Cutter: In your new book, Analytics in a Big Data World: The Essential Guide to Data Science and its Applications, you discuss how to target and leverage business opportunities using big data and analytics. Could you expand on what these business opportunities might be?

In this Advisor, Ken Orr asserts that even though nonlinear thinking is not intuitive for everybody, it will help you understand how to get out of significant traps.

Dependably and accurately estimating the effort required to deliver against business requirements is a very important part of the Agile value proposition. Often, the early stages of Agile adoption are spent in large part coming to grips with the subtleties of estimation.

The phrase "Agile architecture" evokes two concepts:

Mobile devices and cloud computing continue to redefine basic concepts of IT and challenge the concepts taken for granted over the preceding decades. One of the issues in ferment today is that of defining access and providing secure and differential availability of computing resources to users as needed.

Most news coverage of drones focuses on their use by the military -- especially US forces in the Middle East, where they are used in combat and anti-terrorist operations. Amazon also managed to get a lot of free publicity around the 2013 holiday season when company reps suggested the company might use drones to deliver packages to consumers in the future.

Q: Why did one of the largest US chemical companies recently spend nearly US $1 billion to purchase a startup company focusing on applying big data analytics to weather forecasting?

A: To help agricultural companies take advantage of the integration of modern technologies!

Great conductors are known to be supremely confident: in their technique and in themselves. You can see the confidence when you watch video clips of giants like Mengelberg, Toscanini, Furtwangler, Kleiber, or Bernstein. Moreover, you sense their confidence when you listen to an audio recording of theirs: they are sure-footed with each and every note in the symphony they are conducting.

One of the great things about working with Cutter is the access to a lot of great information from really smart people -- and also the ability to have serious sessions with

The phrase "Internet of Things" (IoT) started appearing in 2009 and, as with most new concepts during their infancy, its definition has not yet stabilized.

Mobile devices and cloud computing continue to redefine basic concepts of IT and challenge the concepts taken for granted over the preceding decades. One of the issues in ferment today is that of defining access and providing secure and differential availability of computing resources to users as needed.

Many years ago I served as the Chairman of the Privacy, Confidentiality and Security Committee of what is now the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO).

In my last Advisor (see "Can You Be 'Too Agile'?"), we considered the question: "Is it possible to be too Agile?" The question itself is a sign of Agile's successful adoption by businesses and their development teams.

Most of the news regarding privacy and wearable computers and camera-equipped devices like Google Glass has focused on the rights of individuals when it comes to being recorded in public places or commercial establishments like bars and restaurants.

In a recent Agile Product & Project Management Executive Update (see "Scrum's Value Proposition"), I talked about Scrum: what you can get out of it, what you won't get from it, and what you must put into Scrum to get its va

Social media monitoring excels when it comes to gathering rich customer feedback because consumers tend to elaborate when discussing products and services on social media networks and online forums.

In a prior Advisor (see "Something Is Happening Here"), I briefly described four megatrends shaping the world we live in. The topic of this Advisor, the end of anonymity, is worth a deeper look.

"When we started with Agile coaching, I thought we would have to transform dozens of bureaucratic waterfall organizations. Instead we have to start with mostly chaotic structures," a former colleague of mine once mentioned in an interview.

As with most new business disciplines, discussing business architecture with executives typically requires clarifying the value proposition. With business architecture in particular, clearly articulating and communicating its value is a prerequisite to launching a substantive and sustainable deployment effort.

After our initial success activating internal influencers to deliver business benefit, which we discussed in the December 2013 Cutter IT Journal article "People and Data: The Keys to Getting Business Value from Social Media," we have been working to more effectively extend our model to external influencers. Whether the influencer is internal or external, the basic principles are the same. The interaction has to be genuine, valuable for the influencer, and measurable.

Here is a planning exercise for your IT management:

The Target Board of Directors and CEO Gregg Steinhafel announced on 5 May that Steinhafel would step down as CEO. This is the first time in my memory that a CEO for a Fortune 50 company has been forced to step down because of cyber security problems.

We've come a long way from the skeptical reception Agile used to get in product development organizations. There was a time not that long ago when budding Agilists had to be prepared with a huge arsenal of arguments in favor of the young methodology in the face of traditional waterfall supporters.

Interoperability between components and integration of components are high on the contemporary EA agenda.

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant San Murugesan's introduction to the April 2014 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "How IT Can Transform Healthcare" (Vol. 27, No. 4).