The key to improving business effectiveness is to improve our understanding of the world in which we live and do business. Providing options and lenses for new thinking is the purpose of this edition of Cutter IT Journal.

Driven by several converging and complementary factors, cloud computing is advancing as an IT service delivery model at a staggering pace. It is also causing a paradigm shift in the way we deliver and use IT. Its transformational potential is huge and impressive, and consequently cloud computing is being adopted by a spectrum of stakeholders -- individual users, businesses, educational institutions, governments, and community organizations. It is also helping to close the digital (information) divide. To provide a glimpse of the emerging cloud ecosystem and the issues surrounding it, we present four articles in this issue that focus, in turn, on PaaS-IaaS integration, intrusion detection as a service (IDaaS), user-centric cloud service agreements, and the realization of an interoperable cloud ecosystem.

From time to time, the corpus of information technologies absorbs new classes of technology, often in one fell swoop. The collection of technologies discussed here -- social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (SMAC) -- represents such a bundle. A decade ago, social, mobile, and cloud technologies were more a gleam in the eye of innovators than part of the CIO repertoire. Back then, analytics were frozen in a period of glacial change that was moving far too slow to attract much attention except from analysts trying to divine which bigger vendor was going to buy which smaller vendor. Today, social, mobile, analytics, and cloud are the cornerstone technologies driving innovation inside many if not most enterprises. In this issue of Cutter IT Journal, we bring together five articles with some different looks at the opportunities and challenges SMAC poses.

In this edition of Cutter IT Journal, we will focus on the selection of the metrics that organizations should include in their dashboards to indicate how the business is performing. Moreover, we will learn best practices and guidelines for showing the information on the screen and the main requirements to keep in mind when designing dashboards. We will consider different contexts for dashboards, such as development teams and global enterprises, and we will see how different the requirements for a dashboard can be depending on their context of application.

Change at an architectural level is always transformational. But too often architects have struggled to demonstrate or realize this potential for making a significant, positive difference at the enterprise level. Instead, big changes are more frequently driven by the architectural opportunities that arise from new technologies. This is starting to change, and leading enterprises are planning architectural change that genuinely combines the organizational, business, and technology perspectives. Enterprise transformation that successfully unites all three viewpoints requires a new technique to raise the architectural debate to the level of senior decision makers. This issue of Cutter IT Journal provides practical insight and guidance on how enterprise patterns are being used to drive transformational change.

The news in this issue of Cutter IT Journal is that it's not agile or CMMI that fosters your culture, and it's not agile or CMMI that shuns or requires documentation. In fact, as we'll see, it's really not about agile or CMMI. And perhaps "To agile or not to agile?" is the wrong question to ask and the wrong perspective on matters. This issue we have lined up six articles that address everything from the right questions to ask to how to deal in an agile manner with very large systems. It seems a fairly universal conclusion that it's not agile or CMMI that are incompatible but the way they're applied in a given situation that makes them incompatible.

The articles selected for this issue of Cutter IT Journal provide a handy opportunity to conduct that sober evaluation of Big Data technology. The discussion first provides a solid introduction to the world of BDA and then explores a set of important extensions of the technology.

Most readers of Cutter IT Journal -- indeed, most CIOs and CTOs and their staffs -- live their professional lives somewhere at the intersection of IT and business management. Therefore, the impact of information and collaboration technologies on the processes of invention and innovation, as well as the effect of changing business conditions (including issues of scale), should be of key importance to them. This is the topic we address in this issue.

Why then the increasing interest in cloud computing standards in 2012? The answer is arguably quite simple: cloud computing represents a game-changing paradigm shift in the industry, with consumers (and the enterprises they serve) crying out for a broadened set of standards in areas where standards have never existed before. How does this all play out? Our contributing authors tackle this topic head on in this month's issue of Cutter IT Journal.

The authors in this month's Cutter IT Journal think that many of the practices, processes, and techniques underpinning ERM continue to exhibit major flaws, which they too believe can be fixed to improve ERM's effectiveness. However, that belief is also balanced in each article by warnings that the fixes recommended will require major, sustained effort and so should not be viewed as easy tasks.

In this issue of Cutter IT Journal, our six authors have focused on reasonable courses of action to enable ITIL to better satisfy the business customer's goals, and they provide specific recommendations on how IT operations can balance the conflicting demands of ITIL projects against the burgeoning (and sometimes overwhelming) demands of business users. Interestingly, the authors individually develop a consistent theme that the long-term survival of internal IT operations requires immediate changes in positioning and delivering these ITIL processes.

In this issue of Cutter IT Journal, we present a number of authors with differing approaches to and perspectives on what some have termed the "consumerization of IT." Whatever we call it -- BYOD (bring your own device), mobility, consumerization -- it's not new. Nor is it solely about devices. What we are witnessing is an inevitable outcome of the convergence of technical and social forces that have blurred the line between work and personal lives and identities. The writing has been on the wall (or in this case, the tablet) for some time now.

While the traditional fundamentals, principles, and approaches to security still hold true, in this issue of Cutter IT Journal we discuss new risks posed by the connected environment and new approaches to risk mitigation. Our four articles present four different perspectives on the issues and solutions.

Is leadership a science? Whether you subscribe to the notion of leadership as science or consider it more of an art, we hope that this issue of Cutter IT Journal will provide tools and insights to improve leadership development in your own organization.

"Small is beautiful" in software. While big software might not be beautiful, more often than not, it's in the nature of what needs to be accomplished. This contrast between the beauty of the small and the requirements of the big generates systemic tension in many software projects, organizations, and companies. Resolving this conflict is the focus of this issue of Cutter IT Journal.

Each of these trends described in this issue is powerful on its own and requires devoted study from IT planners and leaders. Taken collectively, they can be a rather large tsunami that engulfs organizations faster than they can adjust. 2012 will likely emerge as a critical transition year in which two well-established trends, social media and consumer technology, meet up with two emerging trends, Big Data and cloud computing, and transform corporate IT from the inside and the outside. There is a lot of promise and peril in these trends. To some, they represent the beginning of the end of the modern IT organization. I -- and I think our authors -- would disagree. This is merely the end of the very early phase of an important transformation that will require all the best and brightest IT leaders across the globe. New tools enable new strategies, and, boy, do we have new tools available to us in 2012! To sort this out, I encourage you to read on and learn how these trends will impact you and your organization.