A common question asked by organizations that are defining their architecture programs is: "What should architecture look like?

Each time I fly, I notice flight attendants taking passengers' food and drink orders on a pad of paper. I've thought for some time now that would be a perfect scenario for using a tablet device. So you can imagine just how pleased I was to learn recently that American Airlines (AA) is going to be doing just that.

One of the most popular articles ever written for the Harvard Business Review was authored by Frederick Herzberg in 1968.

In this Advisor, I want to introduce the book The Soul of Design: Harnessing the Power of Plot to Create Extraordinary Products that I coauthored with my friend and colleague Rob Austin. It is also an introduction to the webinar that I am hosting with Cutter on 24 October ("The Soul of Design: Plot, Coherence, and Resonance in the Structure of 'Special Things' ").

In this Advisor, I want to introduce the book The Soul of Design: Harnessing the Power of Plot to Create Extraordinary Products that I coauthored with my friend and colleague Rob Austin.

As project manager, you have a great deal of say regarding decisions affecting your project, but everyone on the team -- including engineers, QA, sales, customer service, and other stakeholders -- knows that the project will only succeed if there is substantial consensus on what to do.

The title of a recent article in The Economist reads, "Companies Hope That "Chief Customer Officers" Will Provide Better Service.

My Advisor last week on the battle between proprietary and open source cloud standards seems to have struck a chord in the cloud community (see "Who Is Driving the Bus? The Cloud Standards Battle").

Many people, when they think of Big Data development environments, tend to think of the main Hadoop distributors such as Cloudera, HortonWorks, or MapR. But other providers have innovative Hadoop offerings, too. One I've been examining recently is DataStax.

"It often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong."

-- Abraham Lincoln

Using a case study approach, we have researched why managers often disengage from project risk management. We singled out significant adverse events for a range of IT rollout projects, projects that involved the physical provision of client-server infrastructure plus (usually) a consistent set of software applications. We asked about key risks that the project managers associated with these events, whether and why those risks were known, and what actions, if any, they took in response.

One of the most important disruptive technologies that businesses can employ today is video. Video can benefit several business activities, including training, corporate communications, collaboration and knowledge sharing, and CRM.

One reason for slow cloud adoption within the enterprise has been a justifiable fear of vendor lock-in and proprietary systems partially caused by a woeful lack of cloud computing standards. Cloud migration or onboarding has long been hampered by the lack of virtual image standardization.

Big Data and analytics are of growing importance to the enterprise. These areas have developed so swiftly and contain such levels of potential complexity that they are creating a variety of staffing issues.

I recently worked with two client management groups on the basics of trust and partnership between IT and business. This is a continuing and ongoing issue that affects our profession and is somewhat amazing to me, since we have been dealing with this problem for so many decades.

In my Advisor "Reassessing Your Software Process," I drew a parallel between transaction cost and velocity. According to classical economic theory (see R.H.

There has been a lot of noise in the application development area around what are being called "systems of engagement" (SOE).

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant Claude Baudoin's introduction to the September 2012 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "IP, Innovation, and Collaboration: BFFs or Frenemies? " (Vol. 25, No. 9).

Each time I fly, I notice flight attendants taking passengers' food and drink orders on a pad of paper. I've thought for some time now that would be a perfect scenario for using a tablet device. So you can imagine just how pleased I was to learn recently that American Airlines (AA) is going to be doing just that.

With the rise of Big Data analytics and significant improvements in high-performance computing, it is likely that more knowledge-worker jobs will get displaced. Industry and academia are finding new ways of mining data and performing complex tasks previously done only by humans. IBM's Watson’s adroitness at Jeopardy may precede, by perhaps only a few years, general-purpose computing’s ability in diagnosing illnesses and processing complex business problems. Advanced image-processing capabilities can be applied to adding metadata to video files.

With the rise of Big Data analytics and significant improvements in high-performance computing, it is likely that more knowledge-worker jobs will get displaced. Industry and academia are finding new ways of mining data and performing complex tasks previously done only by humans.

Your smartphone dings to signal the arrival of an email. Upon seeing its title, "Build #452 failed," your stress level doubles. You approach Rae, a talented developer, and say, in a slightly ticked-off tone, "I notice the build broke."

The idea of having a standard for describing architectures was first debated in the 1990s.

Just a couple of years ago, we were witnessing -- and some of us were deploring -- the "irrational exuberance" as well as the uncontrolled fears of many customers and decision makers about cloud computing.

A paradox increasingly confronts a number of researchers and analysts: to derive value from data, you need a lot of it. We now have the tools to analyze these large amounts, but few institutions, at least in the private sector, are willing to make it available to others.