In the 1920s the wonderful science fiction writer Edgar Rice Burroughs published a pretty weird but fascinating book called The Land that Time Forgot. It reminds me quite a bit of where we are with most business application software in the CRM space. In the book the era is post-The Great War, and in the story two enemies, [...]

2/22/2012 3:40:56 PM

—————————————————————————————————- And now for something really special. My colleague Ant Allan has written a blog on the recent NIST moves to fund alternatives to passwords. Enjoy! —————————————————————————————————- So, NIST intends to provide tens of millions of dollars in funding for people to develop and commericalize something better than legacy passwords, as part of the National [...]

2/22/2012 2:54:59 PM

Yesterday I had a very interesting conversation with somebody from a large IT vendor, who was interested to know what we were hearing from our clients after the webinar that we run and the many research notes that we published between December and February. I had to admit that I had very few inquiries and [...]

2/22/2012 11:57:58 AM

Last Thursday, David Mario Smith and I delivered a webinar titled “Taking A Strategic Approach to Social Media.” During the webinar we asked the attendees three questions about their social media initiatives. Here are the results from those polls. Question: How would you characterize your organization’s social media initiatives? 234 people answered this question. 20% – [...]

2/21/2012 10:34:59 PM

Recently it dawned on me that processes seem to traverse cultures in ways that language can’t. We would all pretty much agree that art and music appeal to the human in us all and tends to communicate at a level that linguistics doesn’t. There is a parallel between processes and art and/or music. The Thesis: [...]

2/21/2012 7:25:47 PM

I’ve been thinking about “Addressgate.” Watching the conversations flow. And it was an interchange between Nishant and Eric that finally trigger this post and these questions – who is responsible for the use of an API? Who should the market hold accountable for using a provided-API in a way that provides an unwanted surprise on [...]

2/21/2012 4:52:41 PM

A few days ago it was announced that on February 21st Italian minister would publish their incomes as part of what is called “Operation Transparency”. This actually happened but: Not all ministers complied (including the prime minister) The information is hidden as a link on the left hand side of the page with each minister’s [...]

2/21/2012 1:58:53 PM

Ronald Reagan’s shadow looms big in the American political scene, and a favorite saying of his was: doveryai, no proveryai; in English: “Trust but Verify” – relating to the START arms agreements that he signed with the then USSR. I think that in IT we have a similar stance on many fronts of security, integrity, [...]

2/21/2012 12:40:59 PM

After a tendering process started in late 2011, the UK Cabinet Office selected over 250 vendors providing about 1700 services that government agencies can choose from in order to meet their cloud needs. Yesterday it opened its cloud store. The store, which admittedly in its early stages, allows to browse services by type (IaaS, PaaS, [...]

2/21/2012 10:01:28 AM

Stuxnet. Duku. DigiNotar. Commodo.  The names of exploits and breached organizations reel past like dark clouds of a gathering storm. Cybersecurity programs spread ominously around the world. I’ve seen the importance of international cyberweapons control for some time and wondered why more people weren’t talking about it. But recently, a new voice from the other [...]

2/20/2012 10:03:47 PM

Building executive and business presence in your company is a concern of CIOs and IT professionals because it is important and hard to do.  This post is one in an occasional series about relationship building at the executive level.  The question for today is – If I want to build a relationship with top management [...]

2/20/2012 10:31:23 PM

Industry analysts discuss emerging concepts and current events with journalists. We are misquoted more than you might think (or we would like). Sometimes the misquote is minor. On occasion, the statement attributed to us differs materially from our original statement; we are inclined to speak out and make a correction. Misquotes can be the result [...]

2/19/2012 9:39:27 PM

Many vendors rely upon their support annuity stream for their very survival. Renewal revenue is also the foundation of growth. Without it, vendors must find and win a continuous flow of new business just to stand still. “Service stickiness” is a measure of the ability of a provider to retain its customers. Minimising revenue leakage [...]

2/19/2012 3:58:00 PM

Interesting piece in today’s NY Times (and reprinted in the Boston Globe), recounting how Boston Beer’s Jim Koch bypassed the traditional IPO route in 1995 to offer stock in his company directly to consumers (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/your-money/an-ipo-process-that-is-customer-friendly.html?scp=1&sq=sam%20adams%20ipo&st=cse). [Disclosure: I own a small stock position in Boston Beer.] Google did a similar thing in 2004 with its modified [...]

2/19/2012 6:14:43 PM

With all due respect to William Ury and his negotiating strategy book “Getting to Yes,” the difficulty faced by owners of governance projects in organizations not used to governance is how to get to the point that saying “no” is feasible and actually works. After all, you don’t need to do anything with governance if [...]

