This morning we happened to notice an announcement of a project portfolio management (PPM) conference for this summer. And Cutter's Summit in Boston features a Wednesday morning (6 May) roundtable on PPM.

We concluded Part III of our series "One Size Does Not Fit All" discussing horizontal flow in vertically siloed organizations (see Figure 1). In such organizations, both the flow of data and the flow of decisions across the silos might not be fast enough to satisfy the needs of the enterprise. The project teams may well be frustrated with the speed of the decisions that impedes their ability to deliver. An overly burdensome approval process leaves them powerless to improve.

Because of the importance of documentation, just like a building architect would do for a construction project, EA has a vital role to play in ensuring that organizations carefully plan and execute transformation initiatives against a blueprint with a current and target state.

Teams composed of business and technology professionals should identify problems and opportunities together. The era of top-down autocratic control is over. Teams with deep knowledge of technology and business models and processes should perform the tasks listed in this Advisor to generate credibility and trust.

I suggest when teams start off, they go with shorter iterations, and once they feel they've got the Agile process down, and they're working together well, and they've got a good mindset shift, then they can expand to two or three weeks. Anything bigger than that and you're shortchanging yourself on your learning cycles.

With Russia's intention to assert data sovereignty by requiring all firms to keep data and systems in Russia, and many other countries already requiring this or quickly following suit, we are seeing what I expected a few years back: nations exerting control over their cyber infrastructures and using corporate IT infrastructure as a means to thwart competing nations. While techno-optimists usually equate IT with democratization, I am not sure despotic or even democratic rulers think the same.

In the previous two Agile Advisors in this series (see "One Size Does Not Fit All, Part I" and "One Size Does Not Fit All, Part II"), we described characterization of projects using three criteria:

Innovation -- determines the kind of performance measures to be used: descriptive, predictive or combination of the two.

Complexity exists everywhere. Would it not be helpful to understand specific kinds of complex situations where the services of architects are particularly valuable? This would help enterprises use architects' capabilities more effectively.

When you introduce Agile into existing organizations, you regularly get two types of seemingly conflicting results if you ask for employee satisfaction. First you get the satisfaction boost. Once the teams have learned to deliver valuable stuff, they experience the satisfaction of accomplishment. They finally deliver and get feedback from real customers. In most organizations this leads to a significant increase in employee satisfaction.

In June 2014, I discussed some of the possibilities the commercial use of drones offers. Since then, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), after several years of study, has finally issued proposed guidelines for the commercial use of drones in the US. Moreover, the FAA appears to be more receptive to commercial drone usage, and we are now seeing an increase in their use by companies, government agencies, and researchers.

Security in the IT realm is a very complex issue to deal with, largely because the very attributes that create vulnerabilities are the main creators of value for individual users, businesses, and society itself. Just as the value of a network increases as the square of the number of nodes on that network, so too does the probability of a bad actor exploiting the network to his or her own ends.

By now almost every software professional has been exposed to the Agile Manifesto, or at least to its first page containing the value system. But few people have noticed that the Agile Manifesto also contains a second page, with the "Twelve Principles of Agile Development." So if you want to know "how Agile" you are, you should take a look at these principles.

Data generated by sensor-enabled devices is making it possible for organizations to measure activities and behavior that was not really practical before the advent of smartphones, wearables (e.g., watches, bracelets, anklets, and smart clothing), and other connected devices. In short, connected devices are leading to new applications and larger and richer data sets.

As great as a private enterprise application can be for your requirements, be careful when getting it ready. The problem with some applications is that they can cost you quite a bit to develop. Before you have an application designed for your business, be aware of the following five key points associated with rolling out an enterprise application, along with their related costs.

If we use measures properly, we do so to improve our business, organization, or our lives. In this respect, there are many times when having some data is not better than having none. Given that all data could possibly be erroneous to some extent, what to do?

Companies offering Internet-based products and services or online mobile services to their customers should use effective authentication mechanisms for high-risk transactions involving access to customer information or movement of funds to other parties. For the company, it is also important to protect stored cardholder data and encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks as per popular standards such as PCI DSS. Areas of concern for online commerce can be minimized once the industry gives adequate focus to security issues.

The different ways that supermarkets organize service at the deli counter offer an example of salient transparency. Inefficient supermarkets rely on the mob to self-organize. Customers are expected to form a queue, and the servers have the task of deciding who's next. When approaching the mob, a customer cannot tell whether or how the mob has organized, how long it will take, or who to queue behind. He or she must expend mental energy to establish and maintain position in line and may experience anxiety over whether cutting in line will occur.

Case management isn't necessarily important for every business, but we have seen that it is a vital concept for some, such as insurance, health, or legal. Even in companies where cases are not currently common, the idea might be relevant -- for example, in handling a customer complaint that spans a longer period of time, or that covers multiple services. The notion of case will probably become more relevant as enterprise architectures become more dependent on their integration with Internet and social technologies.

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant Balaji Prasad's introduction to the February 2015 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Enterprise Architecture: Toward a More Perfect Union Between Business and IT" (Vol. 28, No. 2). Learn more about Cutter IT Journal.]

An examination of the different types of social media analysis practices helps provide a better understanding of their technical capabilities and where they fit in regard to enterprise social analytics needs, as well as how the application of the technology is evolving. There are essentially three main categories of social media analysis practices: social media monitoring, social media listening, and social business analytics. Each provides for increasingly sophisticated analysis of social media data, and each requires the application of increasingly sophisticated technology.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt told reporters at the most recent World Economic Forum in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, that he saw the Internet disappearing over the next few years. What Schmidt was talking about, I believe, is not so much that the Internet's physical underlying structure would disappear but that the Internet would become so ubiquitous that it would be invisible.

Characterizing projects by innovation is useful because it sheds light on the nature of work to be done no matter what the size of the effort.

There are many bookish definitions of architecture out there that speak of systems and components swirling around in complex interactions, and of the need to describe the organization, structures, patterns, and principles that underlie the dynamics of all this. The task of understanding and describing falls squarely on the architect's shoulders. But architects do more than description; architects also create new patterns of organization, intended to enable a move toward a better state for the business.

US President Ronald Reagan's old adage "Trust, but verify" certainly works with data, measures, information, and metrics. The trust part means that you don't ignore them. They may be totally accurate! That's why you go through the trouble of having a metrics program! So trust that the data is as accurate as possible and that no one is feeding you misinformation. But verify. Don't run off and make changes or decisions -- instead, verify. I don't mean verify the data (prove it is accurate), but instead verify what the data is telling you.

In the era of big data, where assumptions are being challenged in all areas related to analytic processing, it is no surprise that new concepts should emerge to challenge the central role of the data warehouse in BI. The most recent is the data lake, which is viewed as a centralized repository of unstructured data held for processing by Hadoop and meeting the diverse needs of big data analysis. The data lake, like so many concepts in our industry, is currently undergoing subtle change as new technologies evolve to extend, fortify, and capitalize on the need that it is designed to fill.