As a customer, have you ever wondered why companies force you into a customer service environment that seems to be convenient only for them? We choose to interact with organizations for a variety of reasons with a desired end result in mind. We have a general expectation of how service should be delivered and the amount of time we are willing to invest in the interaction. Today's customer is experienced, knowledgeable, demanding, and willing and able to defect to another company at the drop of a credit card. Frustrating customer experiences are rooted in customer-facing services designed from the inside (them)-out (you), absent of what's important to the customer, and more concerned with cost containment than with revenue opportunity.

Companies are developing connected vehicles and transportation applications to enable better management and compliance of consumer, fleet, and urban transit vehicles and associated infrastructure through monitoring and predictive maintenance, and to achieve reduced energy consumption via optimized route planning and delay avoidance. In addition to business needs, government regulations are also driving connected vehicle solutions development to improve the tracking, safety, and servicing of consumer, commercial, public, and emergency vehicles.

When you read the literature, it all seems so easy: everybody just works together to build a high-quality system that provides users exactly what they need — on schedule and under budget. However, as you might expect, Agile and DevOps are not "magic potions"; nor are they “free.”

Wearables have the potential to transform the way we engage with technology. The new generation of personal electronics will change (and in some cases already has changed) many industries. 

Somewhat surprisingly, it is only relatively recently (from the 1980s) that business has come to recognize the importance and value of knowledge as a resource.

Architects and architecture exist with the intent of providing something of value. But intent does not always translate to results. Sometimes we get in our own way if we are not careful. Are there habits of mind that can work at cross-purposes to the value we seek from the enterprise of architecture?

Mobile security is a complex issue that is growing more difficult as devices multiply within the organization. New devices include new ecosystems and new operating systems, which can conflict with existing security measures as well as adding less understood modes of access to online data. Lack of familiarity creates innumerable vulnerability points that may be exploited by sophisticated hackers, as devices become more widely used in critical applications. We have looked at mobile security before, mainly around the proliferation of smartphones in the office. But the issue is likely to become much more complicated as we enter the era of the Internet of Things (IoT).

Are your teams delivering products that delight? These are just a few of the things that you can do to help your teams move the dial. 

One major purpose of the IoT is to collect massive amounts of very discrete data for analysis. Thus, the relevant privacy problems of big data come into play, specifically those of aggregation, scale, and difficulty in understanding what predictive analysis may ultimately affect the individual's interaction with the object.

For many enterprise architects, the concept of systems thinking is almost synonymous with EA. But knowing about systems thinking and applying that knowledge in our daily work can be very different things. Is that finally starting to change? Is systems thinking finally hitting mainstream EA?

Fog computing, also referred to as "Edge computing," is an IoT applications architecture designed to distribute the resources and services of computation, communication, control, and storage closer to the devices and systems at or near the edge of an IoT network or its endpoints (e.g., mobile devices, connected machines, users).

One of the joys of IT is that it gives people the opportunity to learn new concepts and new skills and explore an inner mental world of creativity and show off their new creations.

What I have found over the years of deploying Agile is that organizations forget one of the fundamental reason why they deploy Agile practices: you want your scrum teams to mature as a team and as they mature you should expect that the level of quality in the software delivered will be higher than it used to be.

This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant Vince Kellen's introduction to the October 2015 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "IaaS: Ready for Liftoff?" (Vol. 28, No. 10).

The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to generate incredible amounts of data from a myriad of connected consumer devices and industrial applications. Achieving business value from this massive data stream will require the use of big data storage and analysis technologies that have the ability to scale to meet the constantly increasing demands placed on organizations. Of course, this brings up the question: just how familiar are organizations with the various big data technologies? A Cutter Consortium survey that asked 80 organizations worldwide about their IoT plans helps offer some insights into this question.

Takeaways for developers from the companies developing wearables are clear right now. You can find them in the public keynotes at developer conferences from Google and Apple as well as the not-for-disclosure documents widely available to developers for those and other platforms. Detailed APIs are available to developers, and with little effort you can find discussions and test code on public and semi-public resources such as GitHub and YouTube.

From the fantasy to the real world, there is already an emerging business in large shared-screen experiences. Museums, libraries, hotels, and resorts are among the first locations where organizations can see an immediate return on their investments in creating engaging experiences for visitors in an anonymous fashion. Currently most of these experiences are a small step forward from digital signage, providing people with the opportunity to navigate their own way through the content provided and in some instances share the content to their personal devices.

As with most flawed ideas, there is an element of truth in the idea that "leanness" and absence of slack have benefits to companies over the long term. The hierarchical organizational forms that characterize most modern companies were developed in an era when we did not have our current communication capabilities. A large part of the function of traditional hierarchies was to manage information flow. Some of the changes that we have made to organizations have been inevitable adjustments to reflect the fact that we no longer need to devote as much effort to managing information flow because of the nature of new technologies. 

In order to understand the many dimensions of sociotechnical systems, in particular their relevance and importance to the enterprise, we first need an overview of the key issues in the field of systemics, such as complexity.

Culture change is hard. It takes effort and commitment. While people may see the benefits of changing the culture, resistance arrives and is not always rational. Based on this company’s change effort and others, here are five things you should know about creating a culture of trust.

An effective EA measurement program typically begins by identifying a set of precise and easy-to-use metrics recognized by both business and IT organizations across the enterprise. At a strategic level, EA metrics establish a number of quantifiable parameters that enable practitioners to assess and evaluate the EA program, the IT assets employed, and their relevance to delivering business value for the enterprise. At a tactical level, EA metrics include parameters that impact the EA and its effectiveness across the organization — both directly and indirectly.

Recruitment is another area in which emerging developments in big data, analytics, and artificial intelligence begin to show their seams. Before mechanizing a process, it is important to achieve a finer degree of understanding, and to create a model that accounts for elemental components. 

Industrial, manufacturing, and process industries have used sensors, analytics, and other technologies to monitor and measure how equipment and processes are performing for some time. Now, we are seeing companies seek to apply sensor-enabled devices to support more human-centric monitoring in industrial settings.

Efficiency and productivity were the watchwords of the late 20th century, but today the emphasis needs to be more on agility. The prescription for organizational agility is markedly different from the prescription for efficiency and productivity.

Development and operations groups play equally important roles and must synchronize their work to enable organizations to rapidly produce software products and services. The awareness of this has resulted in the development of the operating principles known as "DevOps."