[From the Editor: A number of Cutter Senior Consultants weighed in with their predictions of upcoming trends in IT. See what they had to say here.]

The Internet of Things (IoT) is creating high expectations from businesses and consumers about the possible ways it can help create new revenue models, increase efficiencies, and enhance customer experience. Businesses are looking to tap into the new business opportunities generated by the IoT, while consumers are seeking intelligent products and services that provide all kinds of insights to help them use those products and services optimally.

Many organizations lack automation in their deployment processes. When asked, developers and operations engineers often talk about their many deployment scripts, their pages of documentation, and their personal knowledge of their applications' deep internal settings and configurations. Yet this doesn't really give us a clear idea of how well automated the deployment process is. We must drill deeper to understand the current DevOps process by asking the following questions:

This Executive Report explains what we mean by a business model, provides a classification of business models relevant to the enterprise architecture (EA) use of business models, and describes some of the key business models and how they relate to EA.

"Business model" is a catch-all phrase that covers models of a wide variety of types, so we start the accompanying Executive Report with a taxonomy of business model types. The report then goes on to give examples of the various types of business models in our taxonomy. Next, the report goes on to examine some of the key changes required in enterprise architecture in recent years as a consequence of changes in business models. Finally, we look at several business model frameworks that the EA team can use to convert or translate business models into architectural descriptions.

Recently I was watching a history of the video game industry and was blown away at how its origins and endpoint -- only a few decades apart -- were utterly unrecognizable to each other. Business/IT is changing just as fast.

This survey, our ninth annual IT budgeting survey, examines general and specific aspects of IT budgeting in 37 organizations.

Imagine you are responsible for a production plant. Let's assume it's a plant that produces a few hundred cars per day. Now you hire a new consultant who promises to reduce your cost by a factor of four. He issues some policies and makes some changes to your production process and, alas, after five months your cost really drops down to half. This was not really what he had promised, but it's still quite impressive, isn't it?

When there is a clear understanding of the purpose and costs of IT services -- and how those services directly support the business -- IT becomes a critical member of the business team. With this in mind, let's dive into the results of Cutter's ninth annual IT budget survey.

In this article, Cutter Fellow Bob Benson ponders two related questions: What does the IT budget contain (are there any surprises)? And, perhaps more to the point, how much of the enterprise IT spend is in the IT budget?

For the past three or four years, mobility has continually ranked near the top of the list of "must have" capabilities when it comes to corporate technology adoption plans. This begs the question: how do organizations view the success of their mobile technology efforts to date? A Cutter Consortium survey (conducted in July–October 2014) that asked 49 organizations about their mobile technology adoption and implementation practices helps shed some light on this question.

Although social media tools like Facebook and Twitter were initially developed for personal communication, businesses quickly became enamored with social media as a mode of expressing their own messages and selling products or services. Numerous companies have one or more social media accounts today, handling everything from product launches to corporate damage control.

Although social media tools like Facebook and Twitter were initially developed for personal communication, businesses quickly became enamored with social media as a mode of expressing their own messages and selling products or services. Numerous companies have one or more social media accounts today, handling everything from product launches to corporate damage control.

Although social media tools like Facebook and Twitter were initially developed for personal communication, businesses quickly became enamored with social media as a mode of expressing their own messages and selling products or services. Numerous companies have one or more social media accounts today, handling everything from product launches to corporate damage control.

Over the past few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has generated a lot of hype, touting how embedded sensors combined with mobile technologies will lead to a multitude of connected devices and services (all generating a deluge of data), which will open up a gold rush of opportunities in the consumer, business, technology, and industrial worlds. We've also learned that the IoT is not just about sensors and a lot of data and analytics; it also involves the application of new technologies including drones, wearable computers, and smart networks, as well as new practices such as predictive maintenance.