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In a Kanban Adoption, Go Lean
Changing the Color of Risk
There was word last week that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was finally going to drop the color-coded terrorism alert system, also known as the Homeland Security Advisory System. This comes after more than five years of consideration of alternatives to the warning system by DHS and two administrations, which was inaugurated in 2002.
Practicing Green IT in Four Dimensions
How Does IT's Evolution Include Our Own?
In last week's Advisor ("IT's Eternal Return: Circular Reference?
Sponsorship of Mission-Critical Projects: Failure Is Always an Option
There is a dramatic scene in the movie Apollo 13 in which a mission specialist essentially gives a group of engineers a round peg and a square hole to put it in and proclaims, "Failure is not an option!" Lives were at stake. The moment represented great drama but a terrible model for project leadership and communication.
Remote Control: Tips on Managing Outsourced Departments
Where work is outsourced to remote departments, integration becomes an important issue. Integration requires development of clearly understood policies and careful oversight. The outsourced department must be integrated into operations on both a technical and a social level. This is greatly aided by modular organization, in which the boundaries and interfaces between departments are well understood.
Simulate Social Crises and Strengthen Your Defenses
A couple weeks ago, I discussed how social media monitoring and analysis tools can be used to defend an organization's reputation (see "Play Better Defense With Social Media Monitoring," 16 November 2010).
Net-Geners: Learning, Innovating, and Sharing Information
In my last Advisor (see "Preparing for the Net Generation," 11 November 2010), I discussed the distinctive characteristics of the Net generation, or Net-Geners -- the group now graduating from college and entering the workplace.
Lost in Translation: Agile's Technical Practices
I've been part of the agile software development world since 2000, when I first found out about XP. I was immediately taken with its high level of collaboration, emphasis on working with the business, and tight focus on technical practices that, when used properly, produce excellent software quality.
Virtualization, Part I: The New Old Thing
Andy Maher is a very old friend of mine and a long-standing collaborator. Andy may be the best business intelligence consultant/programmer in the world -- no kidding. This is because, rather than write books and give speeches, Andy still does real work, helping large organizations try to pry near-real-time information from the cold, hard grasp of their antiquated databases, data warehouses, data marts, etc.
IT's Eternal Return: Circular Reference? See Reference, Circular
These days it is quite fashionable to paint a dramatic picture of the sweeping changes and cataclysmic winds swirling all around us. Faced with this effective illusion of certainty of change (or do we call it a reboot now?), many heads nod in groupthink response to the shibboleths spoken by our techno-shamans.
Why Bring Agile and SOA Together?
Agile and service-oriented architecture (SOA) share similar goals, and both represent the current end point of lengthy processes of evolution. SOA and its concepts are derived from innumerable attempts through the years to develop reusable code and to segment individual software development projects into modules through OO programming.
Explore the Fringes to Find the Killer App
When a group of Baby-Boomer IT professionals get together, it is not unusual for a game of “IT Codger One-Upmanship” to break out. In this game, the old-timers usually start talking about who remembers programming in FORTRAN or COBOL. Someone then ups the ante by talking about punch cards. If the participants are old enough, a winner emerges by explaining how he or she used to program in hexadecimal using toggle switches!
High-Performance Analytic Databases Set to Take Off
Adoption of high-performance analytic databases1 by end-user organizations has experienced moderate but steady growth since their inception. According to Cutter research, about 18% of end-user organizations use high-performance analytic databases to support their BI data management and data analysis efforts.
Pitfalls of Agile X: Team Commitment
Enterprise-Driven Risk Mismanagement: Jessica Rabbit Projects
Model T Decision Making in a 21st-Century World
Business legend has it that Henry Ford waited three days before reading any memos that appeared on his desk. It drove his managers to make autonomous decisions on anything pressing or urgent. It ensured they weren't waiting for blessings from "on high" before taking action. They knew that his responsibility was the longer term, not the short term, and they acted accordingly.
How to Measure Success: Use EA to Define Architecture
This summer, Cutter conducted a survey of EA programs with the subscribers to our Enterprise Architecture practice. Among other issues, we looked into the perceived effectiveness of EA programs. Unfortunately, the results were a little disappointing.
Relationships Increasingly Seen As Key to Successful Outsourcing Contracts
The first view of outsourcing contracts argues that the contract is the most important part in the client-vendor relationship. The second view, while far from advocating that a contract is unnecessary, places its importance significantly beneath that of the relationship. The contract has its place, but it alone cannot produce results. An experienced contract-management team focused on cooperation, common interests, and earning trust over time creates the results and efficiencies. A mere piece of paper cannot achieve such results.
Play Better Defense With Social Media Monitoring
Last week, it was in the news that a Pacific Gas & Electric executive admitted to having used an assumed name to infiltrate an online discussion group organized by consumers who are against the deployment of the utility company's smart electricity-usage metering devices. The executive indicated that his goal was simply to get a better understanding of what his company's customers are thinking.
Preparing for the Net Generation
Technical innovation is widely viewed in the developed and developing world as the driver for economic and cultural growth and prosperity. The growth of network services and social media have made new innovation processes feasible, and the members of the next generation of knowledge workers often have been among the leaders in such approaches.