Business continues to change under the increasing impact of IT and globalization. In today's world, cloud computing makes it possible for a small company to access the resources such as accounting and management tools just like those used by larger companies at a relatively small price. Outsourcing makes it possible to create a business from an assembly of services, with innovation itself often outsourced. Crowdfunding is creating specialty startups outside the normal bounds of investment, and enormous growth in mergers is making acquisition a critical and routine source of new business ideas.

In today’s world of business dependence on technology, it is nearly impossible to separate business continuity planning from information security governance and IT governance. At the same time, many organizations continue to deal with these important issues as separate and distinct activities. Often, business continuity is a business operations responsibility, while information security and technology governance are left to the IT department. Harmonizing these activities can streamline planning, manage costs better, and improve an organization’s ability to react appropriately and quickly when a business-impacting event occurs.

Our friend and colleague Ed Yourdon passed away unexpectedly on January 20. Ed was a guru’s guru. As you’ll discover in these tributes by several members of the Cutter family, Ed had a profound impact on many, many lives. We welcome you to add your stories and memories to this collection in the comments section below.

Rest in peace, Ed.

Our friend and colleague Ed Yourdon passed away unexpectedly on January 20. Ed was a guru’s guru. As you’ll discover in these tributes by several members of the Cutter family, Ed had a profound impact on many, many lives. We welcome you to add your stories and memories to this collection in the comments section below.

Rest in peace, Ed.

Traditional technology adoption models describe a process that’s phased and driven by validated requirements analyses. These traditional models have defined the technology adoption process for decades. Emerging hardware, software, and networking technologies like the Internet of Things (IOT), automated reasoning, cashless payment systems, real-time analytics, augmented/virtual reality, 3D printing, and always-on tablets are changing the way business operates.

It's one thing to espouse the virtues of Agile by giving examples of young organizations such as Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, and others that are built on new architectures and tools. It's entirely another scenario when speaking to older enterprises that must manage significant technical debt, as well as business and technical architectural complexities and interdependencies, often with strict regulatory requirements, across simultaneous legacy and cloud projects. All this adds up to an environment fraught with fragility and risk.

This Executive Update examines key trends and developments affecting the market for, and the application of, data management and analytics that organizations should track in 2016. 

This Executive Update examines key trends and developments affecting the market for, and the application of, data management and analytics that organizations should track in 2016. 

As I read through Cutter Agile Practice Director Tom Grant’s recent article on Agile frameworks (see “Agile Frameworks: Does Anyone Know What a Framework Is?“), I kept thinking of one particular word: structure. People like frameworks because they provide a repeatable structure.

Agile frameworks are an attempt at defining a standard recipe that each team in an organization can follow. This recipe comes predefined with controls and deliverables and will help set a structure around Agile that other departments can understand. Moreover, a predefined recipe can be replicated across all the teams in the organization because they will all work the same way.

At least this is what some people hope.

For the IoT to be successful, it is essential that connected devices provide a friendly user experience. This is especially important when it comes to consumer products for such market segments as smart homes, health and fitness, connected cars, and gaming. But I think it also holds true — although to a lesser degree — for the wider deployment of connected equipment and smart machines in business environments. Simply put, consumers and businesses will resist using devices, appliances, and equipment that are too difficult to set up or too confusing to operate. Consequently, for many IoT scenarios, we can expect to see connected devices increasingly utilize voice- or speech-powered interfaces that offer hands-free operation for the user. However, voice and speech will not replace other forms of UIs like touch and gesture; certainly not any time soon. Rather, they will be combined with these technologies to provide multi-modal interfaces designed to optimize interaction with connected devices.

In this special Peer-to-Peer session for Cutter Members, Cutter Fellow Steve Andriole will lead a discussion on how companies identify, pilot, and deploy specific emerging or “disruptive” technologies.

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to cause disruption in almost every industry. Companies need to examine how they can take advantage of connected products and services and plan for the significantly increased data workloads that will likely come with the deployment of sensor-enabled products. However, an expected surge in product innovation also means that companies should carefully consider how they will deal with the potential rise of new, more agile competitors whose business models will be based primarily on IoT products and services. Here are some points about the IoT I've been discussing with colleagues that organizations may want to consider as we head into 2016 and beyond.

What good is it to have a vision if you’re not trying to make it come true?

The secret: if you have a truly world-changing vision, you aren’t going to be able to make it happen alone. Like raising a child, achieving a vision requires a whole village.

Today we are witnessing a new round of interest in AI and knowledge-based computing that is currently being called cognitive computing. This new round of commercial AI is based on the hugely more powerful computing platforms we have available today. Moreover, it is based on new AI techniques — with the emphasis on neural networks rather than business rules. Business rules provided the basis of some great expert systems, but they didn’t provide a basis for software systems that could learn and adapt — and neural networks do provide these advantages.

IT service leaders are under constant pressure to deliver reliable and available services within the budgetary constraints of the business. They look for opportunities to optimize their support model, extracting repetitive, nonvalued inefficiencies and effort that inflate support costs. The shift-left service strategy focuses on moving issue resolution and request fulfillment to the lowest cost level in the tiered-model service organization, with a focus on "one and done" — providing the internal customer with resolution at the service desk (Level 1) or self-service portal (Level 0).

In this issue of Cutter Edge: The Agile Challenge in System Design | Stat of the Week | A Peek Behind the Curtains of Design Thinking | CFP: Technical Debt

Enterprises and organizations are hybrid "sociotechnical" systems of people, along with the things made by people. They consist of complex collections of physical things, software things, and the mental states of human minds.

Join Maurizio Mancini for this webinar and discover how you can build in quality right from the start.

The most important development I see taking place in 2016 (and beyond) concerning analytics and decision support is the growing commercialization of cognitive systems. Cognitive systems are now having an impact on the consumer and the enterprise worlds by changing the way data is analyzed, and the way that people interact with computers.

A train is only as good as its fastest carriage. Agile can claim to have increased the speed and quality of solutions development through the Agile Manifesto, the Agile principles, and the many popular Agile practices (e.g., user stories, daily standups, and the wall). However, an important discovery by many of us in practice is that faster and higher-quality development in itself is not enough. In fact, faster time to development can lead to problems.

While theoretical discussions of decisions involving IT-related ethics are interesting, this past year highlighted the real effects of ignoring IT ethics in business decisions.

Among a myriad of changes, we have seen obsolete technologies mercilessly replaced, witnessed a couple of global economic collapses, and several products and services that we could never have imagined before — like the Internet — have become part of our daily lives. Whenever I see new, life-changing technology, I can’t help thinking: how did we get here so fast? Naturally, countless factors come into play in answering such a question; this Executive Update discusses two of my favorites: applied foresight and transdisciplinary collaboration. 

I have seen — and am sure that many of you have, as well — architecture cartoons, cost-benefit numbers, and trade-off-matrices that look pretty but lack the integrity that we need from these artifacts. This is not to say that these representations do not hold potential. They do, if we are able to tease out the signal from the noise, and if we are able to bring out the nuances related to where on the fact-to-fiction spectrum a particular data point lies.

Emerging technologies continue to challenge IT as the pace of innovation and introduction of disruptive new platforms continues to accelerate. We are on the verge of huge changes across every area of technology and society. Dominant themes include mobility, interconnection, agility, and global participation. The technologies that support these trends involve Cloud computing, artificial intelligence, big data, the Internet of Things (IoT), mobility, modularization, Internet connectivity, and the digitization of everything.