In my last Advisor (see "Firmitas, Utilitas, Venustas"), I introduced some of the ideas presented by EA Conference Chair Chris Potts in his keynote at the IRM Enterprise Architecture Conference, "High Im

Aldous Huxley, author of the classic novel Brave New World, once said, "There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception."

Many projects concentrate their efforts on implementing technology used to support the business needs (replace System X with System Y) or deliver new functionality. In meetings, the topic of conversation is usually about which application to purchase and which vendor to choose. Those are important issues, but equally important considerations are how your company will use the information to conduct business, the readiness of existing data, and how you can adapt the data to fulfill the requirements of the new system.

In early June, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released a remarkable report entitled, "Greece: Ex Post Evaluation of Exceptional Access Under the 2010 Stand-By Arrangement," documenting the IMF's decision to participate in the economic rescue of Greece from its self-created ec

Architecture debt refers to the cost and effort of dealing with the backlog of maintenance and change to legacy architectures that are necessary to bring the architectural landscape up to date.

I'm honored to be the Guest Editor of this month's Cutter IT Journal. This issue describes the experiences and findings of senior consultants and researchers who have been actively involved with helping organizations around the world apply Agile strategies in enterprise environments.

It is time to turn our thinking about IT development's role in change on its head. Instead of IT being the driver and necessary means for change, it should be relegated to last in the order of things. The first step is study, which changes management's perception of the problem(s). The second step is to improve the service design so that it works for customers. The third and final step is to pull in IT development to provide the means to run the service in the new way.

One of the more interesting acquisitions affecting the enterprise software, BI, and data management industry so far this year involves networking giant Cisco, which purchased data virtualization1 vendor Composite Software for approximately US $180 million in cash.

I don't know about you, but I've begun to notice a pattern in the problems that we have in keeping our secrets lately. Three years ago, a US Army enlisted man stationed in Iraq downloaded 250,000 US State Department cables and then handed them over to WikiLeaks which in turn handed them over to the press.

Circa 1990 (memo from the quality head): The lead assessor will be visiting our organization to check the maturity level this week. Please ensure documents are checked into the repository and folders named as per the standards. We need to get CMM Level 5 this year.

Circa 2010 (memo from Agile group lead): Please ensure every one completes the Agile maturity assessment as we need to understand the maturity levels of our teams.

Last week I attended the IRM Enterprise Architecture Conference in London. This is the third year the conference has coincided with the BPM Conference, and the combination really seems to be working.

Leadership per se is either effective or ineffective. There are no universal criteria for good or bad leadership, and the quality of leadership should not be confused with the motivation or objectives of the leader. Once leadership is deemed effective or ineffective, judgment about whether it is good or bad rests on an unpredictable mix of situational and subjective criteria. Like anything else, leadership comes with associated costs and unintended consequences. The limits of tolerable costs are largely determined by the value and priority of the leader's objectives.

There is no question that we are becoming more visually oriented in our approach to thinking today. You can see it in the increasing numbers of PowerPoint presentations given with the admonition that fewer words will suffice.

Truly savvy managers know the value of information. It's the stuff intelligent decisions are borne of.

In a recent Advisor I took the stance that nearly all software development is part of what we call an infinite game and therefore should be managed like a product rather than a project, which is a management approach for finite games (see "On Projects, Products, and Gaming Theory").

Complex event processing (CEP) has received considerable interest among organizations because of its ability to increase operational efficiency by identifying and interpreting the effect of seemingly unrelated events taking place across the enterprise and then notifying the appropri

Measuring the value of IT is something that every CIO and IT customer has been asking how to do for years. The difficulty is that it's a very complex and sophisticated problem to solve, and it has typically been addressed by keeping a cap on IT costs and developing some business cases for large IT initiatives.

Measuring the value of IT is something that every CIO and IT customer has been asking how to do for years. The difficulty is that it's a very complex and sophisticated problem to solve, and it has typically been addressed by keeping a cap on IT costs and developing some business cases for large IT initiatives.

The electronic surveillance practices of the US National Security Agency (NSA) are hot, front-page news around the world.

When my cofounders and I began in 2007 to create a software development services firm in Vietnam, one of our most powerful motivations was to create a shop that could support innovative projects. Outsourcing had historically been very much geared toward low-risk, low-innovation work at the large-enterprise level.

Last month I attended the annual meeting of the Federation of Enterprise Architecture Professional Organizations (FEAPO). I first became aware of FEAPO in the spring of 2010 when it was initially being formed. At that time, Dr.

For myriad reasons, distributed agile software development represents the cutting edge of collaboration technology. It provides a laboratory for techniques that teams can beneficially employ throughout the enterprise.

The past week has seen unprecedented leaks about the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the way it monitors the world's electronic information. The primary whistleblower has identified himself; he is Edward Snowden, who has been an NSA contractor through Booz Allen Hamilton and a former CIA technical employee.

There's a fundamental problem between the IT profession and its customers: there's an abundance of focus on the cost of the technology (the "T"), yet a dearth of focus on the value of the information (the "I") side of the equation.

Efficiency has been the mantra of systems approaches from early work on time and motion, through the business process reengineering movement, to the latest manifestation in Six Sigma. The organization has been seen as a machine or manufacturing process to be managed through the definition and measurement of defined outcomes. In consequence, method and tools have imitated the manufacturing process: defining output, managing process, monitoring for deviation.