An ongoing issue with enterprise architecture (EA) is how to make a compelling case for its value with business decision makers and stakeholders. The cost proposition is one area where EA can deliver unique value. 

Organizations have several choices for implementing IoT infrastructure.

Recently I discussed Cutter survey findings pertaining to development trends for organizations building mobile apps that customers can download and run on their smart watches (see “The Smart Watch as a Customer Touchpoint: App Development Trends”).

From the time most people are able to put together their first cogent thoughts, the question arises: Who do you want to be when you grow up? It's a simple enough concept. Do we want to be firefighters? Captains of industry? Doctors? Lawyers? Astronauts? But as we achieve a reasonable level of maturity, we come to the realization that we simply want to be happy with ourselves and with the world around us.

In part IV of this series, we explored how alignment leads to autonomy (see "Implementing the Integrative Framework, Part IV -- Autonomy"). We now shift our focus to empowerment as the last "ingredient" in the (Scalability -> Alignment -> Autonomy -> Empowerment) cycle. It is this full cycle that makes the integrative framework so powerful.

The pattern I propose for a service assurance architecture is based on ideas taken from the operations support system (OSS) developed in the 1980s and 1990s. The original OSS, created for the telecommunications industry, covered a broad range of subjects and considered networking systems. The pattern presented here narrows the scope of interest to service assurance and casts the OSS principles into the IT systems area.

Many large organizations that are facing volatile and stagnant markets in their existing businesses decide to acquire another organization to augment their strategy or compete more successfully. This is a major decision and a critical inflection point that needs to be navigated through with a lot of thought. Unfortunately, data suggests that many companies that acquire other companies do not succeed in capturing the value that they had hoped to in closing the deal. Why is this true?

A recent Cutter Consortium survey that asked 80 organizations (worldwide) about their plans for the Internet of Things (IoT) helps provide some insight into how organizations are responding to the introduction of the Apple Watch and the growing consumer use of smart watches in general.

The IT community has a huge stake in minimizing the probability and severity of any backlash. One major asset is that their executives are, on the whole, more publicly respected than their counterparts in most other industries. They have bully pulpits that they can and should use to get in front of both technical and broader sociopolitical issues likely to bring on or intensify backlash.

Conventional wisdom holds that alignment and autonomy are contradictory. This is a false dichotomy. Alignment actually enables autonomy by providing each and every project team with its goals, measures, and boundaries. The project team is strongly encouraged to operate independently within its own context. As long as a project teams has a well-specified set of clearly derived measures, it can do what it needs to do to achieve its measures without the interference of external management.

I was recently discussing the possibility of writing up some success stories, about enterprise architecture initiatives in particular, with a young colleague who then asked me: "And do you have any anti-success stories to tell?" Leaving aside his interesting choice of words, perhaps unconsciously aimed at avoiding the dreaded word "failure," this made be think of several cases where my clients snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory, so to speak, and what lessons we (or our clients) can derive from them.

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant Lou Mazzucchelli's introduction to the August 2015 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "What's Over the Technology Horizon?" (Vol. 28, No. 8). Learn more about Cutter IT Journal .]

For organizations considering the selection of a COTS business process management system (BPMS), this decision is not just a product choice, but an immediate determination about delivery. For many reasons, the cloud seems to be in the mix of these decision points, adding yet another dimension to the complexity of the decision.

One of my favorite professors in school used to say that "the sloppy use of words can lead to sloppy thinking."

Bifurcation of knowledge is a fact of life in most hierarchies. People at the top understand the context. Founders, the first 15 employees, and key managers know the business, the market, the product, the customers. They hold the financial information about how the company makes money and the current financial status. Since they hold this info, they also know what the company should do -- on a strategic and tactical level. Knowledge flows down, but mostly on a "need to know" basis -- a trickle, not a torrent.

A time horizon is a point of time in the future at which the EA process or its outcomes are achieved or evaluated. This is sometimes referred to as the planning horizon. Sometimes this is a relatively short time in the future and sometimes it is a much longer period. Generally speaking, EA needs to consider a mix of different time scales. Short term can be regarded as looking less than two years into the future. Medium term is often seen as a two- to five-year time horizon. And long term is five years or more.

Today there is an imperative to fill new jobs, to hire the best and the brightest to perform them, and to ensure that innovation survives and flourishes within the company.

Mobile connected devices, smart clothing, and advanced analytics are now being used in the treatment and management of chronic diseases and debilitating injuries. We are also seeing considerable activity among companies developing platforms for remote patient monitoring (RPM).

The advent of software-defined infrastructures (SDIs) brings to hardware many of the known problems of software: since software is invisible, it is not bound to physical constraints and can become much more complex than hardware.

In one open enrollment Lean software development class I taught, two participants were the development manager and manager of project managers of a very successful company that built sophisticated websites for other companies. They were currently at about 100 developers and growing rapidly. As successful as they were, the company had a serious technical problem -- about 5% of their installations would fail in the field and have to be fixed, causing about a 20% hit to the company's development effort.

If we view the practice of architecture as a business, then innovation at the business level recurses into innovation of the underlying business of architecture, so that the broader business is positioned to innovate.

When we have mental models or "laws" (such as E = mc2) that work predictably and reliably, we perceive these models to be almost indistinguishable from the underlying reality. Based on the limited number of laws that we have been able to tease out in disciplines like physics, where testability and proof are easier, it is reasonable to assume that robust laws are hard to come by. And, it would be good to take the view that architecture is perhaps closer to art than it is to physics. So, great architectural models are really rare.

A discussion of wearables really needs to be separated into at least two parts from the start. There is the fashion element, and how anything affixed to the person becomes a badge of class, status, or coolness; and there is the sensor/utility function, which is of greatest amusement to technophiles. 

It doesn't take much to nurture innovation. Our primary role in the executive suite is to get out of the way.

What makes a good PMO great? This Advisor covers a short list of items; there are many overall ingredients that go into a great PMO.