Two decades ago, I moderated a panel discussion of CIOs interested in better understanding the challenges IT faces and initiatives they might take to successfully address them. During the panel discussion we agreed on six basic themes as being critical to successful IT management. The question is: have things changed much since?

In many companies and in US government agencies, enterprise architecture (EA) governance is already considered as a consensus-driven framework to guide and direct significant architecture decisions related to IT assets and resources that may make significant architectural impacts to the business operations.

In the last few years, agile methodologies have rapidly gained acceptance and moved into the mainstream. Currently, it seems like a majority of companies are running at least one agile pilot program and many large organizations have converted completely to agile methods.

There are many opinions about what constitutes an IT strategy. In my view, the IT strategy has to start from a deep understanding of the short-, mid-, and long-term goals of the company. In the absence of clearly stated corporate goals, the CIO does not get a pass; he or she must make some assumptions based on observation. Assuming there are stated corporate goals, the CIO must have some specific artifacts to create a grounded, purposeful strategy that aligns IT actions to company needs and whose value is clear. One of these artifacts is the company culture.

High-performance analytic databases1 are receiving increasing interest by end-user organizations. This is understandable, given the ever-increasing amount of data that organizations are accumulating -- causing a data glut that is, quite simply, putting a strain on organizations' data warehousing and BI activities.

Social media represents an incredibly important opportunity to leverage new (and existing) technology onto internal and external strategic and operational business objectives of all shapes and sizes. Who, for example, would have suspected that new product lifecycles could be affected by wikis, blogs, file sharing, and opinions? That focus group in Peoria is forever gone, replaced by blogs open to customers from Illinois to California to New York to Paris to Shanghai. Innovation is now a contact sport played by a globally distributed team.

Fully prioritize your tasks, estimate them, skim them off the top until your current velocity is met, and you’re done. Agile planning is that easy ... but is this really easy?

A couple of months ago, I wrote an Opinion for the Cutter Trends Council titled "The Book Is Dead, Long Live the e-Book” (Vol. 10, No. 9).

Of Cutter Consortium consultants, I believe I may have a unique distinction: I’m a former member of the inside-the-beltway media. I was the news director at WASH-FM and the community affairs director of news radio WTOP for a number of years before jumping into the “real world” as a manager, project manager, and, later, executive.

Persistence in computer science refers to the characteristic of state that outlives the process that created it. Without this capability, state would only exist in RAM, and would be lost when this RAM loses power, such as a computer shutdown. (Wikipedia)

Governance is one of those concepts that suddenly emerged and became an important issue in IT. It is not clear when exactly the concept originated as we understand it now. In 1998, the IT Governance Institute was founded to disperse the IT governance concept. In academic and professional literature, articles mentioning IT governance in the title began to emerge during the late 1990s.

Complex Event Processing (CEP) [1] is generating increasing interest among companies due to its ability to increase operational efficiency by providing a means to identify and interpret the effect of seemingly unrelated events taking place across the organization and then notifying the appropriate stakeholders with near zero latency.

It's all about the money! This is one of most common ideas in the minds of enterprise executives. It is one of the tenets that has driven enterprises for decades because, well ... of course, businesses want to make money. Although this is true, that doesn't mean the company and its products or services need to be cost-driven.

¡Se trata del dinero! Esta es una de las ideas más comunes en la mente de ejecutivos empresariales. Es uno de los principios que han dirigido empresas durante décadas porque, bueno... por supuesto, los negocios quieren hacer dinero. Aunque esto es cierto, no quiere decir que la empresa y sus productos o servicios necesitan ser basados en costo.

BP PLC Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward did not come across very well in his testimony in June before the US House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is looking into the loss of the oil-drilling platform Deepwater Horizon.

In my last Advisor on this subject (see "Semantics, Pragmatics, Outsourcing Shape 'Net's Future: Part I," 1 July 2010), I explored the two dimensions of information (semantics and pragmatics) and identified a continuum of tolerance for error in interpretation (from none

Apple continues to make waves with the iPad and the iPhone. The iPad is probably already a US $2 billion line of business in a scant 80 days. Name another product that generated so much revenue so fast. I am finding how Apple pulled off that feat to be a more significant lesson in the design and engineering of a businesses than the glitz and splash of the iPad usability.

One of the biggest problems we face as architects is enabling the transition from architectural specification to executing systems. As I've said many times, the value of architecture does not come from creating the architecture, but rather from applying it. By applying it, I mean influencing the selection, analysis, design, and implementation of an enterprise's IT systems.

The January 2010 issue of the Cutter IT Journal ("The Great Recession Fallout: Will CIOs Be Elevated or Exterminated?" Vol. 23, No. 1) focused on the future of the CIO.

Cloud computing continues to gain momentum as a description of service offerings based on a virtualized data center infrastructure and provided over the Internet on an as-needed basis. Public clouds, such as Amazon EC2, first brought attention to this model, followed by private clouds built within an organization, as exemplified by IBM's Blue Cloud initiative.

EMC Corporation announced it is acquiring data warehousing database vendor Greenplum, Inc. for an undisclosed amount. This deal is important because the addition of Greenplum's analytic database and cloud data warehousing infrastructure offerings will enable EMC to form a new data warehousing/analytics division within its information infrastructure business.

Sports broadcasting is an industry that does not wait for competitors to vet new technology; rather, it rushes to use new technology, and by doing so, creates a more innovative product -- a uniquely compelling, highly rated broadcast.

In my last Advisor (see "Has Agile Grown Up Yet? Assessing the Maturity of Your Process," 24 June 2010), I discussed the need for assessing agile process maturity. This week, I provide some methods for going about performing assessments.

There's a brand-new layer of digital intelligence being conceived on the world's century-old electric power grid by way of your regional electric power utility, through your new smart meter, and extending into your future home and business energy-management systems and smart appliances. It's called the Smart Grid.

Here's how the Electric Power Research Institute defines it:

In the chaotic world of IT, frontline leaders sometimes struggle to keep up with the pace. Projects and productivity expectations can push the most important asset -- people -- to the back of the pack. Successful organizations know, however, that no matter how good the technology, it is the people who make it work. When people come first, customers win.