The Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Computing, has said that it will be offering the first Online Master of Science degree in computer science (OMS CS) that can be earned completely through the massive open online course (MOOC) format. The degree will be provided via the Udacity MOOC platform, with support from AT&T.

Students enrolled in the program will pay a fraction of the cost of traditional on-campus master's programs; total tuition for the program is initially expected to be below $7,000.

OMS CS courses will be available free of charge on the Udacity site, but only those students granted admission to Georgia Tech will receive credit. Georgia Tech and Udacity also will develop a separate credential for those students who successfully complete courses but do not qualify for full graduate standing.

A pilot program is scheduled to begin late this year. Initial enrolment will be limited to a few hundred students recruited from AT&T and Georgia Tech corporate affiliates, but will expand gradually over the next three years, according to Georgia Tech.

AT&T is providing financial support to help address the nation's growing shortage of qualified workers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields.

Udacity now offers a range of tuition-free IT and computer science MOOCs, including computer science 101, Java programming, software testing, and artificial intelligence.

Interestingly as well, Big Blue also made the link between its big data (a petabyte's worth now managed in the cloud) and the cloud. The net result so far: $25 million saved over a five-year period. Seventy percent of IBM's employees use the cloud, too, the company said.

That's the gist of a new story from Todd R Weiss, which has interesting echoes of the service-orientation movement. That is, rather than reinvent the wheel each time a service needs to be deployed, tap into the repository of existing services, and reuse them in other functions or processes.

On a different scale, mobile apps can also get reused for different purposes. Weiss cited the example of Justin Miller, co-founder of WedPics.com, who reported that he has received a lot of corporate and individual interest in adapting the app for non-wedding purposes.

IBM, for one, thought the app, which collects smartphone photos from wedding guests into an online account, would be useful at its conferences. The challenge, Miller said, is adding marketing and scaling to promote the app deeper into the enterprise market.

SOA calls for more expansive thinking early on in development projects, with consideration of how a service can and will be shared. Perhaps today's generation of app developers can adopt this thinking as well.

That's the word from Gartner, which just issued a prediction that 38 percent of companies expect to stop providing devices to workers by 2016. The consultancy foresees organizations even pulling back on reimbursements. Today, Gartner said, roughly half of BYOD programs provide a partial reimbursement, and full reimbursement for all costs will become rare. "Coupling the effect of mass market adoption with the steady declines in carrier fees, employers will gradually reduce their subsidies, and as the number of workers using mobile devices expands, those who receive no subsidy whatsoever will grow," Gartner predicts.

The key is to keep things as simple as possible, said Gartner analyst David Willis:

The enterprise should subsidize only the service plan on a smartphone. What happens if you buy a device for an employee, and they leave the job a month later? How are you going to settle up? Better to keep it simple. The employee owns the device, and the company helps to cover usage costs.

In a separate report, the consultancy predicts the rise of back-end cloud services (platform as a service) that will support mobile application development projects — creating some chaos in IT departments. In the next three years, Gartner said, 40 percent of mobile application development projects will leverage cloud back-end services, "causing development leaders to lose control of the pace and path of cloud adoption within their enterprises".

These cloud services — referred to by some as "mobile back end as a service" — provide back-end capabilities, such as user management, data storage, push notifications, social network integration, and even server-side code.

Conceivably, business users outside of IT will also begin using these services to develop their own apps — especially with the emergence of visual app builders and other forms of rapid mobile application development tools. It all sounds intriguing, but Gartner analysts are expressing concern about the data security implications of these services:

The programmer develops mobile applications using familiar storage programming mechanisms, and the cloud service acts as a black box that stores and retrieves the data as necessary. But as the use of cloud services by mobile applications grows, the challenge of governing the security and use of sensitive corporate data also grows. Left ungoverned, this results in the hidden movement of potentially sensitive data to the cloud, and the possibility of inadequate security.

The consultancy advocates stronger governance of this process, especially since non-IT types will increasingly be part of the mix. Such governance needs to occur at the organization level, beyond what any particular mobile application development platform offers. "Clear policies must be established and communicated to developers prior to the use of cloud mobile back-end services by applications that may access corporate or customer data," said Gartner's Gordon Van Huizen. "It is, therefore, necessary to extend awareness of the issues to the broader organization, as well as the organization's policies for cloud services, so that mobile applications built outside IT are subject to the same oversight and governance as those built within IT."

