This Executive Update examines key trends and developments impacting the market for, and the application of, data-centric security and protection technologies and practices that organizations should track in 2016 and beyond.

Building and enterprise architecture are two aspects of the same concern: How do we see the bigger picture? How do we oversee and integrate a wide range of diverse components into a single, unified whole?

There is a price tag for innovating quickly and easily. One of the costly line items is technical debt, the increased drag on the ability to do software innovation that arises from a very specific source: failing to code with a proper level of care and diligence. Writing code is much like another procedural exercise -— writing laws and regulations. The less care one takes in the process of creating these instructions, the harder it will be to diagnose unintended problems and fix them, or even to build on the existing procedural foundations.

In this article, I will explain how to get business engagement and “buy-in” to remove technology debt using existing IT processes such as the quarterly/annual ­budgeting process, design reviews, and functional walkthroughs. To obtain funding and business sponsorship for TD remediation projects, it is important to get non-IT executives to understand and support the TD remediation challenges. Understanding how technology debt is created is essential to preventing, containing, and retiring the debt.

Gamification should not be done for the sake of gamification. It should be a business-led initiative that aligns to business strategy with a focus on improving specific key performance indicators (KPIs). The metrics to track and measure should be clearly laid down at the onset, and a business case should be created to justify the investments.

You can find variations on the definition of API all over the Internet. An API is a description of a software component in terms of its inputs, outputs, and operations. The inputs, outputs, and operations comprise the interface to the component (i.e., the application programming interface). In this sense, APIs have been part of system documentation for decades. However, there’s one key aspect to APIs that goes beyond good documentation housekeeping: APIs define interfaces and service usually without regard to implementation details.

Twenty years ago in May, the American Academy of Political and Social Science published a special issue of its periodical The Annals that focused on the challenges in risk assessment and risk management, especially within government. The premise of that highly influential issue was that assessing risk needed a new perspective; one that went beyond the methodical quantification of risk prevalent at the time to one that encompassed “the complex psychological, social,

One-off innovations are moderately easy to take advantage of, but to create a pipeline of innovative ideas that materially impacts the growth of an organization, it is critical to nurture an innovation management process that can be sustained and that can remain flexible and adjustable to accommodate changes in the competitive environment.

Developing and nurturing an innovation management process takes considerable effort, resources, and ingenuity to perfect. In advanced organizations motivated to reorchestrate the innovation management process, you’ll find a focus on the practices and principles of enterprise architecture (EA). This Executive Report explores the integration between the innovation management process and EA. It also highlights 10 key challenges that enterprises encounter and offers five pieces of advice on how to implement the concepts in your enterprise.

This Executive Update focuses on the opportunities for, and the challenges in, leveraging value in unstructured data — in particular, text. 

Architecture thrives as a discipline because it holds the promise of being able to sift out the essential structural elements from the complex tangle that is the enterprise. The theory is that architecture will help us realize business value by ferreting out the essentials so that we can grapple with the elements of the enterprise that are disproportionate in their influence, and make them deliver. The promised land of architecture-enabled business value beckons tantalizingly, but are we there yet? Do we even know how to measure architectural value, let alone in financial terms?

Cisco got serious about its IoT strategy with the completion of its acquisition of IoT platform and services provider Jasper Technologies. This development highlights just how dynamic the IoT market is. It’s also important because it essentially transforms Cisco into a major enterprise IoT provider with extensive IoT platform and packaged IoT solutions offerings.

With Goal #1, we've found an approach that helps us deal with specific challenges within the company. It's not perfect, and it certainly comes with a price. Therefore, we will continue to develop the format even further. 

The data-centric security model focuses on protecting an organization's sensitive data as opposed to protecting the overall computer networks and applications — as is the case with more traditional security models that function primarily by implementing a security perimeter designed to keep bad actors out. That said, data-centric security is intended to support an organization's overall data loss prevention strategy in conjunction with network, anti-virus, and other enterprise security incident and event management systems.

Cutter Consortium's agile enablement engagement provides your organization with experienced, hands-on assistance to jump-start and guide your transition to agile methods. Cutter's team of experts helps you identify which agile practices will bring the greatest return on investment to your organization. Our goal: to enable you to implement agile methods quickly and effectively, shorten your product development schedule, and increase the quality of the resultant product.

Providing an enterprise-wide data store has been one aim of the enterprise data warehouse since the 1990s. One of the key lessons learned was that resolving issues of meaning and context — metadata — was central to any successful implementation. The challenges remain: very few data warehouse teams have claimed anywhere near complete success. It is also interesting to note that these issues have, finally, been recognized by data lake proponents. Tools offering big data governance, data wrangling, and similar function have begun to emerge over the last year or so. Unfortunately, once again, the tools precede an understanding of the true extent of the problem: how to traverse from data and information to knowledge and finally meaning and vice versa?

Making decisions without important information can result in poor choices. That is especially true with respect to technical debt. Using a technical debt framework to inform our decision making is a powerful technique to help us quickly and confidently make better judgments. I’ve worked with numerous organizations that have benefited from understanding their technical debt this way, and in this article, John Heintz shares stories about three different clients and how they were able to make good decisions for their businesses based on the data found during technical debt assessments.

I would like to broaden the conversation around tech­nical debt to include the challenges of keeping up with software vendors’ lifecycles. Such vendor-driven tech­nical debt requires the continual attention of CIOs and technology executives, who need to balance limited budgets to cope with technical debt. In this article, we will examine aspects of the problem and evaluate some of the techniques to address and repay technical debt.

This article will present the key concepts of the SQALE method and explain how to use it, either in a day-to-day context (as, for example, within an Agile project) or at corporate level to govern a portfolio and optimize its technical debt.

If there is rampant technical debt with most software products and services, why don’t organizations do something about it? Well, it’s complicated. Let’s take a step back and look at what we mean by technical debt and how we can measure it. Then let’s take a longer look at why technical debt exists and what you can do to address it.

Many long-standing problems like technical debt owe their longevity to two factors — not dealing effectively with their causes and not dealing effectively with their resilience. Because what limits our ability to deal with technical debt might be not be technical, it is useful to explore possible psychological and political sources of the longevity of the technical debt problem.

Cutter gets teams to the Agile starting line as quickly as possible. Cutter offers basic Agile training for teams who are new to Agile, as well as those who want to sharpen their Agile edge.

This executive-level workshop provides answers to typical questions that arise during an Agile adoption, such as: How do we ensure the Agile teams are working in alignment with strategic objectives? How long does it take to start seeing results? What kind of executive-level support do Agile teams need?

Buy-in has been the mantra for consultants for as long as I can remember. Besides “walk the talk” and “be the change,” “getting buy-in” has been the most overused and misguided principle ever to haunt the halls of organizational development. If I sound jaded, I am. I’m tired of the blame game. I’m tired of fixes that are more simple than possible.

Technology backlash is as old as technological innovation. It is inevitable that people will grouse about new technologies and adopt them with varying degrees of acceptance. Yet, with one caveat, the cool stuff will take hold and prevail on the basis of its functionality and actual worth to people. The caveat is that this will happen only if these products do not give people some absurd reason to do a double-take and say, "What? You didn't tell me this amazing product" -- and here, take your pick -- "uses triangulation to share my location with perverts," "shares my aimless meandering around department store aisles with marketers," "leaves my television camera running," or "records my child babbling away to a beloved toy."