The world is going through a massive digitalization in the consumer ecosystem due to the influence of social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (SMAC). The evolution of SMAC throws integration challenges in front of enterprises, forcing them to handle various SMAC endpoints in the simplest way.

From time to time, the corpus of information technologies absorbs new classes of technology, often in one fell swoop. The collection of technologies discussed here -- social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (SMAC) -- represents such a bundle. A decade ago, social, mobile, and cloud technologies were more a gleam in the eye of innovators than part of the CIO repertoire. Back then, analytics were frozen in a period of glacial change that was moving far too slow to attract much attention except from analysts trying to divine which bigger vendor was going to buy which smaller vendor. Today, social, mobile, analytics, and cloud are the cornerstone technologies driving innovation inside many if not most enterprises. In this issue of Cutter IT Journal, we bring together five articles with some different looks at the opportunities and challenges SMAC poses.

While adoption of social technologies may lag behind the others due to their newness, IT leaders have had the concept drilled into their heads constantly over the past few years. In our first article, Cutter Senior Consultant Dave Higgins and coauthor Sam Clark rightfully point out the distinction between public social networks (e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook) and private social networks (those dedicated to a specific company or organization). After all, the way human beings network with each other is complex. Humans may maintain different sets of relationships for different purposes. For example, many of us have a Facebook presence for connecting with friends and family and a LinkedIn presence for more professional needs.

Nethaji Chapala asks an excellent question: Is SMAC really helping organizations compete, or is it merely adding more complexity and confusion? While the already large SMAC pie continues to grow, not all organizations have been able to extract value from their SMAC investments. Chapala argues for a more systematic approach to developing pragmatic SMAC strategies. He identifies two simple matrices that can help organizations clarify their thinking about how SMAC technology ought to be adopted.

To view social media as monolithic in nature is to ignore some of its most interesting attributes. One area of growing importance is the use of social participation to create crowd behavior that suits a variety of interesting purposes.

The software development industry is continuously evolving, requiring organizations to maintain greater control over software development processes, methodologies, and practices in order to certify that projects and their management align with a company's strategic direction. The project management office (PMO) paradigm has arisen within organizations as a critical element in maintaining this control.1

In April 2012, while in Boston for the Cutter Summit, I started a dinner conversation with a friend and ex-colleague under the assumption that we would simply have a pleasant chat, giving each other updates on our respective work since our previous meeting.

In April 2012, while in Boston for the Cutter Summit, I started a dinner conversation with a friend and ex-colleague under the assumption that we would simply have a pleasant chat, giving each other updates on our respective work since our previous meeting.

The term "Big Data" is becoming part of the common vernacular. So what does it mean? Basically, Big Data refers to the huge amount of data created and collectively examined through many online sites, as well as offline sites and vast repositories. The amount of data created now is staggering when compared to just a few years ago. Consider the following:

I have claimed that devops affects the entire solution delivery lifecycle from end to end. Let's explore each Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) phase one at a time and see how this is true.

It seems that hardly a day goes by when the poor state of systems security isn't driven home with another report of some stunning new attack. What's even more distressing to security experts is that the frequency of such attacks and their sophistication are increasing.

Part III of this series provides practical advice for launching a business-IT architecture misalignment initiative in practice. Topics covered include business as a change agent in business-IT transformation, building executive support, transformation scenarios, and establishing governance and funding.

Part III of this series provides practical advice for launching a business-IT architecture misalignment initiative in practice. Topics covered include business as a change agent in business-IT transformation, building executive support, transformation scenarios, and establishing governance and funding.

User experience analysis (UXA) can be described as the understanding, modeling, documenting, and reviewing of multiple aspects of a user's (and user group's) relationship with the business with the aim of creating lasting and sharable value.

Last year, I had a client identify a concern regarding the communications gap that seemed to exist between team members in the trenches and those in the executive suite. The response? We developed a series of "Communicating UP" workshops, designed to facilitate better communication up the food chain. It was a surprising success.

Since the publication of "CMMI for Development, Version 1.3," we would expect an end to the discussions about whether agile can be combined with CMMI. In its current version, CMMI explicitly adds guidance for organizations using agile methods. However, our experience reveals that practitioners still think CMMI and agile are incompatible because they lack accurate information about agile development.

In my last couple Advisors, I have looked at what constitutes architecture and an architectural description ("Is It Architecture?

As reported in Part I1 of this Executive Update series, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey in October and November 2012 that asked 69 end-user organizations worldwide about their use of mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, in order to provide their employ

As reported in Part I1 of this Executive Update series, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey in October and November 2012 that asked 69 end-user organizations worldwide about their use of mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, in order to provide their employ

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Last week, in Part I of this Advisor, I discussed important changes I saw happening in the Hadoop/Big Data world in order to accelerate enterprise adoption of the technology (see "Big Changes on the Horizon for Big Data -- Part I").