These issues echo the challenges — and questions — that arose with the advent of "Web 2.0", with the availability of enterprise mashups and other approaches that potentially enabled user-created front-end apps. It's in organizations' best interests to allow creativity and innovation to flourish, as this is what helps build new lines of business. At the same time, there has to be someone watching the back end to guard against security abuses.

That's one of the takeaways from a keynote presentation at the IBM Impact conference taking place this week. IT executives from Target provided details on how they have been employing service-oriented architecture techniques to bring together the store chain's various customer engagement channels.

To keep up with customer demands for mobile capabilities, "Target needed to unlock our core technology assets," said Kim Skanson, senior director of enterprise architecture for Target. "We cannot simply tear them down while we're running critical business functions. This is what led Target down the path to unlock our core functionality via reusable services. By unlocking core functionality, mobile demands are much faster met."

Target's challenge was to simplify multiple point-to-point connections between systems and customer channels, added Keith Tanski, director of enterprise architecture at Target. The store chain's challenge to provide product attributes consistently across all its channels. "We put in place reusable services. A large part of our business processing runs on the mainframe. One of the ways we exposed that platform was through IBM MessageBroker. By providing the basic building blocks upfront, we can meet fast-moving requirements across the various channels." This includes enhanced mobile-based services for customers that access Target's back-end systems.

Skanson shared Target's lessons for reusable services:

• Seek progress over perfection: "This path is beyond intimidating, but you need to start the journey, and trust that even small steps forward are progress," she said.

• Build for resiliency: "Inevitably, increased reusability creates increased need for uptime."

• Communicate early and often.

Disclosure: IBM is helping to cover Joe McKendrick's expenses to attend Impact.

That's the theme coming out of IBM's annual "Impact" conference this week. Interestingly, IBM has adopted a new mantra, "mobile first", which suggests that all connections across the enterprise eventually lead to mobile devices.

IBM VP Robert LeBlanc pointed out that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are now generated each day. He also pointed out that there are now 9.6 billion devices across the globe.

The huge stream of data is now reshaping even the most industrial companies to rethink their businesses.

Ford Motor Company, for one, no longer considers itself an automobile manufacturer. Ford is now a software company. Vijay Sanakaran, director of application development for Ford, spoke at the IBM event, pointing out that the latest Ford Fusion model has 16 million lines of code, and most cars produced today have 70 microprocessors connected to hundreds of sensors and actuators that have thousands of multiplexer signals. On-board processes supported include customer safety, adaptive cruise control, and parallel parking assist.

If you think about who we are, we're a 100-plus year-old automotive company. And we've really had to change our leadership from automotive engineering to a leadership around software engineering. That's a pretty profound change for us. If you think about the overall ecosystem for the automobile, we really have to think about how we design build software inside the vehicle to the highest degree of quality. If you think about the technology as a user interface, it changes how we think about all the new product design and features ... software has just been a huge change for us.

Interestingly, Sankaran pointed out that Ford sees its mission to employ design to deliver "a mobile digital lifestyle". To achieve this, the company oversees a software supply chain, works to enable collaboration between developers and designers, and build off a plug-and-plug architecture that allows the company to leverage partners' software solutions. 

Disclosure: IBM helped cover Joe McKendrick's expenses to attend Impact. He also moderated a panel discussion with several IBM and customer executives on standardizing and opening up the cloud.

Trevor McKendrick (no relation that I'm aware of, honest!) just posted an interesting account of his year in the app business. Trevor built and launched a Spanish Bible mobile app for the iPhone in April 2012, and has so far netted more than $73,000 — after Apple's cut. The total development cost was $500.

The first version of the app was fairly basic, but, as demand grew, he was able to release a more polished update. He also released an audio version as a follow-on.

The takeaway here is that many online services — including those consumed by enterprises — are being independently produced by developers, and being made available in an open market type of environment. ABI Research estimates that the app economy will hit $25 billion this year. Call them "micro-ISVs" — representing a new attitude and opportunity, reshaping the way applications and services are being brought out to the world.

That's the view of Nelson Kunkel, director with Deloitte Consulting LLP, who explained in a recently published video that design thinking is increasingly becoming part of enterprise IT. Design thinking is flourishing as part of industrial design and architecture, but many IT leaders are recognizing that well-designed systems can deliver improved performance in the IT sphere as well.

"We're seeing design as a way of thinking, we're seeing design as a process that can be shared ... to make what the enterprise produces much better for the people who use them," said Kunkel.

