While Agile is pretty mainstream by now in Web and app development, it is still a major challenge in system design, where software plays only a part of the game, although that piece is steadily increasing. Whether we're talking about manufacturers of cars, chips, or medical devices, they all need to respond to the increasing pace in the market. Only one or two decades ago, these industries were content with product cycles of three to five years. Today, some chip manufacturers are capable of delivering a new version of their product every second month, causing excitement for their customers and despair for their competitors.

Our survey findings strongly suggest that the security solutions providers are going to have to develop new technologies and methods to support IoT applications. This includes better threat detection and prevention technologies for embedding within the connected devices themselves as well as for deploying within the networks and platforms intended to manage them and all the data they generate.

In this issue of The Cutter Edge: Looming Threats in Cloud Computing, Does the Business See IT as Delivering Value?, Mobile Security in the IoT, IT Budgeting 2015: Folks, It's Time to Remodel, more.

As we describe in this Executive Update, vision is the overarching driving goal for your organization’s future. It is not a measure of success or a target; it is not about increasing your profit margin. It is an important change that will shape your organization’s next five to 10 years.

According to Dennis Adams who has analyzed Cutter's IT budgeting survey for the past 10 years, IT managers believe that senior corporate-level managers and senior business unit–level managers regard IT as a partner.

A lot has changed in a few years.

When I talked about cloud three years back, I got frownie-faces from my peers. Skeptical looks that belied a deeper-seated fear or trepidation, probably having more to do with their internal image of what a CIO should be than the promise or peril in the new technology.

This Update examines survey findings pertaining to the types of connected devices and IoT applications organizations believe hold the most promise.

Bob Charette discusses the steps makers and users of technology should be taking to offset what appears to be a rising backlash against automation in this webinar, recorded on December 9, 2015.

A method is essentially a pattern. Just as a design pattern abstracts and encapsulates knowledge of many experts which, in turn, can help fast track new designs, similarly a method provides guidance for new initiatives based on collective past experiences. Agile as a method (notably Scrum, but also other methods under the Agile umbrella such as XP) brings to us the experiences of practitioners who discovered that visibility, honesty, cross-functionality, and iterations can help a software project immensely.

Question leadership is a question-based management principle not a bumper sticker. Most brilliant, innovative leaders know that leading by asking questions is a more powerful leadership style than just having the “right” answers, and gets you not only better business and organizational outcomes, but also more widespread employee — and customer and stakeholder — commitment. Moreover, asking the “right” questions, in the right order, communicates the goals you want to achieve. 

One of the descriptions of EA often heard is that it provides a bridge between strategy and implementation. Fair enough, but what does that actually mean?

Companies are developing connected vehicles and transportation applications to enable better management and compliance of consumer, fleet, and urban transit vehicles and associated infrastructure through monitoring and predictive maintenance, and to achieve reduced energy consumption via optimized route planning and delay avoidance. In addition to business needs, government regulations are also driving connected vehicle solutions development to improve the tracking, safety, and servicing of consumer, commercial, public, and emergency vehicles.

Cutter Consortium conducted a survey asking organizations worldwide about their thoughts and plans for the Internet of Things (IoT). Parts I and II of this Executive Update series covered survey findings pertaining to how organizations view the IoT in terms of importance, the current and future status of corporate IoT budgets, whether survey respondents see the IoT living up to all its hype, and the main objectives and goals driving organizations to develop connected devices and applications.

Cutter Consortium conducted a survey asking organizations worldwide about their thoughts and plans for the Internet of Things (IoT). Parts I and II of this Executive Update series covered survey findings pertaining to how organizations view the IoT in terms of importance, the current and future status of corporate IoT budgets, whether survey respondents see the IoT living up to all its hype, and the main objectives and goals driving organizations to develop connected devices and applications.

When you read the literature, it all seems so easy: everybody just works together to build a high-quality system that provides users exactly what they need — on schedule and under budget. However, as you might expect, Agile and DevOps are not "magic potions"; nor are they “free.”

Patterns are incredibly useful in so many situations -- from knitting to economics to software engineering and architecture. Indeed, we can express business operating models and value chains as patterns. The accompanying Executive Report explores business patterns and, in particular, how they inform the work of enterprise architects.

Enterprise architects are familiar with patterns. Those in software design have used patterns for decades, and over the last 15 years, they have been established as one of the most important techniques in enterprise architecture (EA). Enterprise patterns are a representation of the EA components that determine how an enterprise forms and operates. An enterprise pattern explains how the architecture either constrains or enables business capabilities and strategies. Every enterprise is unique. Similarly, each business model is unique and we can express a business model as a pattern or, more specifically, a “business pattern,” which describes the essential and unique characteristics of a business model. This Executive Report describes how enterprise architects can use business patterns to inform the work of enterprise architecture.

We are rapidly moving to a world where individuals don’t switch off their technologies, and companies can’t switch off their technologies. Head-up displays, image recognition, wearable technologies, virtual reality, a revolution in manufacturing technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT), super-dense computer memory … the list goes on and on! But what does this mean for the future of enterprise architecture (EA) — as a discipline, as a process, and as it informs the nature of an enterprise? This is the theme for this Executive Update.

In this on-demand webinar, Balaji Prasad explores the potential that lies beyond the edge of your visible architecture.

Wearables have the potential to transform the way we engage with technology. The new generation of personal electronics will change (and in some cases already has changed) many industries. 

Architects and architecture exist with the intent of providing something of value. But intent does not always translate to results. Sometimes we get in our own way if we are not careful. Are there habits of mind that can work at cross-purposes to the value we seek from the enterprise of architecture?

A psychological contract is a construct comprising an indi­vidual’s assumptions and beliefs about what each party to a contract must do and how they are to do it. All individuals in both parties have their own unique psychological versions of that contract, which makes managing expectations quite challenging. In this Update, we explore the topic of harnessing the value of the psychological contract.

Mobile security is a complex issue that is growing more difficult as devices multiply within the organization. New devices include new ecosystems and new operating systems, which can conflict with existing security measures as well as adding less understood modes of access to online data. Lack of familiarity creates innumerable vulnerability points that may be exploited by sophisticated hackers, as devices become more widely used in critical applications. We have looked at mobile security before, mainly around the proliferation of smartphones in the office. But the issue is likely to become much more complicated as we enter the era of the Internet of Things (IoT).

In this issue: Quarkitecture -- a cure for architecture's messiness; the data integration analyst's pain point; CFP -- what is the emerging role of enterprise architecture and the enterprise architect?; save on Summit 2016 registration, How Mobile, Cloud and Big Data are Transforming Healthcare and more.

Are your teams delivering products that delight? These are just a few of the things that you can do to help your teams move the dial.