It's no secret that corporate use of social media as a valuable source for better understanding and engaging customers is still fairly limited at this time. Likewise, current usage of data acquired from social media sites to bolster corporate BI efforts is also quite limited.

It's amazing how organizations spend vast sums in the interest of discovering the newest, latest, and most advanced business practices and technologies. They throw their energies behind radical change, while ignoring the improvements that can be made through effective implementation of existing practice.

It's time we stopped this debate over the roles and responsibilities between the project manager (PM) and the business analyst (BA) and focused our efforts on realizing the benefits of the PM and BA partnering to deliver maximum business value to their clients.

Whenever we deal with challenges of gargantuan proportions, we break them down. This decomposition enables us to understand, manage, and ameliorate the challenges.

If social media is unimportant to a company, the company must consider that it is enormously important to its prospects and customers. But a company cannot simply tack it on and expect it to foster satisfied customers and a more innovative enterprise.

Early this year, fellow Cutter Consultants Mitch Ummel, Mike Rosen, and I wrote an Executive Report on the Smart Grid (see "

Industry leaders are optimistic about the great success of service-oriented architecture (SOA) in realizing adaptive, real-time, and on-demand enterprises. Services have emerged as the proven construct for rapidly implementing and sustaining mission-critical, enterprise-scale business systems. They provide the most efficient units for realizing business realities and requirements. Services are publicly addressable, discoverable, accessible, and manageable. In addition, they are interoperable and reusable.

The most recent major acquisition taking place in the BI and data warehousing market has IBM buying Netezza Corporation, a data warehousing appliance pioneer, for about US $1.7 billion. This deal is significant for several reasons. First, the market for data warehousing and BI appliances is hot, and Netezza's products are well established.

I recently watched a talk by a self-appointed agile "expert" who tried to explain the key elements of Scrum.

A little less than two weeks ago, the international banking community in the form of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (which is part of the Bank for International Supervision) came together to finalize the Basel III agreement on the minimum capital banks will now need to have.

Today mobile phones are used mainly for communication purposes -- making phone calls or sending SMS messages. But new, high-end phones are already introducing new mobile services that allow mobile phones to be used not only for communication, but also as information processing, storage, distribution, and sometimes even local computing devices.

Here at University of a Kentucky (Lexington, Kentucky, USA), we are deep into the early stages of IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) adoption. As it is at any point in time and with nearly any IT team, these sorts of things become equated with process control, with metrics, with improvement, with thickness, with complexity, with rigor, and then usually with rigor mortis.

I've noticed a few blogs and articles recently that talk about the convergence of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and enterprise architecture (EA), even going so far as to predict that there will no longer be a difference between them; they will be merged into one and the same.

According to Webster's Dictionary, the word "profession" means business, calling, career, employment, job, line of work, occupation, office, position, sphere, walk of life, and so on. This is also the foundation of the word "professional," which we think of as the person who is employed on the said work or occupation. According to Webster's, professional means adept, competent, skilled, efficient, experienced, masterly, polished, practiced, proficient, qualified, slick, trained, and so on.

There are numerous reasons why outsourcing could be detrimental to innovation. Perhaps one of the most self-evident is that outsourcing firms are unlikely to innovate, as their work is confined by stringent, unbending contracts. Suppliers find it difficult to justify innovation unless it directly helps their ability to meet their contractual obligations and internal revenue/profitability targets. Clients commonly assume that innovation during an outsourcing engagement will naturally come about.

Do you think data mining and predictive analytics are too complex to deliver via the cloud? Better think again, because that's what Predixion Software is now doing. Moreover, what Predixion has done with its Predixion Insight offering is not simply host some complex data-mining workbench in the cloud.

In a recent Cutter Business Technology Council Opinion ("Managing Differences: The Critical 21st Century Management Skill," Vol. 10, No.

The confluence of cloud computing, smart mobile devices, and social networks is usually discussed in terms of its transformative effect. The cloud enables offering products and platforms as services. Smart mobile devices consume those services and contribute to them in an "always-on" mode.

These are tough times. Organizations have to do more with less. Managers have to stop being afraid of their staff and they need to get more done with less. This doesn’t mean that they should ignore new technologies. Indeed, there are some technologies out there that are mature and would improve productivity by orders of magnitude if used correctly, but they require discipline, and discipline requires management and commitment.

The idea of managing demand has gained much traction in recent years -- especially with demand for resources outstripping the budgets for those resources. It is an idea that increasingly has become part and parcel of our everyday lives. We are urged to control our energy consumption to better match generation capacity and efficiency.

Security and data privacy/regulatory considerations are two of the biggest bottlenecks standing in the way of more organizations adopting cloud computing.

Technology governance is something every company needs. But it's also something that most companies would prefer not to discuss -- or publish. The fact is that without explicit, consistent, well-communicated, and well-supported governance, you will experience some degree of chaos in the technology acquisition, deployment, and support process.

The term "big data" gets thrown around a lot these days. The vendors are all talking about the need for organizations to meet their "big data" requirements. The same is true for the data warehousing and BI gurus. But just what actually constitutes big data depends a lot on whom you're speaking to.

Requirements define things that a product or service are supposed to do to satisfy the needs of the client. A more formal definition is given by the International Institute of Business Analysis in "A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge" (PDF):

The worst mistake is not telling the boss.

Or so said an article a few years ago in the Washington Post about the importance of immediately disclosing problems or mistakes to your boss.1