As technical debt tools like Sonar and SQALE become more and more pervasive, the measurement and interpretation of technical debt are becoming fairly standard operating procedures in many of the development "shops" I work with. On a regular basis in my Cutter engagements, I use dashboards like those shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2.

Mobility will be one of the most sought-after enterprise initiatives in 2013. But implementing mobile devices and applications presents organizations with a number of issues and considerations.

Misunderstood, poorly identified, and often brushed aside, the gap between strategic business demands and the ability of deployed IT solutions to meet those demands grows by the day.

Collaboration methods and tools are evolving rapidly because of a confluence of recent trends:

The after effects of subtropical storm Sandy, which slammed into northern New Jersey late in October, are still being strongly felt. According to the latest count, some 30,000 businesses and homes in New Jersey and an additional 305,000 homes and 256,000 businesses in New York were destroyed or damaged by the storm.

Are you agile? You have probably heard this question before, and since you read this Advisor, chances are that you answered "yes" to it.

Although mobile computing is not new, there has been a lot of discussion lately about it, and about having an effective mobile/social strategy. The first question we need to ask is: what should your mobile strategy be?

There has been a lot of discussion about the need for organizations to adopt tablet devices (e.g., iPad, Android-based, PlayBook) to enable their employees to communicate via email, participate in mobile conferencing, and to access, view, and interact with corporate data via reports, dashboards, and other functionality while on the

Mobile device management will continue to play a key role in enterprise mobility in 2013 as organizations accelerate their use of smartphones and tablets in an effort to increase employee productivity and enable the business to respond more efficiently to customer wants and needs.

Some time ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an article with the title "What the CFOs Want." It reflected the views of a significant number of CFOs from large and small companies, including CFOs from companies such as PepsiCo, Comcast, Ford, DuPon

Although the popularity of current agile values and practices have their roots in software development, there exists a significant opportunity for these agile values and behaviors to be applied across the overall business.

As organizations rediscover that it costs far more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one, there appears to be a marked increase in assessing customers' experience. In this regard, customer surveys and focus groups are the typical tools of the trade.

With the US presidential election now being over, the results have been dissected by the pundits, political analysts, pollsters, and politicos. One of the most significant elements to emerge is the use of sophisticated analytics and Big Data -- in every aspect of both the Obama and Romney campaigns.

There has been a lot of discussion about the need for organizations to adopt tablet devices (e.g., iPad, Android-based, PlayBook) to enable their employees to communicate via email, participate in mobile conferencing, and to access, view, and interact with corporate data via reports, dashboards, and other functionality while o

I have recently confronted a need to revisit these topics. To remount, if you will, my hobbyhorse. Industrial thinking and methods, never quiet for long, seem poised to make further advances in the ongoing struggle to standardize work (of the many) for the convenience of those in charge (the few). I believe we should resist whenever we can.

My practice tends to be a little bifocal with respect to the size of the clients. On the one hand, agile, technical debt, software governance, and devops engagements tend to be of significant scale and scope. On the other hand, technical due diligence engagements I carry out for various venture capitalists are typically concerned with startups.

For years I have been expecting a new device to come along and impact the way we design enterprise applications, and I think that era is upon us now. But let's take a step back for a minute and review what we have done to prepare for this inevitable evolution.

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant Hillel Glazer's introduction to the November 2012 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Agile CMMI" (Vol. 25, No. 11).

Business intelligence and analytics are becoming increasingly important in creating an agile approach to business process/performance management.

In this series of Advisors ("What's a Knowledge Worker to Do? Part I" and "What's a Knowledge Worker to Do?

Last January, I discussed the respective pros and cons associated with the BYOD and enterprise-supplied device strategies for adopting mobile capabilities in the enterprise.

Mergers are like marriages. Two entities come together to form a union that should, in theory, be greater than the sum of its parts, often with the goal of accelerating growth, cutting costs, increasing market share, or taking advantage of other synergies. In the best case, merged companies complement each other and create new opportunities not realized if they remained separate.

I regularly receive emails like this from procurement departments of large companies or public authorities: "We ask you to offer your proposal for the development of system XYZ that is specified in the 700 pages attached. Please provide your proposal by Friday next week, 0:00 UTC." I have stopped answering these requests.

There has been a lot of discussion surrounding what's better for mobile development: building native apps designed to run specifically on select mobile platforms and OSs (e.g., Apple iOS, Android-based devices, BlackBerry, Windows 8) or using dynamic Web-based technologies (e.g., HTML5, JavaScript, mobile Web frameworks) to bu

A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it.

-- J.R.R. Tolkien