If you still subscribe to fixed site recovery services using shared IT infrastructure from the likes of HP, IBM BCRS, or SunGard, among others, you will quickly become a dinosaur in the next 1 to 2 years.

These types of shared infrastructure services involve lengthy restores from tape and a recovery time objective of 72 hours, at best. Plus, you'll be lucky if you recover at all because chances are, you've had trouble scheduling a test with your service provider and it's been a LONG time since the last one, if indeed you’ve ever tested.

72 hours recovery just doesn't cut it anymore. And frankly, understanding your provider's oversubscription ratio to shared infrastructure to determine the risk of multiple invocations, or attempting to negotiate exclusions zones and availability guarantees is a time suck. Most companies are either taking DR back in-house or, if they still rely on a DR service provider, they are using dedicated infrastructure.

We're looking for product managers who have played a role in Agile development efforts. Specifically, we want to talk to both (1) PMs who have been in development groups that started with an Agile approach, and (2) PMs who were part of a transition to Agile within a larger organization.

If either description applies to you, in your current job or an earlier one, please drop me a line. The interview will last about 30 minutes.

A question I've been hearing with increasing frequency is, "Should there be a professional certification for product managers?" Tyner Blain has a thoughtful post on just this subject that's worth reading.

There are three obstacles to making professional certification worthwhile:

1. First, you have to agree on what product management is.
2. Then, you have to define the curriculum that every product manager needs to master before getting the blessing of some certifying authority.
3. Finally, you need to trust the certifying authority.

I'm a big fan of widgets. Now that the concept of "cloud computing" has gained traction in the technology industry, lots of people are also wild for widgets. Of course, when you dynamically assemble content from multiple sources, bad things might happen to good people:

SiteMeter's widget for tracking visits to Web sites went haywire on Friday and rendered many pages unviewable via Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

The technology industry will take steps to eliminate these problems. Standards will help a little, if only to get the people writing widgets to think about all the implications and edge cases of what they're building. Abstracting the run-time layer of widgets through mechanisms like Netvibes' universal widget API can help, too.

On Thursday, Forrester announced that it bought JupiterResearch for $23 million in cash. Bringing the two companies together has been a dream of mine since the 1990s -- Jupiter always had incisive analysts, influential clients, and always seemed to be ahead of the next trend -- and it always seemed like a cultural match for Forrester (OK, I'll admit it -- they were probably much cooler than us...)

It's pretty simple why we bought Jupiter. Marketing and strategy executives are probably the most challenged by technology changes. I was with the head of marketing for a major national newspaper recently who said to me: "...given Facebook, blogs, YouTube, Craig's List, we don't know what will be in the future -- we have no idea." Forrester serves these executives -- and adding JupiterResearch's analysts, salespeople, and service people to this effort will help us help our clients even more -- and it will mean that we can grow that business faster.