In a recent interview with CIO UK, Facebook CIO Tim Campos discusses the company's strategy for moving as much of its IT operations as possible into the cloud. In fact, roughly 70 percent of Facebook's internal IT activities are now managed and operated in cloud-based environments, according to the article. The types of applications and activities that Facebook currently does not operate out of the cloud are things like business intelligence because, as Campos sees it, "the technology is just not there yet."

There is something ironic about CIOs' long and continuing struggle for greater recognition and respect as a member of the C team. After all, executives today are at the mercy of information: utterly dependent on data to run their companies, yet inundated by more of it than they can productively manage without technology. IT chiefs, then, should be the ones holding all the cards.

The founders and co-lead of Business Intelligence Reporting Tools (BIRT) are looking ahead when it comes to the next generation of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), open-source BI software. In an event held Tuesday in New York City, San Mateo-based Actuate offered partners and analysts a peak at the company’s next release, Actuate 11.

“This product is very much on the shop floor,” Utpal Bhatt, Senior Director of Product Management at Actuate, said during a demonstration at the NYC Actuate & BIRT Customer Days conference. Actuate 11 is slated for release in June of 2010, but customers and BIRT developers were eager to take advantage of some of the upcoming software enhancements.

I believe that if you walk into any business or IT shop in the world, you will likely find a database system that is build on the Relational Theories of E. F. Codd.  I would also guess that most if not all of these databases are also built on Tables with Rows of data.  This has long been accepted as the method of storing large amounts of data without the inherent problems of using flat-files, the method used previously.

The other day I listened to a webinar sponsored by The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI) called, “Data Integration and Quality: Helping BI and Data Warehousing Succeed”.  The two presenters were Danette McGilvray, President and Principle, Granite Falls Consulting, Inc., and Bill Rojas, Solutions Marketing Director, SAP.  McGilvray is also the author of the book, “Executing Data Quality Projects: Ten Steps To Quality Data and Trusted Information” which provides a methodology for completing data quality projects.

Many, many years ago when I first got bit by the computer bug, I remember something I learned in my first computer programming class.  We learned that computers - the Apple IIe at the time - are nothing more than complex calculating machines that translate series of 1's and 0's into instructions for the processor to execute.