Efficiency and productivity were the watchwords of the late 20th century, but today the emphasis needs to be more on agility. The prescription for organizational agility is markedly different from the prescription for efficiency and productivity.

Amidst all the cloud computing market kerfuffle, my teams are currently immersed in a slightly provocative and full-throated effort to vacate our data center. We have been looking around to see how the marketplace has shifted, where it has not, and, more importantly, what threats we are likely to face as we all go to the cloud. We have found seven of them.

The issues detailed in this article can and should be addressed prior to implementing an IaaS product, and to whatever extent possible, by your legal agreements with your provider.

FINRA, the largest independent regulator for all securities firms doing business in the US, is moving its technology platform to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud and open source platforms. The program has been underway for close to two years, and 70% of systems are currently operating in the cloud. This case study begins by outlining our objectives for moving to the cloud and how these resulted in choosing a virtual private cloud using a large-scale cloud provider (AWS) rather than building our own private cloud. It also reviews how FINRA addressed several concerns that companies considering a migration to the cloud often face, including security, the balance of business and architectural concerns, DevOps requirements, disaster recovery, and implications for our culture.

In this article, you'll get an overview of how to design, build, and operate a new breed of cloud-native applications. The author also looks at how cloud-native design positively impacts a business, bringing new and crucial capabilities to your organization.

As the cloud market has grown up, CIOs are now in a position to rely on a modern, robust ecosystem of cloud computing vendors to deliver efficiencies and cost savings at scale. To do this, however, the role of the CIO demands an understanding of how to build and subsequently manage that supply chain when deciding to procure infrastructure as a service. This article discusses how the CIO, ahead of launching an RFP, should prepare for the challenge of coordinating multiple, competing IaaS service offerings to establish the type of mature supply chain more commonly found in established utilities markets.

Many organizations, most notably the larger and more conservative companies, are still on the fence about moving their infrastructure to an IaaS model. IaaS can be deployed in different models, including on-premises and off-premises, managed by a third party or managed internally, and/or using private or public cloud environments. Which model(s) should an organization adopt? How do firms know if moving their hardware, software, servers, storage, and other infrastructure components to a third-party provider is right for them? Should they consider IaaS only for temporary or experimental workloads? Also worth considering and planning for are the technical/security risks, scalability, and legal/contract issues that are critical to a successful IaaS platform deployment. In this issue of Cutter IT Journal, our authors share their insights on the issues organizations should contemplate before moving to IaaS.

“In-silo” transformations of specific portfolios pose considerable challenges. This Executive Update offers some key considerations for the planning phase of such transformations and highlights a few challenges and possible solutions for the design and implementation of an in-silo operating model. [Not a Cutter Member? Download your complimentary copy here.]

Today’s software systems are moving toward API access in what has come to be called the API economy. Analytics providers are now beginning to offer analytics APIs for use by organizational software departments, developers, and individuals.

Today’s software systems are moving toward API access in what has come to be called the API economy. Analytics providers are now beginning to offer analytics APIs for use by organizational software departments, developers, and individuals.

Development and operations groups play equally important roles and must synchronize their work to enable organizations to rapidly produce software products and services. The awareness of this has resulted in the development of the operating principles known as "DevOps."

Disruptive technologies unleash tremendous creativity, with effects far beyond the initial change. Successfully creating disruption requires more than just ideas and technical capacity; there's also cultural capacity.

Based on the success that software development has achieved with Agile, enterprises are extending these practices beyond single software projects to increase innovation, responsiveness, and efficiencies for portfolios and enterprises. This has led to the expansion of Agile methods for enterprise projects and the expansion of Agile methods for portfolios. Existing techniques that support both "Classic Project Agile" and portfolio management form a foundation for Organizational Agility.

As we explore in this Executive Report, Organizational Agility™ is the capability of an enterprise or partnering enterprises to rapidly adapt to internal or external needs through collective creativity, learning, and knowledge. Groups can learn to recognize these collective characteristics using the models of vision, Group Coherence, and process ambidexterity. The targeted practice of Cooperative Inquiry, Group Coherence Ingredients, operating rhythm techniques, and Lean Six Sigma methodology develops Organizational Agility maturity. The Organizational Agility Maturity Rubric™ can be used to assess the maturity of Organizational Agility characteristics and target agility improvements.

The digital economy calls for inside-out exposure of core business processes across the enterprise to enable the seamless integration of data across partner ecosystems, social computing platforms, hyperconnected customers, and self-learning machines. More than ever, today’s digital world forces enterprises to quickly course-correct their business strategies and operating models to stay afloat. Course-correcting strategies and changes in operating models call for a robust foundation that is nimble and agile enough to adapt to both internal and external changes.

As organizations ramp up their Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives over the next few years, the huge volumes of sensor data generated by connected devices, machines, people, and processes is going to provide considerable opportunities for analytics and automation. Combined with data from enterprise and industrial systems, and mobile, social, and other sources, sensor data, when analyzed, will help companies better understand how customers use their products and respond more appropriately to their needs. But just how experienced are organizations with managing and analyzing sensor data?

In this Executive Update, we investigate the dynamics of digital payment platforms in the Danish market. Although our focus is on Denmark, the strategies we discuss likely generalize to a large extent to the entry and expansion strategies of digital payment solutions in other markets.

In this Executive Update, we investigate the dynamics of digital payment platforms in the Danish market. Although our focus is on Denmark, the strategies we discuss likely generalize to a large extent to the entry and expansion strategies of digital payment solutions in other markets.

This Update examines survey findings pertaining to benefits and trends driving organizations to develop IoT-connected products, applications, and services; how organizations use or plan to use IoT applications, devices, and data; primary issues viewed as impeding corporate IoT initiatives.

This Update examines survey findings pertaining to benefits and trends driving organizations to develop IoT-connected products, applications, and services; how organizations use or plan to use IoT applications, devices, and data; primary issues viewed as impeding corporate IoT initiatives.

In this on-demand webinar, recorded October 28, 2015, Curt Hall explores the results of Cutter’s comprehensive IoT survey. Learn how companies are exploiting (or plan to exploit) IoT opportunities.

The representation of architecture in the form of architecture artifacts is less important than the act of representation. Architects are no less susceptible than others are to pitfalls of assumptions and beliefs that are suspect and, perhaps, outdated. The act of representing forces architects to think. The goal of architects is not to create works of art that pander to the need for certainty and control, but to deliver frameworks that provide the context to question, poke, and prod. The goal is to surface concerns, bring out possibilities, and expand, at least a little, into the vast darkitecture that envelops the visible enterprise of architecture.

In a culture of innovation, a culture in which "failure" has no useful meaning, a culture where we cannot predict the outcome of our work, we're going to have to get a new idea about efficiency. We will not "get it right the first time." Well, we might, but that would be an accident. No amount of planning and arrangements will guarantee a valuable outcome. What we used to abhor as failure becomes a fact of life, a key feature of our work processes. We must fit our expectations to the fact that of the things, services, and ideas we find innovative, many if not most will not display immediate value.

Consider this: when the IT world wrote its first line of code, there were no methods and we were “flying by the seat of our pants,” so to speak. Then came the structured systems analysis and design methods and entity-relationship modeling for relational structures. Later, the object-oriented methods and the formal project management through Prince-II and PMBOK all provided increasing sophistication in developing solutions but, at the same time, added overheads and bureaucracies to the way in which we worked.

Evolution within security needs to move in a more adaptive direction. The contest between security and intrusion is an arms race like the "Red Queen Hypothesis" — the faster the threat evolves, the faster the response must become, and it is never possible to get ahead of the game.