For all independent service providers (ISVs) and IT service providers, developing cloud-based services is becoming an essential business model in order to be at par with competitors and to keep infrastructure and operational cost optimal. The challenge here is two-fold: (1) developing, deploying, and maintaining services using cloud-based models form one part of the challenge; and (2) choosing the right set of infrastructure and application components and achieving a defined level of nonfunctional aspects is the other part.

So you're the new CIO? Congratulations or condolences, which should it be? A bit of both. Nobody ever said it would be easy to be a tech-savvy plus business-savvy strategist who focuses on important IT initiatives and innovations while simultaneously managing hiccup-free daily operations and delivering complex initiatives predictably, on schedule, and within budget.

But that's your job.

In Part I of this article ("Intelligent Video Analytics On the Rise, Part I"), I discussed the basics of video analytics and how the technology has evolved into comprehensive, intelligent video analysis (IVA) platforms, which are finding increasing use for automating the moni

At the time of this writing, I could find no existing laws or regulations that explicitly name Big Data within them. That could change sometime in the coming months as businesses and lawmakers realize that a variety of legal protections as well as associated information security controls are necessary to protect these digital gold mines.

A colleague and friend -- Olivier Gaudin, CEO and cofounder of Sonar -- has recently shared with me his "water leak" metaphor. The water leak metaphor asserts that resolving a technical debt situation is similar to the approach you need to take when you find water on the floor of your house.

One of my tenets of modeling is "Good enough is good enough," meaning that when a model is good enough for its intended purpose, it's time to stop messing with it.

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant Jim Sutton's introduction to the April 2013 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Is Lean the Path to Releasing the Competitiv

The Boston Marathon bombing on 15 April and the crucial role that video played in identifying and apprehending the suspects in the days after sparked my interest in examining the current state of video analytics and, in particular, new developments with intelligent video analytics (IVA) systems.

The past few months have been compelling for me in my role as a project management consultant and risk management expert.

It doesn't get much more "from the trenches" than digging in to find and fix bugs, and this is a case study based on working with a client doing exactly that. The particular issue: they were becoming increasingly unresponsive to high-priority bugs.

Many explanations and descriptions of complexity refer to, and even depend on, the notion of a system or systems. As EA also uses the notion of systems extensively, referring to systems makes it much easier to relate complexity to an EA perspective.

Big Data is not only knocking at your business executives' doors, it is being pushed in their faces with dire warnings that if they don't adopt it, their business is doomed for failure.

Last month we looked at the veracity factor in Big Data, which concerns the uncertainty of input and the need to cross-check and correct it (see "The Veracity Factor"). This is important because results in streams, such as social data comments, do not yield a precise interpretation.

In a mutual boot-strapping beginning with the dawn of Homo sapiens, mankind and information have both exploded in variety, velocity, and volume. Our fates have been intertwined. We advance by harvesting, using, and sharing information. Along the way, information persists, mutates, and diffuses further.

The key members from the technology group are waiting to hear about the new project that the director is going to announce. The meeting is about to begin, and the room is filled with silence. They know that the project has something to do with Java, Oracle, and the cloud. The director starts explaining the importance of this strategic project and delivering it on time to the customer.

A recent article in the New York Times describes a New York Police Department (NYPD) pilot program in which approximately 400 officers have been given smartphones to help them fight crime.

The experience a customer has with an organization is no longer restricted to the time window of that interaction.

For some time now, tablets routinely have been touted as an ideal platform for making mobile BI practical. But to what extent are end-user organizations actually adopting tablets to support their mobile BI initiatives?

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

The more agile software development becomes mainstream, the more often I run into a typical pattern of management mismatch. It comes in several flavors. A recent client CTO who is responsible for the IT of an online store illustrates one example.

Every company has some form of organizational chart. We're all used to seeing the hierarchy of boxes and lines and names that are characteristic of traditional reporting structures.

The global financial crisis (GFC) provided a once-in-a-generation opportunity to develop support among key decision makers that a strategic view of risk management actually does matter. Post-GFC views of risk management increasingly seek to embed the analysis and understanding of risk within the strategy process. After all, strategy is about taking risk. The challenge then becomes: how do we control this risk taking?

Driven by several converging and complementary factors, cloud computing is advancing as an IT service delivery model at a staggering pace. It is also causing a paradigm shift in the way we deliver and use IT.

Last week, CNN reported on the "biggest Cyberattack in history" involving two Internet companies in Europe. Apparently the scale exceeded any previous attack by, maybe, a factor of 10.

Does this quote from Moore's Crossing the Chasm feel like the agile adoption marketplace today?

When a product reaches this point in the market development, it must be made increasingly easier to adopt in order to continue being successful. If this does not occur, the transition ... may very well stall or never happen.