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.

In last week's Advisor (see "Short-Term Tactical Approaches to Application Modernization and Rationalization, Part I," 9 March 2011), I provided some background about the problems associated with many legacy modernization

There's no question that social media intelligence is a priority. Without social media intelligence, how can anyone know what their customers think, who they like, and who they hate? But there's more to social media than meets the eye. Understanding the nature and trajectory of the cloud is a significant factor. It also enables additional primary and secondary business analyses. For example, the entertainment industry's social media intelligence might well focus on what people are saying about specific movies, television programs, and radio spots.

We're now seeing organizations across almost every industry develop mobile BI applications that employ interactive dashboards, reporting, visualization, and other functionality tailored to specific users or groups that extend the usefulness of their BI and performance management systems.

The title "project manager" is cheap. In some organizations it is given to administrative assistants, lead technicians, or senior business analysts in lieu of a raise. Senior PMs play a vital role on large, complex, mission-critical projects.

Once again, I am sitting here, sipping a cup of coffee at my local McDonald's, looking across the parking lot at the steady stream of people going into the H.H. Gregg electronics store that took up residence in what previously was a Circuit City electronics store.

This is the sixth and final Advisor in this series on green IT. In it, I briefly outline the importance and usage of the ISO14000 family of standards associated with carbon emissions.

If I could summarize my experience in presenting business cases into one sentence, it would be the following: it is more important to be credible rather than accurate.

Do you have a new development project in planning that will replace an existing application? If so, then it is likely that you are planning a legacy modernization. According to a conversation with Capers Jones, 70% of "new" application development is to replace a legacy system.

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.

Just as the word "computing" has lost its original association with mathematics and now refers to the entire range of information systems, "cloud computing" does not denote just the provision of compute servers. The distinction among IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS already indicates a broader scope.

Over the last two weeks, we've seen two moves by enterprise vendors making acquisitions of high-performance analytic DB vendors:1 Hewlett-Packard (HP) acquired Vertica, and Teradata bought Aster Data Systems.

Despite the attention now given to innovation and innovation processes, and the importance in which they are viewed for the progress and survival of companies, the means by which good ideas are created continue to elude us.

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:

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).

The 1988 movie Rain Man won Dustin Hoffman an Oscar for his portrayal of a mentally challenged man who was incredibly gifted at recalling certain things; for example, recalling facts and computing complex numbers in his head.

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.

Two recently formed organizations have come to my attention lately that are (or should be) of interest to architects. The first is the Federation of Enterprise Architecture Professional Organizations (FEAPO), and the second is the Business Architecture Guild (BAG).

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.

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.

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.

Chances are that your IT organization is structured in different departments, such as development, quality control, and operations. Although the names may vary across companies, the idea is to group people that execute similar work or have similar expertise.

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.

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.

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?