Have you ever overloaded your dishwasher? You focus completely on getting every last dish and every last glass and every last utensil loaded. Then you breathe a sigh of relief as you press "start." An hour later, as the wash cycle completes, you return to find that the dishes and glasses and utensils aren't really clean.

In June/July 2011, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey asking 61 end-user organizations about the adoption and use of text mining and analysis.

Several years ago, I wrote a short article on planning in agile projects that dispelled the notion that agile practices did not include much planning. 1 Agile has moved on,

SOA remains an important area for development and enterprise implementation but recent trends in social computing, mobility, user-developed applications, and the cloud have significantly upstaged SOA, as we explore in this Executive Update.

How would you feel if you owned a Ferrari and couldn't get it out of first gear? That's exactly what's happening in many companies when it comes to collaborative technologies.

It's your first briefing from the CIO:

It's your first briefing from the CIO:

Cisco and Microsoft are betting big that they can create collaborative toolsets compelling enough that people (i.e., customers, developers, employees, investors, and regulators) would deem an enterprise crazy to not be Cisco/Microsoft-enabled. On the flip side, a barbarian hoard of entrepreneurs, ISVs, and venture capitalists are betting these vendor giants will not be completely successful. A fascinating David vs.

Recently I've been learning and following the principles surrounding the Lean Startup community, as popularized by Eric Ries. 1 While attending the inaugural San Francisco

I recently finished grading about 60 graduate student papers on IT strategy.

In June/July 2011, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey asking 61 end-user organizations about the adoption and use of text mining and analysis.

Software development is complicated, requiring highly specialized skills. Agile methods such as Scrum advocate self-organizing, cross-functional teams and promise predictable, efficient delivery of useful functionality. To have teams composed of people who are specialists in each of the relevant skills for your project, you need to know what the skills are before you plan the iteration.

Many tools have emerged in the last few years to facilitate the exchange of knowledge among people from different organizations (or different divisions of the same organization). These tools enable the "socialization of knowledge." In a previous Update I focused on the needs, the people, and the processes. Here, I examine the range of advanced technology solutions in this area and propose a framework to understand and compare the capabilities needed by an organization as well as various products on the market.

Often, at the heart of a successful project management practice is a project management office (PMO), which has been structured to create a path of success for company projects and the project managers who lead them. Sounds like a good plan, right?

Management scholars in the year 2040 will undoubtedly label the second decade of the third millennium as the point in time when decision-making transparency became widely recognized as a preferred and affordable source of competitive advantage.

In Part I of this three-part Executive Update series, we began our examination of a recent Cutter survey about reorganization of the IT function. 1 Nearly three-quarters of reporting organization

IT organizations devote significant attention to delivering the technology and processes that ensure the achievement of business objectives. It's what we do in IT.

In February/March 2011, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey asking 60 end-user organizations various questions about the adoption and use of predictive analytics.

For more than half a century we have been witnessing the doubling of the power of computer technology every two years.

The enterprise threat environment continues to grow in complexity and increasingly falls to IT for a solution. Solutions in enterprise risk management (ERM) and business continuity management (BCM) aimed specifically at IT have evolved to embrace greater territory.

Despite its youth, in recent years social networks have become a common and integral part of modern life. Social media appeared on the Internet 10 years ago, and at the time nobody could have predicted its success. Today, its influence on our lives is so great that the number of people participating in some social media outlets already exceeds the population of certain countries.

Leaders of technology companies should take change management more seriously. While this is also true of changes to requirements, products, and other elements normally handled by change-control systems, here we're talking about the type of change management that's associated with organizational change. Such change deals with altering what goes on inside an operation.