Another week, and yet another news story about a new or upgraded IT system released before its time.

The subject that every distributed Agile team is questioning is the topic of setting up visual walls. Conflicts arise when purists argue in support of setting up visual boards across all locations, while the distributed teams consider it an inconvenience.

In a previous Advisor (see "Mobility: Did Thee Feel the Architecture Move?"), we observed that the enterprise's architecture has begun a move toward the edges of the enterprise. And, with that extension to the "edge," it is obvious that the enterprise can no longer be the sole architect of the structures that prop up the edifice of business.

We know that stakeholders are those individuals who are actively involved in our projects and/or have a valued interest in the outcome of those projects. However, if you've ever managed a project, I'm sure you know that even though those stakeholders may be involved in our projects or are interested -- be it financially or otherwise -- in the outcome or success of our projects, that doesn't mean they will be involved or engaged along the way, even when it may be in their best interest to be so.

A key promise of SOA is that the activities in business process models that business analysts define can be instrumented by engineers to invoke SOA services. This approach to building applications is supposed to help align the business and IT sides of the house. In principle, this alignment increases agility by diminishing the impedance between conceiving a business process and executing it. Where a business process management system with a process execution engine is in place, it is even possible in some cases to directly execute business process models.

Every software executive that faces the decision whether or not to ship code must answer the question, "Do the economic benefits of shipping outweigh the economic risks?" To decide, the executive must have a view of each. The hoped-for benefits are clear in that they are up front in the decision to build the software. They can include revenue, meeting contractual obligations, enterprise efficiency, or supporting some enterprise initiative such as a new service offering. The economic risks can involve exposures resulting from software failures, leading to the following:

Every software executive that faces the decision whether or not to ship code must answer the question, "Do the economic benefits of shipping outweigh the economic risks?" To decide, the executive must have a view of each. The hoped-for benefits are clear in that they are up front in the decision to build the software. They can include revenue, meeting contractual obligations, enterprise efficiency, or supporting some enterprise initiative such as a new service offering.

It would be hard to overlook the rise of social technologies, yet many enterprise architecture (EA) teams do not consider managing social technologies as part of their brief. This is partly because of the organic nature of social technologies and partly because they lie beyond the enterprise boundary. Social technologies change the boundaries, nature, and scope of EA. Organizations, senior executives, business managers, and IT leaders are all under pressure to find ways to deal with and take advantage of the attraction of social technologies.

The direct cost of machine downtime in most industries is significant. In addition, downtime also severely impacts customer satisfaction due to unplanned work stoppages and missed production schedules.

Recently I overheard a nerd debate between two rival colleagues. One was energetically advancing the architectural approach of one brand of high-performance networking switches; the other was defending another.

There are two main strategies available for implementing Agile: incremental and all-at-once ("big bang"). The incremental approach has generally been recommended and is likely to be the most widely used, but there are advantages in an immediate big bang approach.

It took home improvement retailing giant Home Depot about a week before it finally confirmed it had suffered a data breach. Home Depot first reported the possibility of a breach on 2 September 2014, but did not actually confirm the hacking until 8 September. During that time, the company made somewhat vague statements that it was still carrying out an investigation to determine whether or not its systems had actually been compromised.

When I was a first-line manager at IBM, I often interviewed college graduates for entry-level positions in sales or systems engineering. I remember surprising my boss when I rejected a young man with a stellar résumé. He had great grades from a top-notch school. He was a varsity athlete and head of the student council.

In a previous Advisor (see "Database Futures I: Big Data, Cyber Security, IoT, and a Database Called 'Cockroach'"), I suggested that database thinking was in the most innovative stage since the 1970s and 1980s.

Professions are like people: as they get older they learn new things and forget old ones. Sometimes in the excitement of learning new things, they forget really important old ones.

Recently, I supported a team that was unhappy with its Scrum implementation.

In its early manifestations, enterprise architecture was an IT function. The chief enterprise architect generally reported to the CIO, and the enterprise architecture work was focused on IT issues such as enterprise application integration, and (the lack of) technology standards across the enterprise. But just as business process reengineering (BPR) efforts illuminated the need to consider technology in BPR, so too did enterprise architecting efforts illuminate the need to consider business process -- and more broadly, business architecture -- in IT reengineering.

In the Kansas City Star recently, an educator posted an editorial that suggested all students graduating from college these should days should be "job ready." The educator argued that the current college curriculum w

In January, I discussed key developments with IBM's Watson natural language understanding and analytics question-and-answering system (see "IBM Bets the Future on Watson").

How do business technology professionals stay current or, ideally, ahead of the constantly changing business technology curve? Unlike lots of disciplines, technology is an always-moving target. Business models change just as quickly.

Early in my career as a project manager I invited my client to work with me on a particularly complex software development project that my team was ready to start for them.

Enterprise software has come in waves over the years. The first wave introduced mainframe applications that rested on the business premise that automating certain routine operations could power a large company to new levels of productivity and efficiency.

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Fellow Ken Orr's introduction to the August 2014 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Data Hacking: No Day at the Breach