The consumerization of IT has raised user expectations for simpler, well-designed interfaces to enterprise applications as well. Design thinking needs to go deeper than the user interface layer. This extends from "the application of the visual layer down through the application layer and into the functionality of the systems and the tools that we create", he said.

In a related article, Kunkle provided a blueprint for moving to design thinking, which is based on multidisciplinary teams from across the enterprise.

As an example of design thinking in IT, Kunkel said that the act of walking into an airport and checking into a flight should ultimately happen automatically and seamlessly, without the need to constantly log into systems, such as smartphones and kiosks. "The ultimate design is simple. It's the pursuit of transparency. The ultimate design just works."

For those who want to learn more about design thinking, Stanford's School of Design has posted a 90-minute "Virtual Crash Course in Design Thinking".

Enterprises that take an architectural approach to integration already have an advantage in that their organizations can more seamlessly accept new applications, interfaces, and data types without turning the IT department upside down with one-off projects. That was the essence of a recent webcast, in which I had the opportunity to join Dr Claudia Imhoff, John Schmidt, vice president of global integration services at Informatica, and Chris Parsons, senior solutions manager at Informatica, in a discussion of what a next-generation data integration architecture can bring to the table.

One of the questions Chris, moderator and host of the event, put to us was, basically, "why now?" What has changed that makes data integration so urgent? Here's my take:

The global economy has drastically changed the business landscape. There's no longer such a thing as a huge, stable business with fixed departments, steady product lines, and fixed revenues. Rather, the organization of today is a constantly evolving entity. Teams are assembled to solve problems or tackle new opportunities, then disassembled. New business units are formed or purchased, and others are spun off or dissolved.

Today's organizations are "loosely coupled" businesses, structured as sets of services either created and maintained in-house or brokered through outside service providers.

With this fluid state of existence, applications and data need to be constantly re-assigned, re-allocated, or repurposed to ever-changing processes and workflows. Data needs to be brought in from a newly acquired business unit, applied to new applications, or merged within a new data model.

Bigness, originality, or even nimbleness doesn't win the game in business anymore. Products and services are too easy to copy. The business that succeeds in today's global economy is a smart business, capable of employing data analytics that will enable it to know what customers want and what's around the corner in the marketplace. An organization can't achieve this with fragmented views from one department or another — it needs a well-rounded, holistic view of its surroundings. It needs to be able to sense and respond to any and all threats and opportunities.    

Disclosure: Joe McKendrick was compensated for his participation in the webcast.

That's the view of "Lean IT" guru Steve Bell, who recently released a video of his keynote speech at the European Lean IT Summit in Paris last year.

The lean philosophy is intended to being the creative (development) and operations sides of the house together, he explains. "These two are fundamentally different. When I'm speaking to a lean audience that comes from a traditional lean mfg background, I think many of us miss this. The success of Toyota is as much responsible for the success of the Toyota development system as it is for the production system. One side achieved operational excellence, the other is focused on development and innovation. The two synchronize so well, and that is what allows Toyota to bring out a Prius from conception to launch in about two years."

The two sides are fundamentally different, and this has implications for devops initiatives, Bell continues. "It's about certainty. On the operational excellence side, we're trying to find things that can be standardized and repeatable. On the development side, it's about leveraging uncertainty.

"If you talk to an agile person, and say: 'Quality at the source, do it right the first time,' they'll look at you and say: 'No, you've got to fail fast early and often. You have to learn from your mistakes, and settle on what works.'"

On the development side, things need to be creative, unstructured and somewhat uncertain. On the production side, standardization is key, and variation is to be avoided at all costs. So how do we bring these two sides together? By adopting lean principles, Bell said. "By working together, by learning together. There is learning in the production process, and there is certainly process in the creative process."

Bell provided the following advice for moving to Lean IT:

1. Do not focus on costs: "Isn't that what everybody was focused on over the past four years?" Bell said. "I can guarantee you can lose a pound of weight. If you want to lose a pound, you give a pound of blood. Losing weight by cutting costs in IT is very simple. Fire people, cut projects, reduce the service levels. Are we healthy? Are we bouncing back? Are we overburdened? Do we have the time for continuous improvement? Of course not."

