Readers are probably familiar with the concept of a body of knowledge (BOK).

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?

I'm currently working with a medium-sized organization confronting collaboration problems. How do we unleash our true collaborative power? It's not an academic question. We are in a hypercompetitive industry with new competition hitting us from every direction.

It still amazes me how many enterprise data warehousing/business intelligence (DW/BI) projects struggle, often to the point of paralysis, with the "Inmon/Kimball" debate. This impasse revolves around whether a DW/BI program should insist upon routing all information through a complex, third normal form (3NF) data layer o

I would like to follow up on a story mentioned in my previous Advisor ("Who Watches for the Watchers When the Watchers Don't Watch?" 12 January 2012).

It is often attractive to executives to seek and apply so-called best practices when looking for ways to improve their performance. Despite purported track records of such practices as promoted by well-meaning expert thinkers, there lay hidden pitfalls that entrap many ope

In technology architecture, it's easy to spot a wrong solution but almost impossible to design the perfect system. The primary reason for this ever-changing nature of the solution is its evolution toward staying relevant to the changing business use case.

The general literature on leadership is very confusing. There are over 250 different definitions of leadership in the literature! Many of these definitions are not operational in that they don't provide guides to action. What specifically does a leader do? There is confusion over how leadership contrasts with the words "management" and "authority." Educational institutions like the Harvard Business School say their mission is to train leaders, but every professor has his or her own definition of leadership.

I started to see this trend play out last year, and this year I expect it to be more popular based on the advice I have been giving some of my vendor clients.

Agile adoption for data warehouse and BI is on the rise. Agile can shorten development cycle time, improve quality, and help ensure that you build the right BI solutions for business decision makers. However, conventional IT organizational structures, policies, processes, and procedures are sometimes inconsistent with the tenets of agility. Values like customer collaboration, face-to-face interaction, and continuous delivery of value are often impeded by IT organizational protocols.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Susan Cain titled, "The Rise of the New Groupthink."1 It was a controversial article, and she took her lumps the next day in the "Letters" section. In the online comments, folks were more in agreement.

[From the Editor: This week's Advisor is from Vince Kellen's introduction to the January 2012 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Hot IT Trends 2012" (Vol. 25, No. 1).

Agile adoption for data warehouse and BI is on the rise. Agile can shorten development cycle time, improve quality, and help ensure that you build the right BI solutions for business decision makers.

Management guru Peter Drucker is famous for saying "You can't manage what you can't measure." From a different perspective and equally guru-like, W.

An important development bound to positively impact the use of the open source Apache Hadoop technology in the traditional enterprise is the introduction of packaged Big Data appliances from the enterprise hardware and software vendors. These offerings -- from Oracle, EMC Greenplum, Dell, and NetApp -- bundle Hadoop distributions along with database, storage connectors, and other software for integrating Hadoop applications with various data sources and into an organization's data center.

An important development bound to positively impact the use of the open source Apache Hadoop technology in the traditional enterprise is the introduction of packaged Big Data appliances from the enterprise hardware and software vendors.

Those of you have been following my Trends and Enterprise Architecture Advisors will recognize that I have become increasingly concerned about software reliability and security and the role that design and complexity play in these areas.

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.

Mobility is one of the top priorities for organizations in 2012. When it comes to utilizing mobile devices in the enterprise, organizations basically have two options for supporting employees with smartphones and tablets.

Last September's Cutter IT Journal contains many insightful contributions about 21st-century IT professionals to help you gear up for the new world in which products like smartphones and tablets are playing a growing role (see "21st-Century IT Personnel: Tooling Up or Tooling Down?" Vol. 24, No. 9). The articles touch on the essentials for the 21st-century IT professional, including usability, user interfaces, smart devices, and so on.

Every year I am asked, "What's next for collaboration?" I came up with 10 predictions for 2011, with about an 80% accuracy, according to my own calculations. I began to work on this year's predictions in mid-December, hoping to finish them by the New Year.

I had the good fortune recently to attend a bimonthly breakfast meeting of CIOs. In addition to me, seven of the 23 regular members of the group were in attendance.

It often starts as a seemingly plain training request. Having decided to go the agile route, a client would like Cutter to train a certain number of employees in one agile method or another.

As architects, we are constantly challenged to provide value to the business. Much of the value we provide comes from avoiding costs and problems before they occur and is difficult to demonstrate or quantify. But architecture can also deliver value by providing a better, broader, more flexible, and extensible solution to business requirements. I always look for opportunities or projects where an architectural approach will provide a better solution and try to seize these chances when I can.

A 1983 New Yorker cartoon shows a man taking his son on a walk. "It's good to know about trees," he says to the boy, then adds almost as an afterthought, "Just remember, nobody ever made big money knowing about trees."1 Self-motivation is a well-established explanation for why people get involved.