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.

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