2. Build in "slack time": "One of the principle ways that a company like Toyota continually improves over time, and drives stability up is that every time employees are presented a problem, they are not only given the time, but they are required to stop the line. And not only fix whatever's wrong, but prevent it from happening again. Only by doing that can you improve over time, so that you have fewer interruptions, fewer line stops." Otherwise, Bell explained, people are too afraid to stop production for quality issues because they're afraid they'll get into trouble for not meeting production quotas. "If you plan slack for the day, that doesn't mean you wasted that time," he said. "I guarantee that time will be used constructively in some way. If you don't stop thinking that everybody being busy is a measure of success, then ... you're on the wrong road. But it's a very hard mental model to break."

3. Develop people through continuous coaching and learning: "Develop people before you develop software," said Bell, cautioning that this "takes a deliberate and sustained investment in time. And it will not happen its own. It will [be] squeezed out by more urgent things, but not more important things."

4. Know your value streams and who owns them: Bell likened the owners to orchestra conductors.

5. Keep it simple: Often, businesses will call in developers to write or deploy more software to solve a problem. However, Bell said, "One of the principles that gets lost in the Agile Manifesto is when you talk to someone who truly gets the spirit of agile, the agile person will say: 'No, I'm here to prevent more software from being written. I'm here to help you simplify your process. The agile mentality is to write less code, rather than to write more code faster."

6. Make it visual: Bell said the Kanban board, which provides a visual diagram of scheduling in a lean manufacturing environment, is a great tool for dev-ops as well. "In software teams, in IT operations, the moment they can put sticky notes, and visualize demand and work in process and problems and velocity, you have given them the ability to see where their problems. Until then it's just a jumble in their heads. It's up to us to help them see through that jumble."

7. "Think backward from customer value, not forward from IT capabilities": As Bell explained, "until you really know what's it like to be a customer of yourself, all you have in your head is a hypotheses. If you think you know what it means to be a customer, you need to experience that."

8. Embrace uncertainty: "Somehow we come together, with a purpose as a team," Bell said.

That's the view of Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond, speaking at the recent EclipseCon 2013 conference in Boston. A summary of Hammond's talk is provided in a new post by TechTarget's James Denman.

One of the advantages SOA brings to organizations is the ability to abstract important parts of applications as reusable, standardized services that can be run in any and all connecting systems. The emergence of these flexible service layers means architects, developers, and even business users can more readily put together new business workflows and processes without the need to rewire or rewrite underlying applications.

For example, marketing may want to try out a new promotion, and require access to the CRM and financial system to provide special discounts. If the promotion fizzles after a couple of weeks, the only labor lost was in linking interfaces to the services —versus the time IT may have spent writing new code.

Hammond pointed to such capabilities in his talk:

The cost of starting up a software architecture improvement project has gone down significantly, and that means large application development organizations can afford to start more projects on a shorter budget ... Even the projects that have to be shut down will teach the organization something, if the company is prepared to learn from its mistakes.

Such testing may even include sophisticated analysis, such as "multivariate testing and examining the interactions of complex traffic routes". As a result, Hammond said enterprise architects are increasingly expanding their roles from artists to engineers to scientists.

Indeed, as more organizations embrace analytics, they are turning to data science to explore and understand the results of their experiments. And enterprise architects are finding themselves working side by side with data scientists. The greatest innovations are a result of a lot of failures, and if organizations have the ability to fail —cheaply —they won't fear innovation as much as they do.

InfoWorld's Eric Knorr just uncovered another example of a non-IT company morphing into a cloud provider, part of the increasingly blurry lines between service providers and consumers.

Milliman, a large independent actuarial and consulting firm, is now a cloud provider, and calls it for what it is:

"If you talked to me four years ago, I suspect I would not have envisioned myself sitting on stage today, saying I'm a cloud service provider," Van Beach, product manager at Millman, told Eric. "But that's really what we are, and I think we're doing pretty well at it."

Milliman initially moved a risk management application to Microsoft's Windows Azure public cloud in 2010 to handle spikes in its workload. The project took on a life of its own as the company moved more functionality, such as workflow, into the cloud — functionality that it extends to its client base.

"What began as public cloud approach to address a problem of variable workloads quickly morphed into an opportunity to take multiple activities related to the actuarial process — previously scattered across client desktops — and centralize and secure them in the public cloud. As a result, Beach said, Milliman can now offer a solution that exists nowhere else in the industry today."

In looking at the coming revolution in BI and analytics, the question that needs to be asked is: "Are we still viewing 21st century organizations through a 1990s window?"

Analytics guru Tom Davenport, for one, still believes that we still are caught in the 1990s, so to speak, with analytics still in the domain of the quants and statisticians.

