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?

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.

For every vendor presentation claiming that cloud computing is an unprecedented revolution, there is an analyst paper denouncing the hyperbole. Every new example of IT goes through this phase, just as surely as a child goes through the "terrible twos" -- and at about the same age.

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?

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.

Some of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of companies wanting to use consumer-oriented social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn for marketing and other purposes have to do with compliance and worries about brand management. This is especially true for financial services and insurance companies, which face considerable scrutiny from government regulatory agencies.

"Are we productive enough?" one of my client's teams recently asked as the theme of a two-day retrospective. The team had done one year of agile transition and had made significant progress in its collaboration and transparency.

This week did not start out well for either J.C. Penney or Google. The reason was an article on the front page of the Sunday business section of the New York Times by David Segal, "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search" (12 February 2011).

I experienced an interesting challenge last week. For 25 years I have taught in a master of information management program at a European university. This program targets IS and business professionals; the median age is probably about 35 years. In short, these are seasoned managers from all kinds of businesses and government organizations.

While IT people have a propensity to make projects out of anything, not perceiving features of an application environment in more detail, and in enough implementation detail, is a flaw in the planning process -- a rookie mistake. In many ways, technologists are obsessed with automating certain features of an application environment, but when it comes to deployment, all brainstorming seems to cease. This isn't a very enterprise-wide or Gestalt view of the world, where the "essence or shape of an entity's complete form" is understood by the application designers.

You staff a project with experienced professionals to carry out a project for a customer who is expecting the best that you can give. Likewise, as the project manager, you have similar expectations for those professionals that are reporting to you on the engagement. You expect the best from them, and you expect them to perform on the assignments given to them. Project success involves some luck -- no one can argue that.

Last month I said that, according to our research, more than half of organizations currently view mobile BI as a strategic priority for their organizations to have, while others foresee mobile BI becoming a strategic imperative within approximately the next 6-12 months (see "Targeting

I have spent the last few days working with a customer on Kanban adoption. One of the organization's teams in particular claimed to be highly productive and therefore didn't think Kanban could be of much use. I worked with the team to create a value stream map (VSM) of their process by walking them through these six steps:

"We allowed two-hour early departure ... without a flake in sight. As late as 4 pm I was worried, with nothing happening, if the exact opposite was going to occur ... a laughingstock story of overreaction."

This Advisor, the fifth in a six-part series on green IT,1 provides insight into the relevance and importance of software systems in enabling organizations to reduce their carbon footprint.

Many CIOs today feel like they are building bridges as they are walking on them. Organizations are being pressed to innovate to catch up to or to stay ahead of competitors. IT shops feel this as pressure to move at the speed of business often with changing and incomplete business requirements. Leaders inside the organization are quickly building the future imperfectly.

I was saddened to hear that computer industry pioneer Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), died on Sunday, a few weeks shy of his 85th birthday.

Back in the 1970s, Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann defined five styles that negotiators bring to the table, based on the degree to which they care about the outcome of a particular negotiation versus the degree to which they care about the relationship with the other party.1 If you are a person who cares much more about outcomes than relati

According to Rand McNally, Africa, Asia, and South America make up 62% of the world's landmass. These markets have 82% of the world's population, which is 5.3 billion out of 6.5 billion people. China and India alone have more than 2.4 billion people.1 The consumer opportunity is huge. Presuming your company operates outside of the Western world, you must win big in these markets to thrive in this global economy.

Last October, I discussed in an Advisor developing trends pertaining to social media monitoring and analysis (see "Psst ... Listen in as Some Business Tune in to Social Media," 5 October 2010).

In a series of workshops conducted in 12 US and three European cities as well as one in Asia, I asked more than 1,500 CIOs to answer the following question: When you, your CEO, and your CFO hear the word "innovation," what is the first thing that leaps to mind?

Don't be surprised if your agile adoption is going south after your next company reorganization. Many agile implementations I've observed will not survive company or division reorganizations. Unfortunately, many of these agile adoptions enabled teams to exhibit truly breakout performances.

Winston Churchill once said, "We make our buildings and afterwards they make us. They regulate the course of our lives." We make technology and our technologies shape us.

— Sherry Turkle, Simulation and its Discontents (The MIT Press, 2009)

In designing and documenting architectures, be they business, data, application, or technology architectures, enterprise architects are prone to focus first and fore­most on the objects that compose the architecture in question. This is both human nature (nouns before verbs) and a logical approach to design. For example:

You've driven 420 miles from your last fill-up. Your gas gauge reads 1/8th full. You assume that means you still have 60 miles' worth of gas. You bypass gas stations, as you are in a hurry to reach your destination. The car stalls out two miles from the nearest gas station. You don't make it. What happened? Your assumption was incorrect. Had you ever tested the assumption by driving around with a spare gas can and seeing how far you could go after reaching the 1/8 mark? If not, it is an untested assumption.