In this Update, we focus on the corporate adoption, usage trends, and satisfaction with high-performance analytic databases.

The assumptions that programmers do semiskilled blue-collar work -- and hence that they are virtually interchangeable and can be hired and fired at will -- are reminiscent of Taylorism as it came to be understood. Yet there can hardly be any domain in which those assumptions are less appropriate than software development.

Any position in any organization can be broken down into roles and responsibilities -- or a clear set of "jobs" the person must perform. Each job can be further broken down into a set of tasks -- sometimes complex, sometimes simple. Yet, to maximize productivity, these tasks are the first things we want to encourage our staff to find ways to eliminate.

In this Update, we explore how analytics engineering will emerge as a focal point for handling the integrations and infrastructure requirements of this new discipline. And fundamental changes will be necessary in how business processes are understood and in how decisions are made and evaluated at every level.

In the first two Executive Updates of this five-part series,1 we looked at frameworks for architecture content and the architecture development process.

In 2002, Cutter Consortium conducted its first comprehensive survey of the state of risk management practice in the IT community, which was duplicated in 2006 and again this year.1 In Part I of this three-part Execut

In 2002, Cutter Consortium conducted its first comprehensive survey of the state of risk management practice in the IT community, which we duplicated in 2006 and again this year.1,2 In Part I of this three-part Execu

In adhering to the principle of triangulation, I have found that the three basic viewpoints for service or product health are: (1) the external subjective (customer satisfaction), (2) the external objective (usage), and (3) the internal objective (delivery). In this Executive Update, I explore these viewpoints, which cover three critical perspectives when looking at the health of a service or product.

Agile business intelligence (BI) has become a convenient catchphrase for a variety of movements sweeping through the BI, analytics, and software development communities. Its goals are relatively clear, but methods of execution can be murky and wrapped up in a range of competing practices and orientations.

In 2002, Cutter Consortium conducted its first comprehensive survey of the state of risk management practice in the IT community.1 That survey found that some 86% of organizations responding claimed they were practicing risk management, and 51% of those were practicing it in a disciplin

Organizations tend to develop far-reaching plans to describe their strategic ambitions, tactics, goals, milestones, and budgets. However, these plans in and of themselves do not create value. Instead, they merely describe the path and the prize. Value can be realized only through the unremitting, collective actions of the hundreds or thousands of employees who are ultimately responsible for designing, executing, and living with the changed environment.

As a learning consultant, my service delivery and project manager clients often ask "How can we sustain high performance in teams?" It's true that building a high-performance team is one thing and sustaining its performance at a high level over a long period is quite another.

Cyber war is the use of IT as a theater of war. The primary focus in recent years has been upon so-called cyber weapons used to affect military and industrial control systems. The most prominent of these was Stuxnet, a piece of malware created by the US and Israel to damage Iran's cyclotrons.

During July-September 2013, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey asking 39 end-user organizations worldwide about various issues pertaining to BI, data warehousing (DW), analytics, and Big Data practices.

Product owners for Agile BI teams often face unique challenges compared to their peers on other functionally specific delivery teams.

The strategic goals, vision, and mission statements of today's organizations emphasize the importance of customer satisfaction, not only in terms of functionality but also in terms of quality of service (QoS). One of many QoS parameters for an application is performance. The performance of any system refers to how well the system is able to handle the user load in terms of application response and system resources.

In recent years, the concept of business process management (BPM) has been gaining traction in modern enterprises and institutions. Broadly put, the management field aims to provide an encompassing approach in order to align an organization's business processes with the concerns of every involved stakeholder.

I've written multiple articles and given numerous presentations on the problems with establishing targets for your measures of improvement. It's worth reiterating what's wrong with them, though, because if you haven't tried using targets, chances are you will.

Testing is potentially a risk-based activity. The fact is, one can't test everything equally, and even if one could, it would be too expensive. The risk-based testing (RBT) approach helps to identify risk factors associated with testing. Various RBT models and approaches available today deal with assessing and calculating risks associated with the test scenarios for a system under test. These studies have described risk calculation for test scenarios by considering various factors from both business and technical perspectives.

In Part I of this five-part Executive Update series,1 we looked at the framework that keeps track of all work products, deliverables, and reference material used by

During July-September 2013, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey asking 39 end-user organizations worldwide about various issues pertaining to BI, data warehousing (DW), analytics, and Big Data practices.

Best practices are prescriptive, and Agile development opposes prescription. So, in this sense, there are no Agile best practices. Managers faced with a need to impose new processes are always in search of guidance, however, and need to know that they are doing what they have set out to do -- or at least are on track to do so. Guidance, whether it is called "best practices," "good things to do," or "useful approaches," is still necessary.

This is the first in a five-part Update series that describes the five most useful architecture frameworks. In this first Update, we cover the Architecture Content Framework.

I said that more people in more places can now compete, connect, and collaborate with equal power and equal tools than ever before.

-- Thomas L. Friedman

IBM's Watson, the famous cybernetic winner of the TV game show Jeopardy, is only the tip of the iceberg with respect to upcoming developments in analytics. We are on the verge of creating a whole new range of computing mechanisms based on analytics and real-time processing, which will put current devices to shame.