Plus, the BI interfaces decision makers still use are two-dimensional charts — and even simple spreadsheets.

Here are the four trends shaking up BI as we've known it:

Visual analytics

Some also refer to this as "3D data visualization." Perhaps even 4D would be a better way to describe it, since it enables a look across time — the fourth dimension.

Visual analytics provides something more powerful than 2D charts, and providing deeper understanding. They are typically interactive, 3D diagrams that enable decision-makers to see at a glance what is trending.

A stunning example of visual analytics is Google's work-in-progress, a 3D map of the universe called, "100,000 Stars." It enables you to zoom in on our solar system, and then zoom over to the closest adjoining star and it's solar system. Click on specific stars and planets, and you will get a brief description.

Imagine similar visualizations for business problem and opportunity areas, and you get what I mean — it's out of this world. You can plot your data points, as well as even plot time to see how trends unfold.

You already see this with those weather maps that move two, three days into the future. It turns the data into a physical object that you can view from different angles or timespans. It really brings data alive, and drives home any points that need to be made.

Unstructured data

Unstructured data is a vast, vast unrealized and untapped natural resource. When I say unrealized, I mean everyone recognizes it's out there, and it's a rich vein to be mined, but many executives maybe sitting right on top of the gold without even realizing it's down there.

The ability to extract insights from unstructured data — which is the essence of Big Data — represents opportunities for real business returns. The insights that lie in Big Data are key to competitiveness in today's economy — offering insights to predict market shifts, understand customer behavior, optimize supply chains, and develop product innovations.

Executives, managers and professionals who are able to make better and faster decisions more often will have the edge in today's economy.

In a survey Unisphere Research conduced among 264 data managers about a year ago, we found our respondents almost unanimously agree that unstructured data — which they define as business documents, presentations and social media data — is on the rise, and ready to engulf their current data management systems.

The trouble is, management does not understand that the challenge is coming, and fails to recognize the significance of unstructured data assets to the business. So there's lots of work to be done here.

Cloud-based BI and analytics

BI can be expensive to purchase, implement and maintain. Cloud may change all that. Cloud is opening up business intelligence and analytics to more users — non-analysts — within organizations. There already is a drive to make BI more ubiquitous, and the cloud will accelerate this move toward simplified access.

To be sure, we're still only in the early stages cloud-based BI and analytics. A survey of 200 companies by Saugatuck Technology concludes that only about 13 percent of enterprises worldwide — including all industries and all sizes of enterprises — have cloud-based BI/advanced analytics solutions in place and in use. But this is about to change.

Saugatuck's survey also shows that cloud-based BI and analytics will be among the fastest-growing cloud-based business management solution types through the next two years. Cloud-based BI and analytics will see an 84 percent compound annual growth rate over this period.

Mobile BI and analytics

This is something from the "It's-About-Time" Department: More enterprises are embracing — or will soon be embracing — access to data analytics via mobile apps. Having analytics available in a simple app fashion could be a major boost for efforts to "democratize" analytics in organizations.

The key is to keep things simple and understandable, and mobile apps can go a long way in delivering this. Analytics can be offered through simple, single-purpose mobile apps, who's utility is quickly and easily grasped by business users.

(Disclosure: I was compensated for my webcast presentation.)

That's the finding of a survey of 207 IT administrators, released by GFI Software, which delved into the stressors that weigh on their jobs these days.

What's causing the stress? Their bosses.

Nearly one third of those surveyed, 29 percent, cited dealing with managers as their most stressful job requirement. The other top sources of workplace stress for IT managers are a lack of IT staff and tight deadlines, with 24 percent and 20 percent of respondents, respectively, citing these as primary contributors to their stress levels.

Interestingly, users are the smallest source of stress, contributing to the stress level of 12 percent of IT admins.

There are repercussions on respondents' health

More than one fifth, 21 percent, said that IT administrators have suffered stress-related health issues – such as high blood pressure – due to their work. This number remains unchanged from last year.

In addition, another 20 percent indicated that they "do not feel great physically" as a result of stress. Another 34 percent of respondents "have lost sleep due to work". Fortunately, this is an eight-point drop from 42 percent last year.

Wait, there's more: Another 16 percent revealed that they have experienced a strained or failed relationship due to work stress.

The stressful workloads IT admins face also results in long hours

Nearly one third of those surveyed work more than eight hours of overtime each week in order to keep on top of their workload. That is the equivalent of working more than 10 weeks a year in overtime.

