Doug Miles published this short Powerpoint presentation from survey results concerning Sharepoint adoption, usage and governance. Over 50% of respondents said they have policies on who can set up a team site and their responsibilities, but about 12% were candid enough to admit that no one is controlling their Sharepoint sites and applications, and it's completely out of control.

In the KIT No. 11, we presented Aardvark's "social search" service, which uses IM to submit user questions to subscribers according to topics of interest. Google just acquired Aardvark, indicating that multiple search strategies can and probably should coexist.
Let's hope this leads to an "Aardvark inside the firewall" service for enterprises: it could advantageously replace email-based bulletin boards, providing peer answers directly to the requester in minutes.

Justin Pirie posted on his blog, "Paradigm Shift," an interesting commentary entitled "Gartner's 'Magic' Quadrant: Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics." He targets his comments, which are really not as anti-analyst firms as the title implies, as recommendations to SaaS vendors on gaining analyst recognition, but this really applies to all IT areas. This in part based on Mark Suster's post, " 73.6% of all Statistics are Made Up," on his blog "Both Sides of the Table."

Cutter Consortium just published two papers by Claude Baudoin:

• "Google Wave and the Future of Collaboration" -- Business Technology Trends & Impacts, Executive Update Vol. 11, No. 2, 5 pages (abstract).
• "EA at 23: Allowed at the Bar, But Still Being Carded" -- Enterprise Architecture Executive Report Vol. 13, No. 1, 23 pages (abstract).
  

Cutter clients may access the papers as part of their subscription. Others should contact Claude Baudoin for more information.

Ira Winkler. President of the Internet Security Advisors Group and author of the books "Spies Among Us" and "Zen and the Art of Information Security," recently gave a webinar sponsored by Qualys. The presentation closely followed the paper " Justifying IT Security: Managing Risk and Keeping Your Network Secure" which can be freely downloaded and redistributed.

Paull Borrill, from Replicus Software, was the speaker at Stanford's CS380 Computer Science Colloquium on 11 Nov. 2009, on the topic of "Rethinking Time in Distributed Systems: How Can We Build Complex Systems Simply?" The 1hr. 20 min. video is on YouTube.

During this week's RSA 2010 Conference in San Francisco, Goldkey is announcing a solution to secure cloud storage. Or rather, they will supply Storage-as-a-Service (anywhere between 8 GB and 40 TB) bundled with hardware tokens (ruggedized USB keys) that handle the user authentication (using two factors: the token and a password) and data encryption. This extends their current solution to create a local "secure drive" on a user's PC. If you want a copy of the slides they presented to cébé, click here.

Dorian Gray: "He gives me good advice."
Lord Henry: "People are always very fond of giving away what they need most themselves."

-- Oscar Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Gray"
(writing about a painter, not a consultant)

"Neither physicists nor computer scientists understand time. But at least the physicists are willing to admit it."

-- Paul Borrill, during the above-mentioned Stanford talk

"An astonishing amount of time is being wasted on investigating the amount of time being wasted on social networks."

-- The Economist, 28 Jan 2010, " Yammering Away at the Office"