It took some organising to meet with each of these vendors for a briefing on their views in the course of a single week in the Bay area, but it really does work in terms of being able to make comparisons. Not competitive comparisons of the products, but comparisons between their vision of how the next couple of years will develop and how that affects the way they are designing their products and solution capabilities. …

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There seems to be a number of people doing some pretty serious thinking at the moment. On the one side there are CIOs and business managers grappling with some very real challenges and on the other some very good work on identifying the key factors that underlie these challenges. I think the playing field for CIOs was pretty well defined by the phrase; ‘Business Process Management, Service-Oriented Architecture, and Web 2.0; (is this a) Business …

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Architecture has claimed its place in the IT landscape over recent years as the need to understand how increasingly integrated environments, if not entire enterprises, fit together. Unfortunately, rather like standards, we now have a number of options as to which architecture method to follow. Even worse we increasingly find we need a lighter weight solution approach that will span more than one architectural model. This sounds like a cue for making life more difficult …

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We all know the question, but who knows the answer? I got asked it again this week which is what made me try to capture this point. The most common response would seem to be ‘I will know it when I see it’, which suggests business success is based on ‘getting lucky’. As you might expect business schools don’t agree with this and as A G Lafley, author of several works on the topic comments: …

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It seems fitting in a week when Facebook reportedly overtook Google as the most visited site on the Internet to try to revisit exactly why social networks are rapidly becoming the transforming force for business created by the new era of technology (whatever we define that technology era to be based on, or to include; i.e cloud, web 2.0, mobility, collaboration, etc). But first back to the report by HitWise who analyse numbers of web …

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