So as it looks like Oracle will get its acquisition of Sun approved with all the consequences of creating a second hardware and software combo player in the market (IBM being the first), and all of a sudden a third alternative arrives, the new HP and Microsoft team. But is all of this simple industry consolidation, or is more of a realignment to deal with the new technology and business market that is also emerging? …

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In the current turbulent trading conditions, it’s no surprise that business intelligence tops enterprise IT wish list. However, in this post, I want to try to dig in to what that really means. On one side of the issue, the use of data and information, an excellent series of posts have already been written by my friend Peter Evans-Greenwood. So it’s the other side I want to look at, the way people use information to …

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I have this recurring sensation that I’m working in two increasingly different universes. Discussions with business managers are different to discussions with IT managers on one hand. On the other, discussions with people who understand web architecture (meaning solutions driven from the user’s perspective) are very different to a discussion with IT folks. It’s not that either side is wrong, they are just standing in the same place and looking in different directions, and that …

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In a recent article by Reena Jana, Business Week spotlighted the concept of ‘Jugaad’, a Hindi slang word for doing things ‘fast and cheap’ by using innovation to get around conventional barriers and focusing on exactly what the real need is rather than the more aspirational requirement that may be the starting point. As an approach to building and delivering IT requirements in the current tough economic period this is of course immediately recognisable as …

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