"If you want to create an Agile organization, you can't rely on stacking the deck with your best staff members -- everyone needs to make the transition, not just your star players."

-- Scott W. Ambler, Guest Editor

Cutter IT Journal VOL. 26, NO. 11

Cutter IT Journal VOL. 26, NO. 11

From April 2011 to December 2012, I was in charge (initially as executive consultant and later as CTO) of the IT organization of Wolfe, LLC, the rapidly growing corporate owner of Giftcards.com and other brands in the online prepaid domain.

Although many Agile teams are small, say 10 or fewer people, and either colocated or at least near-located, the majority of Agile teams work in more complex situations. For example, some teams are several dozen people in size and sometimes larger. Some teams are geographically distributed. Some are taking on very challenging problems.

Cutter IT Journal VOL. 26, NO. 11

Cutter IT Journal VOL. 26, NO. 11

The concept of notice and consent pervades modern privacy law and regulations. The efforts are laudable, but our cognitive limits and the rapid pace of advancing technology are straining their usefulness.

This case study illustrates that sometimes very significant business goals seem to get washed out of the process of specifying and building a system; the focus is on managing the solution (e.g., certainly reducing manual effort is solved with automation) rather than on managing the relationship be

Agile is well served by exploring the connections between knowledge, culture, psychology, and technology. As Cutter Fellow Vince Kellen states:

Too many organizations confuse activity with purposeful action. For them, especially in a crisis, it's important to do something. The worse the crisis, the more pressure there is to act. If you follow this path, at best your success will have had more to do with luck than with planning.

Trust is the bandwidth of communication.

-- Karl-Erik Sveiby

Trust but verify.

-- Ronald Reagan

My Executive Report "Agile Business: The Final Frontier" outlined some key elements of how we can extend and expand the fundamental concepts of Agile project management (APM) and Agile development to an holistic organizational approach to organizational agility.

The Circle -- the new novel from Dave Eggers -- is being billed as sort of a modern 1984 meets A Brave New World.

The Circle -- the new novel from Dave Eggers -- is being billed as sort of a modern 1984 meets A Brave New World.

Hadoop is receiving a lot of attention from data mining and predictive analytics practitioners because it offers a scalable platform for building, training, and testing models that can be executed in parallel using massive volumes of data, as opposed to typical data mining practices involving the use of sample data sets for m

Hadoop is receiving a lot of attention from data mining and predictive analytics practitioners because it offers a scalable platform for building, training, and testing models that can be executed in parallel using massive volumes of data, as opposed to typical data mining practices involving the use of sample data sets for m

Cyber war is the use of IT as a theater of war. The primary focus in recent years has been upon so-called cyber weapons used to affect military and industrial control systems. The most prominent of these was Stuxnet, a piece of malware created by the US and Israel to damage Iran's cyclotrons.

Cyber war is the use of IT as a theater of war. The primary focus in recent years has been upon so-called cyber weapons used to affect military and industrial control systems. The most prominent of these was Stuxnet, a piece of malware created by the US and Israel to damage Iran's cyclotrons.

During July-September 2013, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey asking 39 end-user organizations worldwide about various issues pertaining to BI, data warehousing (DW), analytics, and Big Data practices.

Organizations seeking to respond quickly in an ever-changing marketplace are asking more and more from their data warehousing (DW) and business intelligence (BI) teams. Fortunately, many BI teams are finding they can meet top-priority needs in short time frames when they adopt Agile practices. Within an Agile team, the product owner (PO) guides the team's priorities to meet the organization's goals.

Product owners for Agile BI teams often face unique challenges compared to their peers on other functionally specific delivery teams.

The strategic goals, vision, and mission statements of today's organizations emphasize the importance of customer satisfaction, not only in terms of functionality but also in terms of quality of service (QoS). One of many QoS parameters for an application is performance. The performance of any system refers to how well the system is able to handle the user load in terms of application response and system resources.

In moving from the 20th to the 21st century, powerful advances in connectivity and computing power, along with the trend of centralization of media sources and tech tools, have caused big shifts in many sectors.

If you visit an Agile conference these days, it's hard not to run into talks like "Scrum within a RUP project" or "Agile in a traditional organization." From a dogmatic Agile point of view, this reminds me a little bit of a veggie-stuffed beef recipe promoted as vegetarian food.

For a long time, the predominant business assumption was that specialization (around markets and business functions) was the right approach to complexity (divide and conquer), efficiency, and market responsiveness (closer knows best). In a divide-and-conquer paradigm, the "pipes and filters" pattern -- with islands (or silos) of information processing, decision making, and action, and "pipes" or information buffers between -- works well enough organizationally and for the technology firmament supporting that mode of business operation.

There is no escaping the talk (and rhetoric!) about Big Data. Vendors are peddling Big Data solutions; consulting firms employ Big Data specialists to help you with your Big Data projects; universities offer Big Data courses; Big Data conferences are aplenty; and tech journalists, magazines, and even blogs are buzzing about the Big Data revolution. This is great, especially after the Great Recession we just endured. We welcome any excitement about technology buzzwords!