IT executives need to take heed of these reports, as the success if their ventures depends on the people who make it all happen.

That's the opinion of Scott Weiss, partner with Andreessen Horowitz, recently published in All Things D. Weiss observed that "modern web services, such as Google, Apple, and Facebook, are playing a massive game of Tetris as they grapple with deploying and operating datacenters with tens of thousands of servers versus hundreds. They are all on the bleeding edge of trying to contain costs while cramming as much capacity into a physical building as possible. The result is a complete architectural rethink of datacenter designs, and the incumbent server vendors are struggling to stay relevant in this new reality."

What is happening, Weiss said, is that these giant datacenters are, in effect, becoming the new "servers" — replacing the much, much smaller Dell or HP or IBM System i boxes sitting in the corner of the enterprise. Such a giant supercomputer — "cobbled together from commodity server components and interconnect fabrics" — represents a "profound software and hardware architectural shift that is taking us from a world where datacenters consisted of a small number of independent high-performance branded servers to a brave new world where the giant datacenter building is the server".

Weiss went on to predict that "SaaS will win the enterprise market", predicting that the corporate datacenter will wither away "as on-prem applications give way to their SaaS counterparts".

Weiss makes some forceful points, but it may be a while before the on-premises corporate datacenter slips into extinction. Why? Because right now, there are more private clouds being hosted within organizations than there is public cloud adoption. A new survey I published as part of my work with Unisphere Research among 262 IT and data managers found that 37 percent of enterprises are running or piloting private clouds, and 26 percent are using public cloud services. At least half of the private cloud sites are platform-as-a-service-type implementations, involving application or database servers.

Many non-IT companies are becoming technologically savvy in their own right, and are leveraging both their own IT assets as well as third-party cloud services to build and deliver new capabilities to better understand their customers as well as enhance innovation. We're seeing non-IT companies become cloud service providers themselves, extending private clouds to partners and customers.

What this means for IT managers and professionals is they are increasingly evolving into roles as technology brokers versus implementers, charged with making choices between the best available resources — cloud, SaaS, on-prem, wherever — to deliver power and intelligence to the business. Choice is always a good thing, and let's hope it doesn't get too concentrated into the hands of a few big web services companies, as Weiss suggested. Perhaps a "balance of power" between on-prem and competing outside cloud providers will help ensure that back-end computing doesn't fall into the hands of a few.

(Disclosure: The IOUG survey referenced in this article was sponsored by Oracle, and I was compensated for my work on this project.)

That's the view of Tom Davenport, visiting professor at Harvard University and co-author of the seminal work Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning. I recently had the opportunity to chat with Davenport, and the Q&A is posted at CBS interactive's SmartPlanet site.

Davenport, who is also a senior advisor to Deloitte Analytics, spoke about the difficulties of converting to an analytics-driven culture. He is finalizing a new book, Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics, which makes the case for better communicating analytics to business decision-makers.  

We touched upon a number of topics, and I was curious why he felt that the existing BI and analytics tools that have been on the market — graphic tools, dashboards, balanced scorecards, and the like — weren't up to the task. Davenport sais that it's time for a new type of platform for communicating data analytics results — a more "narrative" approach.

"We've all grown up on pie charts and bar charts, but there are probably at least tens, if not hundreds of alternative approaches to visual analytics," he explained. "Narratives are a pretty good way to convey information in the past, so maybe we should be converting our data and analysis into stories. People are starting to do that more. Most analysts were unfortunately not trained in how you communicate effectively about analytics, so we've got a long way to go in terms of doing a better job of that."

I also asked Davenport about the role of cloud platforms in promoting greater availability of analytics, and he said cloud isn't quite there yet.  Here's what he had to say: "It's certainly making a difference in terms of analytics on big data because its almost infinitely expandable, much cheaper, people don't have to build up the capability to analyze huge amounts of data all the time. They can expand to suit their needs. There are cloud-based versions of most of the visual analytics offerings, but they don't tend to be [as] sophisticated yet as the on-premises ones, so I think its not really driving things yet. For basic big data processing, and computation and analysis, visual stuff, narrative stuff — not as much at this point."