2/17/2012 11:41:43 PM

I don’t blog a lot about security.  I leave that to the security experts like John Pescatore and others.  But recently in the last three weeks security has become a question raised by CIOs and business leaders. Security is a big issue related to technology given recent security lapses at high profile companies and ongoing [...]

2/17/2012 6:19:48 PM

This morning I spent some time listening in on a hearing on DHS monitoring of social networking and media. The hearing was held by the US Congressional Sub-committee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, chaired by Patrick Meehan. Transcripts of the testimony are available here ( http://homeland.house.gov/hearing/subcommittee-hearing-dhs-monitoring-social-networking-and-media-enhancing-intelligence ) as well as a video playback of the hearing. [...]

2/17/2012 4:01:55 AM

I own a lot of books.  Our family library (an enclosed bay of our garage) is lined floor to ceiling with shelves sagging under the weight of a few thousand cloth-bound volumes.  I’m also an avid fan of electronic readers. At one time or another, I have owned just about every eReader ever produced. Last [...]

2/17/2012 12:16:20 AM

I’m tired of hearing quotes like “cloud is completely different from traditional IT” as well as those that say “cloud is just like outsourcing, mainframes, etc.” Those who like the former quote will sometimes add that organizations should scrap all the tools they use for traditional IT and buy new tools for the cloud.  Those [...]

2/16/2012 11:25:19 PM

The BPM summit in London looks to be full of new knowledge, information and workshops for picking up tips. I am really looking forward to spending time with the folks who attend. I hope to sample a few pints as well   Based on the active rate of sign ups, it should be a good [...]

2/16/2012 11:14:35 PM

One of my main goals for research in 2012 is to help round out some of the areas in monitoring which don’t get enough published research or attention here at Gartner. I will be focusing on some vnedor landscapes which will allow us to publish some more actionable advice to those clients looking to invest [...]

2/16/2012 5:12:28 PM

We’ve been having a raging debate internally about the emergence of new working relationships between employers and workers. We’ve read, for example, that in Germany “According to a survey conducted by the IG Metall union, more than 70 percent of companies in the electrical and metal industry in Baden-Württemberg now use such <temporary, project-based> contracts, [...]

2/16/2012 6:21:47 PM

I want to start each post in my new “Social Network for Business: Etiquette” series with a quick one liner about why I am doing this: too many people in business (marketers, you are the #1 culprit) very obviously to users on the social networks, do not understand the medium they are working with. No [...]

2/15/2012 7:21:27 PM

Other than some analysis and speculation about how the takedown changed traffic patterns without actually reducing global piracy, and regular reports about the legal status of Kim Dotcom, the Megaupload drama hasn’t provided much in the way of news for a couple of weeks. On the theory that putting the string ‘Megaupload’ into the title of [...]

2/15/2012 10:00:16 PM

Cloud computing has become an important element of every enterprise IT provider’s business strategy and it is long past time to treat “a cloud [as] water vapor,” as Oracle CEO Larry Ellison famously said in 2009. Even Oracle is now well-entrenched in the cloud war through both acquisition and internal initiatives. Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and [...]

2/15/2012 7:09:46 PM

Gary Hamel’s new book What Matters Now is a different type of business, leadership and management book.  Where most offer single dimensional prescriptive recipes for success, Hamel has provided a thoughtful, deep and readily accessible look at the current state of business, management, capitalism and society. What Matters Now treats the reader as an intelligent, [...]

2/15/2012 4:56:33 PM

While I would hope that the CEO of a major technology firm (albeit a somewhat diminished firm in this case) does not have a copy of the root password, the idea of 'executive privilege' maybe needs to be rethought.

2/15/2012 2:00:26 AM

I have had 4 1/2 great years with the Gartner BPM team. It’s been fun shaping the research, meeting everyone at the conferences and writing research. I’m sad to leave good friends and wonderful collegues.  The good news is that I will be at all the Gartner BPM Summits this year! I’m now onto my next [...]

2/14/2012 11:50:48 PM

Today organizations can’t deliver great products fast enough to meet client demands and competitive pressures. To make matters worse, new products have to hit the ground running without flaws. We live in a demanding world that is getting more demanding; not less. Business rules can be leveraged to quickly configure products and services quickly and [...]

2/14/2012 11:10:30 PM

According to Wikipedia, inversion of control (IoC) is an object-oriented programming practice whereby the object coupling is bound at run time by an “assembler” object and are typically not knowable at compile time using static analysis. The binding process is achieved through dependency injection. In practice, Inversion of Control is a style of software construction [...]

2/14/2012 7:31:54 PM