"Continual miniaturization of computing, sustained demand and innovation in the mobile telephony space, and a maturing global infrastructure have all converged to land us squarely in the era of ubiquitous computing and connectivity."

— Joseph Feller, Editor

For this issue of CBR, we devised a survey to explore how organizations use mobile technology, both now and in the future.

The increased capabilities of today's smartphones and tablets have not gone unnoticed by the enterprise, which sees the mobile channel as viable for extending enterprise services into the hands of employees. However, the natural mobility of the smartphone, coupled with its dependence on wireless infrastructure, creates serious headaches for CIOs and IT managers looking to deploy enterprise services into the mobile channel.

Back in 2007, in the first article I wrote for CBR, I relied on my three favorite questions to ask of any new technology trend: What? So what? Now what? Starting with this issue, I'd like to close each installment of CBR by making sure we squarely address the "Now what?" question.

"Benchmarking" is a term borrowed from early 19th-century surveyors. It's about measuring -- but that's only useful if we take the measurements and do something with them. With that in mind, here are three takeaway action points from this issue:

This survey examined organizations' mobile device policies, mobile OS platforms, mobile infrastructure technologies, and mobile device use. Thirty-five percent of the 55 responding organizations are headquartered in North America, another 35% in Asia/Australia/Pacific, 25% in Europe, with the remaining 5% in South America and the Middle East.

I recently had the opportunity to hear Dr. Paul Roehrig, assistant VP of corporate strategy for the 140,000-person consulting firm Cognizant, talk about the coming changes in the workforce. Underpinning these changes, importantly, are high and, in parts of Europe, alarmingly high levels of unemployment.

In my recent Advisor, "Process as a Service," I described the agile process as a reliable process all too often subject to unrealistic expectation of predictability, as follows:

I just returned from yet another client engagement that had the same symptoms and, not surprisingly, the same root cause.

A friend whose company provides data recovery services mentioned to me that his firm had been hired by a company to delete proprietary information from the mobile phone of an employee it had recently fired. In other words, he was going to have to go through and remove company information from the employee's personal device.

A friend whose company provides data recovery services mentioned to me that his firm had been hired by a company to delete proprietary information from the mobile phone of an employee it had recently fired. In other words, he was going to have to go through and remove company information from the employee's personal device.

The project management community remains one of the growth industries in business, reaching its tendrils deep into diverse sectors of the economy, ranging from petrochemical to information technology.

"Scrum and distributed teams are no problem" some consultants claim. Others recommend that while Scrum "in theory" claims colocated teams, Kanban could help you to run distributed teams in an agile way.

Architecture programs make it possible for enterprises to be flexible and agile; that is, to be truly competitive. Whether your organization is just getting started with Enterprise or Business Architecture, or you have an established program, during this on-demand webinar, you'll envision the best ways to organize the architecture function in your organization so that it can deliver maximum value.

In the 2001 film, Analyze That, Dr.

Architecture programs make it possible for enterprises to be flexible and agile; that is, to be truly competitive. Whether your organization is just getting started with Enterprise or Business Architecture, or you have an established program, during this on-demand webinar, former Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Mike Rosen will help you envision the best ways to organize the architecture function in your organization so that it can deliver maximum value.

In socially infused enterprises such as healthcare IT, Big Data analytics is quickly becoming the cornerstone for ongoing transformation. Like many professionals in the field, I recognize that Big Data is big; in fact, it is huge and complex. Furthermore, it has significant prospects for businesses of all sizes.

This Executive Report identifies and defines the four types of "creeps" that affect traditional project management and complex project management: scope creep, feature creep, effort c

For as many years as there have been projects that are managed using some type of traditional project management (TPM) approach, there have been projects plagued by one or more of four different and commonly occurring "creeps": scope, feature, effort, and hope. The accompanying Executive Report examines these four creeps in detail:

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

I don't think anyone would refute me if I said that we are living in a rapidly changing environment, that stability and security are nice fantasies, and that moving from industrial work to knowledge work has changed the structure of business organizations.

Products and processes are probably the most demanding components in enterprise architecture when it comes to involvement of large numbers of decision makers, designers, analysts, and architects who are highly experienced, knowledgeable, and skilled.

Over the past 15-plus years, the Web has proven to be the quintessential delivery vehicle for enterprise applications. Instead of delivering native desktop clients with additional infrastructure to handle updates, versioning, and ensure privacy and security, the Web browser is an IT manager's deployment shell. It's guaranteed to exist on every OS platform and the Web itself is the deployment infrastructure.

Last month, I said that the biggest challenge facing traditional enterprises seeking to implement Hadoop applications is not a lack of suitable tools, but a shortage of skilled personnel knowledgeable in implementing the technology into corporate IT environments (see "Talent Shor

Last month, I said that the biggest challenge facing traditional enterprises seeking to implement Hadoop applications is not a lack of suitable tools, but a shortage of skilled personnel knowledgeable in implementing the technology into corporate IT environments (see "Talent Shor

In Part I of this four-part Executive Update series, I provided an overview of how and why frameworks are so valuable and nec