There is also a tendency to move or embed analytics into applications, with end-users fairly oblivious to what types of algorithms are spitting out the answers being acted on by applications. Isn't automation making it less necessary to understand the machinations of analytics? Too much reliance on automation may be a dangerous thing, Davenport responded. "We saw the challenge in financial services; you have situations like the flash crash, where there were all these automated trading things happening, and we had no idea why. The real challenge is going to be being able to trace the logic and how the algorithms work when things go wrong, so we can intervene and override."

In recent posts here at this site, we've discussed the possibilities of CIOs sharing technology initiatives with the likes of "chief digital officers" and chief marketing officers. Also, cloud computing positions IT leaders less as technology shop managers and more as high-level consultants responsible for identifying and procuring both external and internal technology resources.

What's the future job description of the chief information officer going to look like a couple of years from now? Antonio Piraino, CTO of ScienceLogic provided this glimpse of rising skills in a post at IDG Connect:

• Less technology-exertion, more people-insertion: "The customer is the focus of the CIO strategy, not the product/infrastructure," said Piraino.

• Less power broker, more services orchestrator: Here we see the shift from technology guru to business guru, Piraino said. "The CIO will be more responsible for financials, legalities, security, and extensibility of services, and less responsible for technical robustness, integration, and infrastructure operations (including governance policies)."

• Less concession, more compliance: Given the global nature of business, there will need to be greater attention paid to various government regulations and mandates. Local cloud computing laws are a prime example. Piraino elevates this discussion way above merely filling out forms and delivering reports: "As cloud computing use grows, governments will become more involved in regulation, creating a worldwide opportunity for CIOs to change their job role to that of an international power broker, ambassador, and even diplomat."

• Less security, more protection: Again, global business demands global leadership. "CIOs need to become experts in cybersecurity and the nuances amongst different countries."

• Less cost, more work: IT systems are getting more complex, and sprawl is on the rise. "Centralizing control of data and applications through centralized management systems, as well as the use of virtual desktop, are areas that CIOs are becoming far more engaged in."

• Less reaction, more vision: CIOs are moving to "the role of proactive defender of proprietary business concerns, and also that of creator of new business productivity tools and information that help us get ahead of the market we're after".

From a technical standpoint, BDaaS is perfectly doable, wrote Philip Wik, database administrator for Redflex in Service Technology. Sure, the last thing we need is another "something as a service" term. But the real question is: What would the business do with it?

It's inevitable that big data — defined as volumes of data, in new varieties, moving through organizations at close to real-time speeds — will be driving all technology decisions in the near future, Wik believes. "Big data, in combination with clouds, EDA, and SOA, is defining the future of information technology," he said. "Although third-form normalized operational data stores will retain their value, big data will not only supplement, but will eventually replace, data warehousing star schemas, as infrastructure costs decline and presentation level analytical tools increase in both number and in sophistication."

The ingredients necessary for BDaaS include a high-functioning service-oriented architecture, cloud virtualization capabilities, complex event-driven processing, Hadoop, and business intelligence tools than provide deep analytics. The pieces are already falling into place, Wik observed: "As big data software continues to improve, changes can be made in the user interface, communications, data storage, and task processing layers without having to rebuild the entire architecture," said Wik. "BDaaS can be regarded as an asynchronous SOA, with a complementary relationship between services and events."

Again, the question is, is everybody ready for this? Wik says the immediate, as-a-Service availability of big data analytics creates some troubling questions, not only from a business standpoint, but from an ethics standpoint as well. The power of analysis that big data provides can be abused. "Rarely in the technical literature do the words ethics and big data appear in the same sentence," he stated. "We can define what big data is, but do we understand what big data means? As a matter of commercial self-interest in the context of our universal rights, we must address the ethics of big data."

As Wik puts it:

Vast databases that talk to other vast databases could erode our sphere of privacy to the point that privacy will cease to exist, even for those who believe that they are off the grid. Because of the ubiquity of sensors and cameras, the grid is our existence itself.

The ethics of big data is one concern, and another should be the efficacy of big data. Business leaders may not have grasped its potential as of yet, and even those working with it have only begun to dip their toes in it. Unfortunately, things being what they are, "big data" is being sold as the next transformative panacea for all business ills. But as with anything technology related, applying big data analytics will not in and of itself deliver profitability or growth. What is needed is enlightened management that understands its potential.

Indeed, as Renee Boucher Ferguson pointed out in a post at MIT Sloan Management Review, there's even a danger of management becoming blindsided by too much reliance on the promises made around big data. As Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, asked IBM CEO Ginni Rometty at a recent meeting:

You don’t worry at all that there's a danger in data? I was sitting there listening, and I was thinking of what Wayne Gretzky says about, "you don’t skate to where the puck is; you skate to where the puck is going to be." Can't reams of data get in the way? Doesn't data at some point almost force you inside the box and towards averages?

