There is a new line separating human beings from each other and it is a great technocratic divide. Calling the reaction against this technocratic invasion a Luddite one doesn’t capture the significance of this scientific tsunami. All roads to the future lead through a forest of computing and scientific complexity. There are fewer mentally easy routes to economic prosperity. How the next generation sorts out their place in the 21st-century economy will be quite different than in the 20th-century economy.

The key point is that pace is relative — it is likely to be comparatively fast or comparatively slow, but there will always be some EA environments with a mixture of both fast and slow, and some that fluctuate between the two extremes.

In this issue of Cutter Edge: Technology predictions 2016 | Remembering Ed Yourdon | Webinar: Recharging Teams 

When we talk about wearables, most of us have one or two specific devices in mind that we use to add tangibility to our thinking.

Disruptive innovation, a well-known business concept defined by Clayton Christensen, is changing. When he first defined this concept back in 1997, digital technologies already existed, but they were just beginning to make their impact on strategy and the process of disruption.

If you look closely at Agile, it is actually a huge advocate of building in quality and calls for everyone on the team to own quality. Agile/Scrum calls on the product owner to produce clear stories and acceptance criteria, the dev team to test their code, testing staff to be involved with the dev team from the start, and of course have customer involvement whenever possible.

Being true to architecture’s roots in business does a couple of things: it ensures that we stay grounded in things that matter, and it provides a framework of values that guides and validates everything that we do in the name of architecture.

Organizations developing Internet of Things (IoT) connected solutions face a number of considerations, including decisions about which wireless and network protocols to use, device connectivity issues, messaging protocols, security, scalability, and data storage and analysis requirements.

Mobile app security is a problem for the individual user, for the corporation, for the app developer, for the network provider, and for any software or access point available for exploitation. The seriousness and wide extent of these vulnerabilities define the “Great App Trap.” Without sufficient care, it is easy to overlook any of the innumerable issues. 

A new pilot application developed by US retailer Sears to help customers find and compare tires offers a good example of the types of natural language processing (NLP)–powered customer engagement and customer experience applications we are seeing.

In a Technical Debt Assessment and Valuation, Cutter's Senior Consultants examine the quality of the software under examination through technical and business lenses.

In the difficult global competition today and ahead of us, finding solace in victimhood serves no one. As in the past and in the future, events will be dictated by teams of people believing all things are possible. Setting big goals, establishing metrics, and monitoring performance become important, but the most important metric will be counting the myriad of small successes found in daily challenges and the continual pursuit of even more complex ones. Is your organization so brave as to measure something this mundane?

When a company adopts new ways of working and embeds them throughout the organization, it is imperative that all new employees, in addition to having the skills necessary to do the work, are also either already practicing the company's ways of working or are very willing to embrace them. Without this, the company runs the risk of diluting its Agile "gene pool." All change initiatives are fragile, and introducing additional critical or dissenting opinions can upset the balance and be detrimental to the change effort.

In this on-demand webinar, Senior Consultant Maurizio Mancini shows how organizations that work at building in quality rather than trying to test it in will have a significant market advantage. Companies such as Apple, Honda, and Toyota have all had success with applying some of these concepts.

What’s a CEO, CIO, CTO, CFO, or business unit president to do? Especially when they go to an investor conference and they’re asked to explain “the game-changing technology plan”? Cutter Fellow Steve Andriole poses three questions that all C-suite residents must answer without hesitation.

Today we face a new forthcoming step change in our ability to manage information and the physical environment around us through information technology. The technology most likely to trigger and sustain such a ­discrete change, capable of breaking the barriers of timeand space (which are starting to limit us to further progress), is quantum computing. This paradigm is based on perhaps the most powerful discovery of all time for our understanding of the universe: quantum physics. Well beyond science fiction, quantum computers are just now becoming something the major players in the IT and aerospace worlds are seriously exploring, as they aim to become the innovators and leaders of the “IT quantum leap.”

To be resilient and sustainable, enterprise architectures must be able to respond and adapt positively to unpredictable and unanticipated situations. So what can EA do to anticipate, prepare for, respond to, and possibly prevent a terrorist attack?

As we begin another year and try to predict where quality assurance (QA) will go in the next few years, we need to reflect for a moment on where QA has been — especially with the dire predictions in recent years that QA in software engineering is dead.

2016 is the year we can all look forward to a host of “new” Agile practices, each with its own nuance, and each with its own subset of practitioners.

When you join a party where everyone is having the best time imaginable, the last thing on your mind is how annoyed the people next door are, and how happy the people paying for it are. Those are two major considerations for Agile in 2016, which will appear as the not-too-subtle subtext for several ongoing developments.

Darren Meister spends most of his time looking at how individuals access data, information, and knowledge in ways that allow them to make better decisions and to enjoy themselves. With that in mind, here are a few thoughts about some trends that he thinks will push demands on corporate IT departments and the IT industry broadly: wearables, machine intelligence, and data visualization.

Darren Meister spends most of his time looking at how individuals access data, information, and knowledge in ways that allow them to make better decisions and to enjoy themselves. With that in mind, here are a few thoughts about some trends that he thinks will push demands on corporate IT departments and the IT industry broadly: wearables, machine intelligence, and data visualization.

I have three predictions for 2016 that cut across existing technologies and how they’re used, managed, and protected: 1. We Will See More Action on Security; 2. We Will Begin to Curb the Excesses of Social Networking; 3. Governments Will Move on Metadata Analysis and Data Decryption.

I’ve been an enterprise architect since 1984, and the main thrust for EA over all those years has been about giving direction to architectural evolution.

In this issue of Cutter Edge: Grandiose Transformation | Stat of the Week | Cognitive Computing | CFP: Technical Debt