We've all heard stories about critical plans that failed because some small detail was left out (they are good training anecdotes, and some make great Hollywood movies). Here's one.

The continuing escalation in the war against computer-based security threats, such as break-ins, malware, and viruses, threatens to obscure what has become the number one security weakness -- the individual. While there is a growing body of resources for combating machine-based attacks, the reality is that successful hacking based on social engineering is much more effective and potentially more devastating.

With the recent economic downturn, technology managers -- looking for ways to stretch their budgets -- are considering or reconsidering the option of moving some or all of their software development activities to locations where labor costs are less expensive. Many large multinationals have, with varying degrees of success, moved work to India, Eastern Asia, or Eastern Europe. Some of those decisions were based on the need for globalization, while others were purely for cost benefit.

Resistance to change is a natural outcome of the change process manifested in a variety of ways, ranging from passive resistance to open conflict and from decreasing work performance to employee absenteeism and turnover. Change must take place to allow organizations to adapt to their environment in order to remain competitive, and successful adaptation necessitates the willingness of its members to support change efforts.

A common practice for large enterprises is a process known as "optimization audits." These audits are designed to assess and recommend opportunities for making money or saving money with technology by looking at areas like applications, data, networks, organization, leadership, governance, and architecture.

In 2006, Cutter EA Practice Director Mike Rosen and I (Jeroen van Tyn) wrote an Executive Report that made the case for enterprise business architecture as requirements for enterprise architecture (EA) in general and for the use of business patterns as a way of articulating enterprise business architecture.1 In an E-Mail Advisor earlier this year, I presented a thumbnail case study of how discovering and articulating a business pattern had a significant impact on executive-level enterprise business decisions.

Is business intelligence (BI) and its byproducts meant for only large corporations? To a general audience, the answer looks like "yes." This is mostly due to the halo that has been spread around the BI and data warehousing (DW) world, which portrays the approach as "toys for the big enterprises." The benefits of BI and DW are invariably great both in terms of value and insights, but that does not mean these benefits should be beyond the reach of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Telecommuting was one of those gee-whiz possibilities that emerged when the Internet took off 10 years ago and the existence of pervasive, reliable connectivity suggested remote work scenarios in workers' imaginations. Since then, telecommuting has waxed and waned in popularity, but a new motivation having nothing to do with IT might ignite an operational and technical reexploration of the subject amongst managers. This Executive Update is designed to support managers in that exercise.

This Executive Update, the last in a three-part series, continues the discussion regarding approaches to implementing service-oriented architecture (SOA) standards and specifications used for enforcing WS-Security.

In January 2008, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey that asked 101 end-user organizations about their use of business performance management practices. The goal was to determine the degree to which companies are implementing business performance management techniques and technologies.

Who was it who said "Always multiply your estimates by a factor of four so that you will be known as a miracle worker"? It wasn't Jack Welch, it wasn't Andy Grove, and it wasn't even Tom Peters. This gem actually comes from an exchange between Captain Kirk and his crew in the movie Star Trek III.

The Internet is both a library and a laboratory. It is a place where existing knowledge is documented and new knowledge discovered. If there is one concept central to the idea of Web 2.0, it is the idea of "the wisdom of crowds," a phrase coined by James Surowiecki that serves as the title of his best-selling book in which he discusses the value of collective intelligence.

It's time to reorganize -- again.

This Executive Update, Part II in a three-part series, discusses approaches to implementing service-oriented architecture (SOA) standards and specifications used for enforcing WS-Security.

The purpose of this Update is to provide guidance and recommendations for securing the SOA infrastructure and further elaborates on the security concepts and standards discussed in Part I (Vol. 11, No. 4).

Is there a more structured way of introducing or managing a BI initiative, which cannot only meet the current enterprise needs at various levels but can also sustain the future BI initiatives, in a scalable, standardized, and integrated manner? The answer to this lies in a simple pre-BI initiative: a BI consulting exercise. This exercise is the best opportunity for an organization to assess its BI readiness and also to take itself to the higher levels of the BI maturity model. This Executive Update examines such an exercise.

Across the gamut of business activities and outputs, innovation is deemed a critical element in business today. Innovation can occur in processes, products/services, and strategy, and it may have varying degrees of novelty and impact, ranging from a completely new product or service to a small change resulting in minor efficiency gains in a business process.

Agile software development promises to build -- in a faster way -- quality software that closely meets the customer's needs. Hence, the methodology is a customer-centric way of doing business rather than simply a process to be followed. As such, agile software development requires a strong partnership with the customer, one that affects every decision in a project's lifecycle.

In the first two Executive Updates in this series (Vol. 5, Nos. 1 and 3), I described in general terms what an ombudsman is and provided a description of what a privacy ombudsman does.

Indian IT outsourcing firms are moving out into the world -- and to a location near you.

From time to time, we have all experienced the frustration associated with managing an individual or a team not performing up to its capabilities or to our expectations. A project is overbudget, or the software deliverable is late again. Our inner desire may be to rant and rave in an expression of anger and frustration. However, if you had restraint and found another way of handling the situation, chances are you were using a high level of emotional intelligence, otherwise known as EQ.

I field a lot of calls about how to go global. Recognizing that it's 2008 and Thomas L. Friedman's book The World Is Flat has been out for years, many of us are still struggling with how to extend our computing and communications infrastructures and architectures around the world, away from the proverbial "home office."

This Executive Update is the second in a two-part series based on the results of a recent Cutter survey on the use of enterprise application mashups in organizations. 1 In Part I (Vol. 11, No. 7), we evaluated the survey responses to determine the extent of mashup use in organizations. In general, while the survey shows that interest in mashups is high, few indicate that mashups are being implemented in response to business needs.

In January 2008, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey of 101 end-user organizations regarding their use of business performance management practices. The goal was to determine the degree to which companies are implementing business performance management techniques and technologies.

For those who have worked on numerous projects, it doesn't take long to tell when a project is being managed well or poorly. But what in particular makes one project manager better than another? What is it about those project managers that make a project work as smoothly as possible, but with other project managers, everything is a struggle? There's not one specific quality that makes a great project manager but a collection of qualities that needs to be balanced to meet the needs of each project.

I wrote a book proposal in 2003 that boldly announced that the Web was on the verge of a fundamental change from being a repository of documents to a source of knowledge. The Semantic Web, long discussed and theorized about, was on the verge of becoming mainstream, I wrote. The book found no publisher, and I graciously avoided the fate of so many prognosticators who find their predictions proved false (or premature) by the slow, plodding steps of history.