Since its inception, enterprise architecture has suffered an evolution failure. Why "suffered"? Because EA has gradually become an area of exclusive IT competency.

"Connection, I just can't make no connection" -- (Connection, Mick Jagger/Keith Richards)

"Connection, I just can't make no connection" -- (Connection, Mick Jagger/Keith Richards)

This month we present five wide-ranging, insightful articles on the possible technological, management, and business skills that executives, managers, and workers in organizations (private and public sector, large and small) will need in the 2020-2025 timeframe as a result of the ceaseless improvement in information systems and their core technologies. While the articles by our group of international authors offer different predictions about what skills individuals and organizations will need to have in order to succeed in the next decade, they all agree that they will likely be radically different from the skills considered to be in the vanguard today. Not a client? Download your complimentary copy of this report now.

Knowledge needs to be discovered and utilized in context. Creating our own route in our own work context will enable us to develop our personal theory of problem solving in practice, thus making sense of our deliberations and discoveries. Educating learners engaged in professional practice in-the-unfamiliar requires us to abandon the safety of universal theory and embrace the principles of personal discovery, reflective practice, sensemaking, and the development of capability, thereby enabling learners to discover and embrace their own theories and continue to foster and enrich their capability.

The skills that many of us older folks (whom I will more blandly refer to as "employers") find missing in the younger generation are fairly well known. These include: communication skills, critical thinking skills, project management skills, teamwork skills, writing skills, and numeracy skills. Many reports on this skill gap cite surveys that measure employer perception of these skill gaps, not actual empirical measurement of the employees' skills. While studies that examine what each generation of students learns as a result of education shows increasing not decreasing knowledge, it is plausible that skill gaps can and do exist, even above and beyond the mythical perceptions each older generation may have about the younger one.

This Cutter IT Journal issue presents five wide-ranging, insightful articles on the possible technological, management, and business skills that executives, managers, and workers in organizations (private and public sector, large and small) will need in the 2020-2025 timeframe as a result of the ceaseless improvement in information systems and their core technologies. Not a client? Download a complimentary copy now.

In this article, I discuss the various forces influencing skill demand and evolution and their implications for organizations and individuals. I also present a model for evaluating and continuously managing the organization's skill portfolio to derive competitive market advantage. The way work is done is changing, and managing workforce skills in sync with market signals will continue to define successful companies.

This is an interesting time in the evolution toward the Internet of Things (IoT). On the road toward well-integrated, well-protected, useful interconnected systems, four things need to happen: interest, technology enablers, security, and management skills.

In this Executive Report, we examine these emerging domain architectures and answer the following questions: What are these domain-specific architectures? What impact will they have on EA in general? And, finally, how do they fit with existing architectures and reference models?

Although we talk about "enterprise" architecture, a lot of the most interesting EA work is happening at cross-enterprise levels. Some of this work is initiated by vendors or consulting firms, keen to provide an architectural foundation for their clients. Other cross-enterprise architecture initiatives are developed by groups or consortia specially set up for this purpose.

Having watched technology trends for a very long time, I have noticed how time and again great ideas get watered down as they reach larger and larger audiences and are applied to bigger and bigger problems. In a way, this phenomenon resembles dropping a large rock in a lake.

I'm excited about the Internet of Things (IoT), and I expect it to create incredible opportunities for companies in almost every industry.

This Executive Update explores the intricate link that exists between Lean and Agile. Such exploration can reveal the hidden synergies between the two approaches, which can benefit projects and organizations in practice. In order to understand this synergy, however, it is also important to understand the differences between Lean and Agile. 

Although currently limited in its application, streaming analytics technology is going to experience a lot more use as the IoT begins to advance due to its ability to ingest and analyze very high volumes of continuously streaming data (both unstructured and semistructured) in real time. Basically, both of these characteristics are key for sensor data management systems.

Although currently limited in its application, streaming analytics technology is going to experience a lot more use as the IoT begins to advance due to its ability to ingest and analyze very high volumes of continuously streaming data (both unstructured and semistructured) in real time. Basically, both of these characteristics are key for sensor data management systems.

This Executive Update intends to show a pragmatic resolution for the well-known dilemma of top-down versus bottom-up approaches in data warehousing initiatives in light of changing technical, business, and economic scenarios.

Nonfunctional requirements (NFR) are an important aspect of an application, and they are becoming increasingly relevant for Web applications and underlying services. We include in this Executive Update the results of NFR testing at a client site, which shows how the framework is applied to study the system under component failures. Tests revealed system defects, which then could be corrected. A component’s resiliency is estimated using the exception indicator and the Wilson confidence interval.

In the early 1980s, Douglas Adams became famous for creating a future world that was both advanced and absurd in the Hitchh

Management reserve is a tool that project managers can use to protect the project schedule against unplanned changes that compromise the project completion date.

One of the hits that enterprise architecture has taken over the years is that while enterprise architecture studies produce interesting pictures, they often don't produce "actionable" information.

One of the hits that enterprise architecture has taken over the years is that while enterprise architecture studies produce interesting pictures, they often don't produce "actionable" information.

Lynn Winterboer answers questions on user stories, how regulatory requirements play out in Agile DW/BI, examples of good acceptance criteria, and the recommended sprint length for DW teams.

While there is no silver bullet for an ideal MDM solution, there are five crucial decision points in a customer MDM journey, and the decisions taken at those points become the defining moments of the solution. This Executive Update addresses those five decision points.