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.

I have written a lot lately about the definition of architecture, such as the fairly abstract statement: "the structure of the fundamental elements and their relationships in an environment," which, by the way, I think is a good description.

Last year, I had a client identify a concern regarding the communications gap that seemed to exist between team members in the trenches and those in the executive suite. The response? We developed a series of "Communicating UP" workshops, designed to facilitate better communication up the food chain.

To view social media as monolithic in nature is to ignore some of its most interesting attributes. One area of growing importance is the use of social participation to create crowd behavior that suits a variety of interesting purposes.

The term "Big Data" is becoming part of the common vernacular. So what does it mean? Basically, Big Data refers to the huge amount of data created and collectively examined through many online sites, as well as offline sites and vast repositories. The amount of data created now is staggering when compared to just a few years ago. Consider the following:

I have claimed that devops affects the entire solution delivery lifecycle from end to end. Let's explore each Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) phase one at a time and see how this is true.

It seems that hardly a day goes by when the poor state of systems security isn't driven home with another report of some stunning new attack. What's even more distressing to security experts is that the frequency of such attacks and their sophistication are increasing.

Every model helps us see and make sense of some things, but obscures other aspects of the situation. And so it is with Moore's technology adoption lifecycle and the fabled chasm. Moore's model describes marketing high-tech products. But agile isn't a product, even though some firms try to sell it as such.

User experience analysis (UXA) can be described as the understanding, modeling, documenting, and reviewing of multiple aspects of a user's (and user group's) relationship with the business with the aim of creating lasting and sharable value.

Last year, I had a client identify a concern regarding the communications gap that seemed to exist between team members in the trenches and those in the executive suite. The response? We developed a series of "Communicating UP" workshops, designed to facilitate better communication up the food chain. It was a surprising success.

Since the publication of "CMMI for Development, Version 1.3," we would expect an end to the discussions about whether agile can be combined with CMMI. In its current version, CMMI explicitly adds guidance for organizations using agile methods. However, our experience reveals that practitioners still think CMMI and agile are incompatible because they lack accurate information about agile development.

In my last couple Advisors, I have looked at what constitutes architecture and an architectural description ("Is It Architecture?

Creating or running a business requires continuous focus on many areas: the individual, the team, the group or division, the organization as a whole, and, of course, the customer. While it is impossible to keep all the people happy all the time, it is essential to embrace, rather than fear, the conflict that naturally occurs.

Last week, in Part I of this Advisor, I discussed important changes I saw happening in the Hadoop/Big Data world in order to accelerate enterprise adoption of the technology (see "Big Changes on the Horizon for Big Data -- Part I").

"Not one of us stood up and said, 'Dammit, stop!'"

Implementing an agile product development process has many challenges. One that is not regularly addressed is who will lead each of the Scrum teams. Many organizations default to the seemingly obvious answer of the Scrum Master. Often ill-defined (even with "certification"), this role is essentially the agile version of the project manager. But agile teams are supposed to be self-organizing, leaving project managers (who don't contribute in other ways) largely useless.

In Reframing Frameworks: Part I -- Making EA Frameworks Your Ally, I identified eight key factors common to all predefined frameworks.

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Ilenia Fronza's introduction to the January 2013 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Making Managerial Dashboards Meaningful" (Vol. 26, No. 1).

For the past year and a half, much of the hype surrounding Big Data focused on the technological aspects of Hadoop.

When writing about IT from the perspective of one's personal experience in consulting and managing, I have found it helpful to refer to references and frameworks. This allows me to compare my thoughts with others', and to frame those thoughts within some common reference points.

In the API Economy, an API is an application programming interface that is exposed (publicly or privately) on the Internet. It is the means by which one piece of Internet-based software can access the data and/or computational services of another, using standard Internet-based communications technologies. Until recently, the primary firms producing APIs were the vendors of operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, and IBM Linux/390.

In my last Advisor, I talked about some defining characteristics of architecture and looked at the criteria that IEEE 42010 specifies ("Is It Architecture? Part I").

Most large organizations have teams of business analysts. And a growing number have business architects. There are bound to be overlaps between the business architect and business analyst roles, but, curiously, the potential intersections and synergies between them are often neglected.

Corporate culture is an important part of the analytics effort. In a previous Advisor ("Staffing for the Big Data Future") we looked at team-building issues and the need to incorporate an emerging breed of data scientist.

The "consumerization of IT" is a catchy term for a sneaky trend that has been going on for at least 10 years, in which consumer devices and applications are increasingly incorporated into the workplace.