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Agility, the Personal Cloud, and Complex Analytics on the Horizon

Brian Dooley | Dec 15, 2012 No Responses

Dec 152012

Agility, the Personal Cloud, and Complex Analytics on the Horizon

Predictions are always difficult in interesting times, because tomorrow’s concepts depend upon activity which has not yet occurred. We expected flying cars; we are getting autonomous cars. In the 1950s, the computer revolution, robotics, GPS, and today’s traffic patterns would have been difficult to envision. Today, we are seeing rapid evolution across Information and Communications Technology, affecting every component and every meme. But we can see the direction that some areas of recent concentration are likely to take. Concepts of Agility will continue to evolve, moving beyond specific processes such as Scrum toward more comprehensive programs capable of incorporating a wider variety of projects, under more conditions and supporting greater integration with governance. This can …

Cloud Standards and SLAs

Claude Baudoin | Dec 14, 2012 No Responses

Dec 142012

Until now, cloud service providers have essentially proposed to their users the equivalent of those click-through terms of service that people accept because they don’t have a choice. As for the standards that would make it less risky to adopt a cloud service, by making it easier to integrate with or to migrate to a different provider, they have been vendor-driven and highly technical; these standards are necessary but not sufficient. In 2013, look forward to more user involvement in prioritizing the standards development effort, and to the emergence of practical advice to negotiate more balance SLAs and User Agreements. In the area of performance and reliability, providers will have to stop hiding behind the …

Development Paradigm Shift over Zombie Apocalypse

Scott Ambler | Dec 13, 2012 1 Response

Dec 132012

Development Paradigm Shift over Zombie Apocalypse

Due to the uncertainty of our times, I’m going to make two predictions. First, the world will come to an end on December 21st, exactly as the Mayans DID NOT predict hundreds of years ago. Granted, the Mayan calendar runs out on the 21st but to be quite frank my calendar runs out every year on December 31st and the world has still gone on despite of that dire prediction. The Mayan calendar myth dates back to the mid-1970s, a time when we were seeing Sasquatches in every forest, aliens eviscerating cows in every farm field, and chariots of the gods in the skies of South America. At that time we were also doing prodigious …

The Rise of the Collaborative Frankenstein?

David Coleman | Dec 12, 2012 1 Response

Dec 122012

The Rise of the Collaborative Frankenstein?

Just as the monster Frankenstein was put together from pieces and parts of many people, so are some of the enterprise collaboration vendors. For example, Jive just acquired Meetings.io, and Producteev to add videoconferencing and task management. Salesforce.com is another vendor that is building a collaborative Frankenstein, as is VMware, and others. The idea is that as these vendors acquire smaller companies and fold them into their framework, they begin to add more and more collaborative functionality: IM, activity streams, integration with social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), audio/video/data conferencing, online meetings (permanent or temporary). As each piece is added to the framework, unfortunately, the tools and the overall suites tend to become more complex, and require …

2013: More Turbulence and, Sadly, More “Back to the Future”

Bob Benson | Dec 11, 2012 No Responses

Dec 112012

2013: More Turbulence and, Sadly, More “Back to the Future”

Last year I wrote about the effect of turbulence on us IT folks and, more importantly, to the business/government users of IT. So has “turbulence” and its cousin “uncertainty” been reduced as we peer into 2013? Let’s see: political direction (in the US: more or less taxes; more or less government regulation; health care; less gridlock; sequestration; Europe; regulations’; the imminent beginning of the 2014/2016 campaigns)? Huh. Don’t see anything much resolved here. Let’s see: economy (Europe again; individual European states e.g., France, Greece; impact of US energy independence; consumer spending? taxes again)? Oh, maybe a little more direction can be seen –- but not much. Let’s see: technology (products/services; Cloud, et al; all the …

The End of Work Creeps a Bit Closer

Robert Charette | Dec 7, 2012 8 Responses

Dec 072012

My prediction for 2013 concerns the end of work for most of us — which may not necessarily be a good thing. Back in 1995, social activist and economist Jeremy Rifkin wrote a controversial book called The End of Work in which he argued that both blue and white collar jobs across the globe were increasingly becoming the private preserve of information technology intensive systems. Rifkin claimed that “software surrogates” were leading to a steady and permanent decline in the number and types of jobs that humans could do better. The inevitable question society soon had to face, he argued, was what actions were urgently needed to deal with the end of work as we understood it. …

2013: Lean Concepts Such as Strategic Value, Operational Kanban Will Begin to Transform Enterprises

James Sutton | Dec 5, 2012 No Responses

Dec 052012

2013: Lean Concepts Such as Strategic Value, Operational Kanban Will Begin to Transform Enterprises

Last year I predicted that enterprises would take an increasingly holistic systems view. I said “they will take an increasingly strategic view of improvement, coordinating change across divisions and functions to achieve a higher overall level of performance. This trend is reversing [of] short-term, every-division-for-itself fractionalization…[so that] the Enterprise, at the end of 2012, will look more like an effective, coordinated whole and less like a collection of disparate…parts.” This happened as predicted. One of the best indicators of it is the rapid acceleration since that time of “reverse offshoring” or “inshoring.” Reverse offshoring is the return of business from lower labor-cost nations where it had been transferred in previous years. Offshoring is a useful …

Culture, Culture, Culture

Johanna Rothman | Dec 2, 2012 1 Response

Dec 022012

Here’s the bad news: As more and more moves to the cloud, expect more security breaches. We do way too much in security theater now. My merchant account provider makes me change my secure password every x days no matter where I am, even if I am in a hotel, on not-so-secure public network. Security theater. This will only get worse. More and more organizations will jump on the water-scrum-fall bandwagon. Oh, they will claim they are doing agile, but they are not. The more they are addicted to their enterprise architects, their lack of project dashboards, their tracking of project hours, and their need to predict project cost so they can manage the project …

The New Darlings of the Globe

Carl Pritchard | Nov 30, 2012 No Responses

Nov 302012

It’s not going to be a pretty year ahead, unless you’re in the “doom and gloom” business. As one of the “risk guys,” I’m in a sweet spot for the year ahead, but I don’t think I have a lot of company. I believe a lot of businesses are going to retrench even more deeply, hoarding capital and waiting for some semblance of stability in terms of business regulation. I don’t believe that stability will be forthcoming, which means that the money that has been holed up for several years now will begin to find its way off shore. This makes for an interesting year ahead for the folks outside the States and outside the …

Mobile Goes Mobile

Mike Rosen | Nov 29, 2012 1 Response

Nov 292012

For years I’ve been writing about and implementing a multi-channel, multi-device, n-tier architecture and often would say “I don’t know what the next device is going to be, but I’m sure there’s going to be one, and this architecture will allow us to be prepared”. Well, I think that era is upon us now and I’m ready to predict what the next device will be: It’s your car. New cars these days are equipped with multiple computers, multifunction touch screens, voice recognition, GPS, and much more. So where are we prepared for this, and where will we need to think differently? Architecturally (if we have done things right in the past) we should be ready …

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The Rise of the Collaborative Frankenstein?

2013: More Turbulence and, Sadly, More “Back to the Future”

The End of Work Creeps a Bit Closer

2013: Lean Concepts Such as Strategic Value, Operational Kanban Will Begin to Transform Enterprises

Culture, Culture, Culture

The New Darlings of the Globe

Mobile Goes Mobile

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