Everyone is talking about big changes in IT. They are indeed big -- bigger, in fact, than the ones we discussed before the dot-com bubble exploded. What are you going to do about them? Here are five areas that require your immediate attention:

Devices

Software

Social media

Cloud

Businesses are faced with ever-increasing complexity, competition, and cost pressures. Vendors espouse new products and "silver bullet" solutions, but more often than not, they fall short of expectations, and worse, add to the complexity of IT challenges. Yet there is hope for getting a handle on this complexity and finally addressing the challenge of business/IT alignment. The approach is not based on a new product or technology but on an architectural foundation that brings the complexity of IT into focus from a business perspective.

Businesses are faced with ever-increasing complexity, competition, and cost pressures. Vendors espouse new products and "silver bullet" solutions, but more often than not, they fall short of expectations, and worse, add to the complexity of IT challenges. Yet there is hope for getting a handle on this complexity and finally addressing the challenge of business/IT alignment. The approach is not based on a new product or technology but on an architectural foundation that brings the complexity of IT into focus from a business perspective.

Despite the hype, despite the maturity of some vendors and their offerings, the cloud/software as a service (SaaS) world is still in its infancy. There are mature offerings, but there are also immature offerings.

Despite the hype, despite the maturity of some vendors and their offerings, the cloud/software as a service (SaaS) world is still in its infancy. There are mature offerings, but there are also immature offerings.

Last June,1 I wrote that traditional enterprises are interested in taking advantage of the Internet-scale "big data" processing capabilities offered by MapReduce2 and open source derivative Hadoop,3 which are used primarily by such Internet-based companies as Google, Facebook, and Yahoo!

This issue of Cutter Benchmark Review benchmarks what's happening in organizations with respect to tablet adoption and use.

This is my fifth contribution to CBR, and it was by far the most difficult survey to prepare. Not the survey itself — the questions that my coauthors and I believe to be interesting and important were obvious to us, and we had no problems harmonizing our thoughts and quickly arriving at a finished product. So what was the struggle? Defining "the tablet."

At the very end of the movie The Terminator, Sarah Conner, future heroine of the human race, fills her car with gas at some "out in the middle of nowhere" service station. She knows how the next decades will roll out for the world; she has seen what lies ahead. As the gas tank fills, a man nearby speaks something in Spanish. Sarah then asks the station attendant, "What did he say?"

The attendant replies, "He said there's a storm coming in."

Sarah then sighs and says, "I know."

This survey examined how organizations perceive and are using tablet devices. Sixty-two percent of the 103 respondents come from organizations headquartered or based in North America, 16% from organizations in Australia/Pacific, 11% from organizations in Europe, 3% from organizations in Asia, and the remainder from organizations in other regions.

The most important way to reduce risk in innovation is to establish efficient innovation processes and consider risks versus benefits at each stage of development for new ideas. General practices that can help to build efficiency and reduce tendencies toward a risky "all or nothing" approach include:

The most important way to reduce risk in innovation is to establish efficient innovation processes and consider risks versus benefits at each stage of development for new ideas. General practices that can help to build efficiency and reduce tendencies toward a risky "all or nothing" approach include:

Risk management is really tough. It involves thinking the unthinkable and then, because you have thought of the unthinkable, feeling compelled to do something to prepare for it. If the latest Japanese earthquake/tsunami/nuclear reactor disaster teaches us nothing else, it is that if something can go bad, it will.

Risk management is really tough. It involves thinking the unthinkable and then, because you have thought of the unthinkable, feeling compelled to do something to prepare for it. If the latest Japanese earthquake/tsunami/nuclear reactor disaster teaches us nothing else, it is that if something can go bad, it will.

Risk management is really tough. It involves thinking the unthinkable and then, because you have thought of the unthinkable, feeling compelled to do something to prepare for it. If the latest Japanese earthquake/tsunami/nuclear reactor disaster teaches us nothing else, it is that if something can go bad, it will.

The relationship between intellectual property (IP) rights and innovation is by no means straightforward. While conventional economics dictates that innovation is the route to value creation -- and IP protection provides the means to secure that value -- this formulation breaks down almost at the instant in which it is questioned.

The relationship between intellectual property (IP) rights and innovation is by no means straightforward. While conventional economics dictates that innovation is the route to value creation -- and IP protection provides the means to secure that value -- this formulation breaks down almost at the instant in which it is questioned.

"Frantic," "indecisive," "technology-disabled," "fantasy-driven," "doesn't know what it wants" -- these are only some of the statements provided by IT people when asked to describe their customers. And this is hardly a surprise. In general, IT processes are characterized by long durations and time-consuming efforts. Once assigned to a task, the IT project manager is first asked to "understand the need" (aka requirements management).

This week I bring you another internationally inspired Advisor from my trip to Rome, where I'm teaching two seminars on enterprise architecture. For this trip, I decided to modernize and leave my trusty old paper Italian phrasebook at home in lieu of a modern, talking, iPhone app. Although there were quite a few to choose from, I started with the free app.

Does this sound familiar? The product manager for a software application is getting hounded by sales reps to add functionality that would let them call on their installed base with a new story to tell. At the same time, customer service has a list of usability problems that need to be fixed. Meanwhile, the product developers are realizing that they have pushed the current architecture to its limits, and they need to move to an approach based on services.

Over the past year or so, I've discussed some of the more important factors I see influencing the growing use of predictive analytics and data mining (see "The Slow, Steady Climb for Data Mining, Predictive Analytics," 1 February 2011).

On 17 March 2000, there was a small fire at a Royal Philips Electronics semiconductor plant in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. The fire was caused by lightening hitting a power line, which shut down the power to cooling fans in a furnace operating at the plant.

On 17 March 2000, there was a small fire at a Royal Philips Electronics semiconductor plant in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. The fire was caused by lightening hitting a power line, which shut down the power to cooling fans in a furnace operating at the plant.

For at least 30 years now, one of the explicit goals of software development is reusability. In the beginning, "objects" were going to increase productivity because developers would develop objects that could be reused. Some were and a lot weren't.