Agile development has revolutionized the way systems are developed from a waterfall or phased-based approach to an iterative-based approach that continuously reexamines development progress, current priorities, and sufficiency of solution.

Business intelligence is nothing new to the business and IT worlds, but it is hardly business as usual when it comes to leveraging BI in the growing field of social media-oriented business.

When last we met, I went on about language and the sloppy and obfuscating use thereof ("Reflections on Innovation -- Part IV: The Care and Feeding of Language").

Agile increases productivity. This is what you hear in at least every second talk on agile and some protagonists even claim an increase in productivity of 600%. Whether or not you believe in these numbers is your choice (I don't).

In my last Advisor ("Put Big Data in Perspective -- Part I"), I discussed the basics of Big Data, what it is, where it comes from, what's it goo

I've said for some time now that one of the more important developments that will lead to greater use of Hadoop and MapReduce in the enterprise is integration of the technologies with relational databases and SQL-based BI tools.

Open source software (as I am sure you know) is software that can be freely copied, modified, and redistributed, either in its original or derived form, for sale or for free. There are many variations in open source licenses defining the conditions for these activities, but those are the core issues.

There were two interesting IT-related news stories the past few weeks that caught my attention. The first was the news that the market value of Apple had exceeded US $500 billion -- only the fifth company to have achieved that milestone.

In this final installment of this series of Advisors, I aim to lay plain the no-holds-barred, right-between-the-eyes, profoundly undiplomatic reality that stands between ordinarily performing devops and high-performance devops: you.

There is a lot of discussion these days about business capabilities and their role in business architecture.

For most corporations, killing old projects is probably as important as approving new projects. Most of the resources of a corporation are used for regular operational work, which, it is hoped, produces a profit that will allow a small percentage of resources to be used for new development, such as new products and new infrastructure -- including IT. It is critically important for those resources used on IT projects that they pay off in improved efficiency of operations and increased revenue and profits.

Over the last year, discussions with the CIO around social applications have changed. I did some research in June of 2011 that showed that 45% of the CIOs we interviewed thought IT was in control of social programs in the enterprise.

"Leadership yoga" -- flipping the organization upside down to have their eyes to the ground to see the grass roots, where the next opportunities are starting to grow. -- Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School professor

In my last Advisor ("Change Management 3.0, Part I"), I introduced the Change Management 3.0 "supermodel," which encompasses a few smaller well-known models of change, where each model addresses one of the following

[From the Editor: This week's Advisor is from Israel Gat's introduction to the February 2012 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Big Agile" (Vol. 25, No. 2). For more information about Cutter IT Journal, please visit www.cutter.com/itjournal.html.]

Social BI and analytics has many unique challenges: unstructured data, Big Data, separating useful from useless data, data analysis and presentation, and so on.

The story of Saint Patrick is an epic unto itself; not because of the miracles wrought, but because of his remarkable savvy about those around him. St. Patrick is attributed with converting the whole of Ireland -- the only such recorded Christian missionary to do so without bloodshed. How did he achieve this wonder?

One of the major patterns we frequently observe is an organization that "plays agile" instead of being agile. The pattern follows a basic theme.

Since publication of the Cutter Business Enterprise Architecture Executive Report "Establishing the Business Architecture Practice: A Case Study" (Vol. 15, No.

No matter how disciplined a company is about its IT governance, the average enterprise has many years of legacy applications in its portfolio that need to be rationalized.

No matter how disciplined a company is about its IT governance, the average enterprise has many years of legacy applications in its portfolio that need to be rationalized.

Back in 2010, in a report on mobile BI (see BI Unwired: The Case for Mobile, Vol. 10, No. 9), I commented on a mobile BI application in use at that time at global nutrition company Herbalife.

We have all witnessed profound implications and disruptive shifts during the past decades when the power of emergence is unleashed because of leveling.

I haven't the slightest idea how to change people,but I still keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out. -- David Sedaris, American writer (1956-)

One of the topics in technology news these days is Big Data. So that raises a few questions. First, what do we mean by Big Data? And then, more pertinent to this Advisor, what are the architectural issues with which we should be concerned?