any and all interaction with audit folks since even a casual discussion with auditors can result in a boatload of work for entire teams of already overworked professionals.

There is growing apprehension among business leaders, economists, and ordinary Americans that we are witnessing what may well be the largest outmigration of nonmanufacturing jobs in the history of the US economy.

-- Askok Bardhan and Cynthia Kroll

A Cutter Consortium survey conducted in February/March 2011 of 60 end-user organizations based worldwide1 helps provide some insight into corporate BI and data warehousing spending trends.

Enterprise agility can be defined as "a time measure between two significant changes in the environment and the time it takes for an organization to respond to that change."1 An agile enterprise is capable of responding quickly and effectively to a change in the environment.

The subject of the September 2010 issue of the Cutter Benchmark Review (CBR) was Kanban adoption (see "Kanban for Project Management: Should We Buy In?" Vol. 10, No. 9).

Deciding the priority and funding for major IT initiatives, such as developing a new system or supporting a new technology, are among the most important functions of the IT governance process.

For years, there has been a constant complaint in the project management community: the chief grief is that project managers "All this responsibility, and no authority." That's not exclusive to project management, either.

I attended a users' conference last week for an enterprise architecture tool. Keeping with Cutter's vendor-neutrality policy, I won't go into detail about the product, but I do want to report on my overall impressions and answer some of the common questions that I heard there.

No one will argue the fact that the overall responsibility for managing a project falls to the project manager. By definition, that is true. By job description, that is true. All project managers understand, or should understand, that the target is on them when they accepted the role, and it simply can't be passed along to someone else.

Last month, I discussed some of the factors influencing the growing adoption of data mining and predictive analytics (see "The Slow, Steady Climb for Data Mining, Predictive Analytics," 1 February 2011).

I have what some people call a "Man Van." It has 4WD, alloy wheels, big ice-grip snow tires, tinted glass, and a 200-watt stereo. David E. Davis, past editor of Automobile Magazine, once wrote that his Man Van was his favorite car, even compared to his Ferrari and Dodge Viper.

Back in the 1960s, then-Prime Minister of England Harold Macmillan was supposedly asked by a journalist what might blow his government's policies off course: "Events, dear boy, events," was his response.

Today we have no shortage of people opining away at the cause-and-effect relationships between educational inputs (schools, teachers, pedagogy) and outputs (student knowledge and success) with nowhere near a sufficient understanding of how the human brain actually works.

Agile software development and agile project management have shown considerable success in helping organizations develop better software and better manage development projects in the face of changing requirements and evolving technologies. In one sense, agile is about managing rapidly changing project factors and requirements.

I was speaking with some fellow CIOs and other business leaders recently about their sources of competitive advantage. A few were not able to articulate clearly from whence sprang their source of sustainable advantage in the market.

Agile software development and agile project management have shown considerable success in helping organizations develop better software and better manage development projects in the face of changing requirements and evolving technologies. In one sense, agile is about managing rapidly changing project factors and requirements.

Over the past few decades, the perception of IT has evolved dramatically from an internal unit that provides back-office support to a meaningful group that supports the organization's business processes and, finally, to a revenue-generating division. This "new era" IT is more involved in the business elements that allow the organization to grow, profit, and prosper. In many ways, IT is now responsible for providing the technical leverage that ultimately leads to gaining advantage over competitors.

When evaluating suppliers, clients tend to focus on suppliers' resources because these are highly visible onsite tours, balance sheets, and résumés. But they should be more interested in suppliers' ability to turn these resources -- their physical and human assets such as physical facilities, technologies, tools, and workforce -- into capabilities that, in turn, can be combined to create high-level customer-facing competencies.

Real-time coverage of the recent disasters in Japan, the social unrest in the Middle East and Africa, and the Allied bombing campaign underway in Libya all expose the limitations of such information; specifically, the clear need to put real-time information into some kind of context with the use of additional, supplemental information.

As we begin to emerge out of the recession, there will be a tendency to take care of the technology pieces that have been neglected for years, such as server and software upgrades. While some of those things absolutely must be addressed, managers are encouraged to look at this as an opportunity to innovate around what needs to be done.

Last we heard from this thread, we ended with an example of visualization's time-saving benefits (see "'Click Here to Learn This One Crazy Secret...'" 27 January 2011, and "V Is for Victory --

In the US and in industrial countries around the world, the recent economic crisis has triggered the first serious consideration of national spending priorities for more than a decade. Supposedly, every option is being explored and unfortunately, in many cases deficits are being balanced out by reduction in long-term investments in existing infrastructure.

It is all too easy to make high-level general statements about CIOs and IT organizations. Often these statements work from the assumption that all CIOs and all IT organizations are alike. For example, since the turn of the year, we've seen a lot of "CIO's Concerns for 2011" and similar articles.