In the early 2000s, I ran a software company called Gray Hill Solutions that specialized in software-for-hire for the government sector, specifically in transportation management and traveler information. Among other projects, we built the original 511.org site for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in the San Francisco Bay Area. We specialized in rescuing government projects that had spent most of their budget and their time, yet had little to show for the effort.

The bottom line is that we should expect enterprise mobility to continue to grow in importance, spreading to more areas of the enterprise. The main benefits organizations seek from adopting mobile technology are improved worker productivity, improved response to customer needs, and better collaboration and knowledge-sharing among employees.

This year marks the centennial of the start of the First World War. One of the fiercest battles in WWI was the Battle of Passchendaele in Belgium. This manslaughter took place from July-November 1917, with more than 500,000 men lost on both sides for only a few kilometers gained, which were retaken soon afterwards during the German Spring offensive.

Something that differentiates consumer devices from business and enterprise devices is the impact they have on the manner in which people live, their concerns, and how they occupy their time. The ability to immediately monitor a wide variety of characteristics and behaviors on an everyday basis and feed that back to a repository in the cloud inevitably creates an opportunity for control. This control may meet the objectives of the consumer, or it may be targeted to meet the objectives of a vendor. The opportunity for control is likely to become more significant as the IoT develops. Aspects of behavior become a part of a conversation.

Within minutes after the New York Mets -- a baseball team that was legendary for its haplessness -- clinched the World Series on 17 October 1969 against the favored Baltimore Orioles, a spontaneous and wild ticker-tape celebration erupted across New York City's financial district.

In the early days of Agile software development, some believed incorrectly that Agile was the rejection of disciplined software development. A better perspective is that Agile was a rejection of techniques such as the waterfall lifecycle that are ill-suited to the dynamics of software.

Companies across many industries face pressures from disruptive companies using technology in entirely new ways to saturate the market. Progressive companies tasked with this challenge realize the benefits inherent to enterprise architecture (EA) or capability-based planning. EA is reemerging as a practice that allows business and technology to respond to major transformation in an orchestrated way, paving the way for the CIO to approach technology enablement with a new mindset.

The consumer device market has revolutionized how individuals connect and perform daily activities, leading to a rapid change in employee mobility demands and needs, but most enterprises are still struggling to keep in sync.

"There is nothing more intoxicating than victory, and nothing more dangerous," explains Robert Greene in his book, 48 Laws of Power. That intoxicating feeling clouds the minds of team members and management, resulting in an unrelenting craving for more.

I've been spending a lot of time with social media analytics and exploring how organizations are adopting and applying the technology. There are a number of obstacles confronting organizations seeking to implement social media analytics. These include technical and organizational considerations, as well as dealing with societal or consumer concerns when it comes to privacy. The latter appear to be particularly troublesome for end-user organizations.

So says Dumbledore in J.K. Rowling's book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, commenting on a mirror that shows us what our most desperate desires want us to see.

Janet Gregory and I have been sharing our success stories of the whole-team approach to testing and quality for almost 15 years. So why isn't everyone doing this? Well, even good ideas can take a long time to catch on. Look how long it took to convince medical doctors to wash their hands. We continue to hear success stories from people embracing collaboration.

Different parts of an enterprise architecture evolve at different rates: some change frequently, while others take longer. So it is not surprising that the pace of change is seen as an important consideration when making EA decisions.

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant Sebastian Hassinger's introduction to the December 2014 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Mobile Security: Managing the Madness" (Vol. 27, No. 12). Learn more about Cutter IT Journal .]

The Internet of Things (IoT) is already having a big impact on the transportation industry. Probably nowhere is this being felt more than with the railroads. I know of a number of projects under way utilizing sensors, analytics, and mobile technologies to optimize rail operations by collecting and analyzing data to determine real-time vehicle location and operating factors (e.g., average acceleration, speed, idle times, number of stops), and to assess KPIs on equipment wear and roadbed conditions.

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Business Technology Strategies practice this year for today's Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients and those that created controversy among Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows.

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Business & Enterprise Architecture practice for today's Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members. Your questions and comments not only make it possible to create lists like this -- they help focus Cutter's Senior Consultants' research on the areas that are most important to organizations like yours. So please keep your feedback coming.

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Cutter IT Journal this year for today's Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients and those that created controversy among Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows.

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the most intriguing articles published by the Agile Product & Project Management practice this year for today's Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients and those that created controversy among Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows.

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Data Insight & Social BI practice this year for today's Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients and those that created controversy among Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows.

[From the Editor: A number of Cutter Senior Consultants weighed in with their predictions of upcoming trends in IT. See what they had to say here.]

The Internet of Things (IoT) is creating high expectations from businesses and consumers about the possible ways it can help create new revenue models, increase efficiencies, and enhance customer experience. Businesses are looking to tap into the new business opportunities generated by the IoT, while consumers are seeking intelligent products and services that provide all kinds of insights to help them use those products and services optimally.

Software development falls roughly into three classes:

Many organizations lack automation in their deployment processes. When asked, developers and operations engineers often talk about their many deployment scripts, their pages of documentation, and their personal knowledge of their applications' deep internal settings and configurations. Yet this doesn't really give us a clear idea of how well automated the deployment process is. We must drill deeper to understand the current DevOps process by asking the following questions:

Data validation is emerging as a stumbling block on the way to optimal use of big data. In its earliest uses, big data was little concerned with data validation, because much of it was experimental. Capability to elicit anything useful at all out of big data came as something of a surprise. However, as organizations become more dependent on their use of analysis of huge data streams for very critical processes, the validation issue is certain to raise its head.