For the past few years, we've argued that business architecture is important, its use is growing, and it is being used to deliver value to organizations.

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant San Murugesan's introduction to the March 2013 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "The Emerging Cloud Ecosystem: In

Big Data has frequently been described as differing from standard BI and analytics by volume, velocity, and variety. These factors describe most of the current initiatives within the area and point to issues that make analysis difficult.

"[T]he nation's top intelligence official, James R. Clapper Jr., warned Congress that a major cyber attack on the United States could cripple the country's infrastructure and economy, and suggested that such attacks now pose the most dangerous immediate threat to the United States, even more pressing than an attack by global terrorist networks."

Expanding agile in development to end-to-end agile was always a tricky business. You could, of course, drive success in agile downstream, using your success in development as the lever for change, provided you had carefully thought through three major aspects:

Back in September of 2012, I discussed business video and issues associated with implementation and usage (see "Catch the Wave of Business Video").

Managers, especially middle managers, are uniquely positioned to see an integrated and holistic picture of their organizations. But they won't do so as long as they see their role as getting people to work hard.

Two years ago, I examined Watson-IBM's natural language question answering system (see "How Smart Is Watson, and What Is Its Significance to BI and DSS?").

Although collaboration is a behavior, it can often be enabled by various technologies. But it's not just collaboration technologies that will define the workplace of the future. These seven technologies will be crucial in shaping the future workspace.

"Freedom doesn't mean to do what you want, but to want what you're doing."

-- Maria Montessori

An organizational capability, much like an end-to-end process, requires that different departments work together to create value for customers.

Architecture without governance is futile. How, then, does business architecture govern? One area where I have seen business architecture make an impact is in IT project portfolio management.

The recent announcement that NATO and the US Pentagon were retracting a statement reporting that Taliban attacks against coalition forces in Afghanistan had declined (in 2012) is a good reminder of just how important training and data quality are when it comes to analytics and decision making.

A company's data has value, but to date, data assets have not been shown directly on companies' books, although it is sometimes there as goodwill, and sometimes it is partially reflected in the price of the stock. We need to make the value of data more apparent. For example, airlines and travel websites such as Expedia capture travel-related data.

In his landmark blog post, "My agile testing project," Brian Marick provided a model for agile testing.

With the continued adoption of TOGAF as the industry standard EA framework, many organizations are struggling with how to get started and how to adapt TOGAF to fit them.

Have you ever written an email, blog post, or Tweet that caused you to take a deep breath and cringe before you showed it to the world? That was the reaction I experienced last fall before I submitted my article, "The Agile CMMI Conversation Is a Dead End," for publication in the November Cutter IT Journal. In this article, I presented a case for why I think we are spending too much of our time continuing to debate the Agile CMMI issue.

While the term "Big Data" continues to encroach on the common vernacular, it's important to understand the drivers of the phenomenon, its possible value, and also its potential for misuse. Many of the "misuse" examples come from areas of privacy and ethics, but there is also the potential for misuse that is just bad business.

"We don't test for hedgehog, either."

Devops has only been around for a brief few years, and it is already having a significant impact throughout the development community. While there are those who might view the integration of development and operations as a useful fad that serves a limited number of situations, evidence suggests that there are serious advantages to this approach.

To enhance customer satisfaction and improve user responsiveness, a common ingredient of choice in today's modern, pan-enterprise, services-oriented enterprise is cloud computing. So what really is cloud computing? It is a way to run a data center that allows users to serve themselves and gives your staff the opportunity to go home on time. I'm being facetious but that's the bottom line. It's an efficient manner for users (end users and developers) to help themselves to computing resources.

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Fellow Vince Kellen's introduction to the February 2013 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "SMAC: Social Media, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud Computing" (Vol.

Various vendors, including Greenplum (EMC), Kognitio, ParAccel, Teradata, and Vertica Systems (HP), have offered versions of their high-performance analytic databases tailored for use in cloud environments such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platforms for several years now.

In today's rapidly changing business environment, innovation is key for survival. Companies may become obsolete in no time in the absence of new and innovative products. A classic example of this phenomenon is the demise of Kodak. At the same time, companies like Apple and Google have not only contributed toward building innovative products but at the same time made their investors many times richer.

Building executive support from a business perspective is often the most challenging aspect of launching and delivering a business-IT transformation initiative. The first step requires understanding what role the business must play and how to overcome common roadblocks.