The KIT ─ Knowledge & Information Technology
No. 135 - 5 Jan 2015
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In This Issue
Happy New Year
Cutter 2015 Forecasts
DDS in Oil & Gas
Information Governance in Oil & Gas
Strong IT Teams
Alan Turing Institute
Seen Recently
Claude Baudoin

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Happy New Year!   

We wish our readers a happy and prosperous 2015. May your processes be managed, your data be secure, and your knowledge be retained!
We remind you that Issue 136 will appear on January 19, and we will be back to our regular schedule with issue 137 on February 2.

Cutter Consortium's 2015 Forecasts 

More Cutter consultant predictions have appeared since our last issue. You can find them all here. Here is a highly edited summary, so be sure to check the details and start 2015 on the right foot!
  • For Hillel Glazer, "agile" is going to impact organizations in general, not just IT
  • Scott Stribrny advocates the adoption of apprenticeships in software.
  • Yours truly, Claude Baudoin, called IoT a "reckless adolescent" - find out why! Jim Love was even more alarming, forecasting a "major IoT hack" in 2015. As for Jeffrey Kaplan, he focused on how IoT will change the role of IT.
  • Scott Ambler predicts that agile will come to data warehousing and business intelligence.
  • Mark Peterson sees a surge in demand for data protection assurances, and similarly Dennis Hogarth thinks the public will demand better privacy.
  • Claude Baudoin (again) thinks that secure collaboration in the cloud is possible; on the other hand, Ken Morris sees Software as a Service (SaaS) "losing some luster."
  • Richard Nolan lists 8 kinds of transformation initiatives in 2015.
  • Roger Evernden sees that the increasing maturity of Enterprise Architecture will lead practitioners to reassess and upgrade their role in the organization. Balaji Prasad made a similar prediction, and on a related note Claude Baudoin pointed out that Business Architecture is starting to "get some respect."
  • Murray Cantor and Israel Gat jointly extrapolated the software development method trends; for Tom Grant, we need to figure out what an "agile framework" really means.
  • David Spann looked into his crystal ball all the way to 2018-2019 and pointed out what qualities will allow companies to survive the next recession. Guess what? Keeping bad software is not a survival skill.
  • Carl Pritchard talked about the advantage of knowing how to leverage smaller workforces.

DDS in Oil & Gas   

In the last issue, reporting on the December meeting of the Industrial Internet Consortium, we mentioned emerging efforts to reconcile the entrenched use of OPC-UA and the qualities of the Data Distribution Service (DDS) in the Oil & Gas industry. One of the major vendors of DDS software, Real Time Innovations (RTI) has published some related information and a video on their Web site.
Information Governance in Oil & Gas
While we're talking about information in the O&G industry, the Southwest chapter of the American Institute for Information Management (AIIM) is having a "lunch & learn" session this Thursday, January 8, at the Hess Club in Houston, to present information governance benchmark metrics. The speaker will be Vickie Malis of Iron Mountain.
Characteristics of Strong IT Teams

A recent webinar held jointly by Forrester Research and Reveille Software -- one of those that make you wonder how much the software vendor is paying the analyst firm in order to get it to support their story -- was focused on the characteristics of successful Electronic Content Management (ECM) programs. Some of the remarks were insightful, some might seem obvious, but what we found interesting was that the critical success factors for an ECM team could really be applied to the entire IT organization. Here they are:

  • [The teams] establish governance that guides how they make decisions
  • They align to specific business objectives and metrics
  • They use agile methodologies
  • They collaborate across teams
  • They use sata and insights to improve applications
Lloyd's Register Gives to Alan Turing Institute
At the time when the general public is finally learning more about Alan Turing's work and life through the movie "The Imitation Game" movie, the Alan Turing Institute received a �10 million gift from the Lloyd's Register Foundation to research the use of "big data" techniques in engineering. The connection is simple: better analytics should reduce the risk of catastrophic infrastructure failures, which will decrease the potential impact on Lloyd's, the world leader in very large insurance contracts.
Seen Recently...

"in content management, the production-consumption distinction is worn out. People construct their knowledge iteratively in unkempt ways!"

-- Vince Kellen, CIO of the University of Kentucky, via Twitter (@vkellen)