Ferguson also discussed the risk of biases and gaps in the data that organizations are coming to rely on — "getting drawn into particular kinds of algorithmic illusions".

The bottom line is we have the tools to build BDaaS. But what we do with it is another, perplexing question.

That's the view of Jason Bloomberg, who said private clouds often add up to more trouble than they're worth. In his latest book, The Agile Architecture Revolution: How Cloud Computing, REST-Based SOA, and Mobile Computing Are Changing Enterprise IT, Jason outlined the reasons why public cloud may ultimately be a better choice for enterprises.

You may not agree with Jason's premise about on-premises — in fact, I expect violent disagreement. And this is more of an either/or argument, rather than raising the possibility of blended strategies, such as employing public clouds as test beds, but keeping applications in production within private clouds.

That said, here are Jason's arguments for public cloud and against private cloud:

1. Private clouds tend to use older technology than public clouds: You may have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on new hardware and software, but try getting your organization to agree to that every year.

2. Public clouds shift capital expenses to operational expenses: It's pay as you go, versus building an entire datacenter, no matter how virtualized it may be.

3. Public clouds have better utilization rates: With private cloud, your organization still has to build and maintain all kinds of servers to meet spikes in demand across various divisions or functions. Public cloud offers the same spare demand on a pay-as-you-need-it basis.

4. Public clouds keep infrastructure costs low for new projects: With private clouds, you still need to scare up sometimes scarce on-site resources for unplanned projects that may pop up.

5. Public clouds offer greater elasticity: "You'll never consume all the capacity of a public cloud, but your private cloud is another matter entirely."

6. Public clouds get enterprises out of the "datacenter business": establishing private cloud probably gets you in deeper into the DC business than with traditional on-premises servers.

7. Public clouds have greater economies of scale: No private cloud can compete with the likes of Google and Amazon on price. And the public providers are constantly buying boatloads of the latest security technology.

8. Public clouds are hardened through continual hacking attempts: Thousands of hackers have been pounding Google and Amazon for years now. The public cloud providers are ready for anything at this point.

9. Public clouds attract the best security people available: They seek out the top security experts, will pay them top dollar, and treat them as the most important part of their businesses, which they are. Do traditional enterprises treat security teams this way?

10. Private clouds suffer from "perimeter complacency": "If it's on the internal network, it must be secure!" 'nuff said...

11. Private cloud staff competence is an unknown: Your organization may have a lot of talented and knowledgeable people, but is data security the main line of your business?

12. Private cloud penetration testing is insufficient: Even if you test your applications and networks on a regular basis (which man organizations don't), these only tell you if things are secure at that exact moment.

This is the observation of Andy Thurai, a chief architect and group CTO for cloud and middleware for Intel. With the rise of social media, big data, cloud, analytics, online CRM, online advertising, and tools such as Twitter, the CMO now seems to be at the epicenter of the enterprise technology action:

While the CIO budget is shrinking, the CMO budget is bulging. Often, I see instances where a CIO will go to the CMO for help and have them write the check. The CMO has become the king of IT without you knowing it. It helps them to track everything their potential customers are doing. Often they are now responsible for analysis and identifying emerging trends — which of course they can leverage for more effective campaigns. They are now afforded the flexibility to expose their data/content to their revenue generators in any number of ways.

Thurai picks up on a Gartner prediction that asserts that "by 2017, the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO". CMOs are not only leading the way with new-age technology platforms, but also are in control of a lot of the data — customers, content, and channels.

What's giving CMOs all this new technology juice? Application programming interfaces (APIs), widely available for any and all functions, are driving this parallel IT organization. CMOs may also help reinvent the business as a cloud provider in its own right — even if the business is something other than technology. "A CMO can build APIs using third-party vendors and host them in the cloud to expose the content/data," Thurai predicted. All this without the CIO's consent or knowledge. And CEOs and CFOs may like this new direction, since the CMO's job is all about creating new business.

Is this a good thing? Enterprise technology has become incredibly complex, and it takes very technically proficient individuals to understand and guide the business to invest wisely and avoid costly security errors. Plus, many of the consumerish services being adopted by marketing departments are relatively simple compared to the programming and administration that goes into enterprise IT systems.