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.

I recently worked on Kanban adoption with a new customer, who informed me that Kanban was already underway and wanted me to help finish the adoption.

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.

I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.

- "The Elephant's Child," by Rudyard Kipling

In last week's Advisor ("IT's Eternal Return: Circular Reference?

Recently, I was working with some clients to create conceptual architectural models, and the discussion turned to the common levels of abstraction that we reference in architecture; namely, conceptual, logical, and physical.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

"You did not finish the stories you committed to!" a product owner at a client of mine recently raged against the team. "What the hell are you doing all day long? This commitment was pointless!" And he was right.

Two government reports published this past week again highlight the old adage "Any fool can make a project late or overbudget; all he or she need to do is not give the project enough time or money."

As the result of a life in the trenches, I have a reading list that is quite broad. One of the journals that I subscribe to is TR News.

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.

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.