We often encounter CIOs and other senior IT executives who seem to be unable to answer simple questions about the IT activity for which they're responsible. They simply don't have the data.

The three hardest questions seem to be:

1. Exactly on what -- and where -- are we spending our company's IT resources?

Welcome to the sixth anniversary edition of my Enterprise Architect's "New Year's Resolutions." I hope this Advisor will give you food for thought and some inspiration for architectural growth in 2011.

Customers are not often known for providing good requirements for the solutions they seek from our project teams. In fact, sometimes all they bring to us is a problem. Even worse, sometimes all they come to us with is a symptom of the actual, as yet undiscovered, problem.

There's been a lot of talk about the need for organizations to enable their employees to access, view, and interact with corporate data using mobile devices such as smartphones (iPhones, BlackBerrys, Android-based, etc.) and tablet devices (iPad, PlayBook, etc.) via reports, interactive dashboards, data visualization, ad hoc reporting, and other BI functionality.

This week, we're taking a look back at five of the most intriguing articles published in Cutter's Innovation & Enterprise Agility practice over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and pare it down to just five articles. Look for these lists from each of our nine practice areas for a compilation of Cutter's 45 most intriguing articles of the year.

This week, we're taking a look back at five of the most intriguing articles published in Cutter's Agile practice over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and pare it down to just five articles. Look for these lists from each of our nine practice areas for a compilation of Cutter's 45 most intriguing articles of the year.

This week, we're taking a look back at five of the most intriguing articles published in Cutter's Business Technology Trends and Impacts practice over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and pare it down to just five articles. Look for these lists from each of our nine practice areas for a compilation of Cutter's 45 most intriguing articles of the year.

This week, we're taking a look back at five of the most intriguing articles published in Cutter's Business-IT Strategies practice over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and pare it down to just five articles. Look for these lists from each of our nine practice areas for a compilation of Cutter's 45 most intriguing articles of the year.

This week, we're taking a look back at five of the most read articles in Cutter's Enterprise Architecture practice over this past year. Each article offers unique insight into the challenges of creating and deploying a successful enterprise architecture. Look for these lists from each of our nine practice areas for a compilation of Cutter's 45 most intriguing articles of the year.

This week, we're taking a look back at five of the most intriguing articles published in Cutter's Cutter IT Journal over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and pare it down to just five articles. Look for these lists from each of our nine practice areas for a compilation of Cutter's 45 most intriguing articles of the year.

This week, we're taking a look back at five of the most intriguing articles published in Cutter's Business Intelligence practice over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and pare it down to just five articles. Look for these lists from each of our nine practice areas for a compilation of Cutter's 45 most intriguing articles of the year.

Dear Colleague,

This week, we're taking a look back at five of the most intriguing articles published in Cutter's Enterprise Risk Management & Governance practice over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and pare it down to just five articles.

"Nobody should ever see sausage or laws being made."

-- Mark Twain

As one year ends and another begins, many organizations focus on the annual end-of-year bonuses for their personnel. It's a time when managers may find themselves doing more harm than good as they dip into the well of opportunity and come up dry. What constitutes the best rewards for our staff and team members?

An old boss of mine used to say, "If you don't want your worst enemy to read it, don't write it down." I've thought of that quote often over the last week or so as the WikiLeaks fiasco has played out. A great deal of what has been leaked is venal, but not really secret.

Over the last decade, the emergence of new technological functionalities (particularly those associated with Web 2.0), combined with the widespread "everyman" use of these technologies, has enabled an ever-increasing number of ways in which organizations can leverage the effort and intelligence of crowds to solve problems, innovate, and get work done (crowdsourcing).

This week, we're taking a look back at five of the most intriguing articles published in Cutter's Sourcing & Vendor Relationships practice over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and pare it down to just five articles. Look for these lists from each of our nine practice areas for a compilation of Cutter's 45 most intriguing articles of the year.

As the New Year approaches, I thought I'd offer some predictions and recommendations on the key BI and data warehousing developments and practices organizations should focus on. In general, 2011 looks to be a great year for BI and data warehousing.

In the late 1990s, every newcomer in the search-engine space seemed to have every feature of its predecessor and more. Each was trying to win the home-page war in an arms race of feature one-upmanship. The more complicated search engines became, the less they seemed to be solving the real problem.1

Then, in 1998, a new upstart from Stanford University came along. It was focused on solving the original problem; quickly finding the most relevant information in the growing ocean of Web content. As we all know, Google changed the game forever.

Imagine, if you will, that all owners of data centers and agents representing buyers of computing cycles get together daily and buy and sell commodity computing units (we'll call them containers) in an open exchange.

Effective demand management is much less a matter of shiny new business analysis tools and techniques as applying existing ones in a way that allows us to "get a grip" -- to examine demand for IT in a critical yet innovative way while balancing it with an organization's capability for meeting that demand. The question, "How applicable is demand management to an agile world?" was one that I kept finding myself faced with.

Event analysis is a counterintuitive but "easy to understand and use" approach for designing or redesigning processes and systems. If used consistently and extensively, it simplifies architectures, increases structural parallelism, identifies needed controls, and expedites the eventual enhancements of applications, middleware, and operating systems.

As we move well into the 21st century, there will be several skill sets critical to the impact of IT on the businesses we enable. One of those skills is business relationship management (BRM). BRM is the face of IT. Business partners "sell" IT and simultaneously enable business models and processes through the application of technology to business problems and opportunities.

Two important benefits afforded by data warehousing and BI are that they enable the distribution of standardized business information and standardized measures across the various parts of the organization.