As I write this, General Motors (GM) has announced its 49th through 54th recalls of the year, involving some 8.5 million vehicles. Overall, GM has recalled a staggering total of 28 million cars and trucks worldwide so far in 2014, or nearly the equivalent to all of its worldwide vehicle sales since 2011. And GM is letting it be known that yet still more recalls may be on the horizon.

As I write this, General Motors (GM) has announced its 49th through 54th recalls of the year, involving some 8.5 million vehicles. Overall, GM has recalled a staggering total of 28 million cars and trucks worldwide so far in 2014, or nearly the equivalent to all of its worldwide vehicle sales since 2011. And GM is letting it be known that yet still more recalls may be on the horizon.

Large enterprises going through the Agile transformation journey tend to set up Agile coaching groups or centers of excellence to promote and scale Agile in the organization. In this Advisor, I share the benefits and challenges of having such a central group to drive enterprise agility.

Companies today require both an enduring focus on continuous improvement and an organization-wide emphasis on exceeding customer expectations to achieve operational excellence (OpX). In years past, the quality function most often drove OpX.

Earlier this year, members of the International Society of Service Innovation Professionals (ISSIP), including myself, Yassi Moghaddam, Haluk Demirkan, and Jim Spohrer, wrote an article for Cutter IT Journal (CITJ) entitled, "How to Thrive as IT Professionals in a Converging ICT World." In the article, we discussed today's changing business environment and how individuals can proactively prepare for its dynamic nature.

Microsoft has several projects in the works designed to extend its Azure cloud platform to support Internet of Things (IoT) applications and services. These platforms are currently in "limited public preview" but are expected to become generally available in the near future.

Those of you who have been anxiously following this series of Advisors about the advances in translation technology and who have dreamed of one day having your very own Babel fish may have been wondering when "instant translation" might be available . You are about to be shocked. As it turns out, one of the largest high-tech companies in the world has announced that you will be able to do instant translation next year! That's right, next year. And it's not coming from any of the companies I've been singling out -- not Google, not WebLens -- not any of the companies that I thought were leading the translation pack. No, this instant translation is coming from a subsidiary of Microsoft, namely Skype.

Given the major importance and impact of nonfunctional requirements (NFRs) on an operational system, it's worth focusing a bit more on them in the context of infrastructure and maintenance. These NFRs (often called "operational" requirements for obvious reasons) describe the many parameters of a system as it becomes operational.

Domain analysis has been defined as "the process of identifying and organizing knowledge about some class of problems -- the problem domain -- to support the description and solution of those problems." Increasingly, such domain knowledge has been seen as a prerequisite for architectural understanding of a domain.

Most of the news regarding privacy and wearable computers and camera-equipped devices like Google Glass has focused on the rights of individuals when it comes to being recorded in public places or commercial establishments like bars and restaurants.

The relationship between mobile and analytics is far from simple, and it is loaded with opportunity. There's an extraordinary number of mergers and acquisitions in this area, and companies developing services include Google, IBM, Amazon, Facebook, all of the analytics firms, and a host of relative newcomers. Why is this?

A number of unrelated experiences over the past few years intersected recently and drove me to a new realization about organizational success:

Clients come in all shapes and sizes. Some are a veritable fountain that continually spews ideas and changes. This may seem like an enviable situation, but don't overlook the need for convergence to a solution.

One area of government where the Internet of Things (IoT) will have a big impact is in the administration and management of cities and other locales.

A good relationship between parties is critical to the success of any important contract. Although many may talk about the relationships between "parties," it's common knowledge (and common sense) that relationships are between people, not entities.

The list of mobile devices for enterprise use has expanded to include not just smartphones and tablets, but also wearable computers like smart watches, smart glasses, badges, and other devices (to this list you can also add drones, which I covered in "D

Let's start with the context for IT and business. Undoubtedly this year has seen continued turbulence in both IT and business. At the same time, the undercurrents of business concern for IT continue -- in terms of cost (too high), value (too low), and relationship ("those guys are different").

An ongoing challenge in development projects that you are "making up" as you go along -- that is, incrementally adding and adjusting features through sprints -- is that it can be difficult to know how much more you have to do to be "done." A great deal of thought and effort tends to go into the definition of done at a story and epic level in Agile,

The CIO has big problems to worry about. Intractable legacy challenges. Mobile devices in everyone's pocket. Then there's the cloud. On the one hand, new applications, increasingly powerful tools, and rising stakeholder expectations -- all within the context of constrained budgets -- lead the IT executive to focus on doing more with less. On the other hand, the complex, brittle mess of legacy continues to loom like some giant spider in a Middle Earth lair.

Cutter: In your new book, Analytics in a Big Data World: The Essential Guide to Data Science and its Applications, you discuss how to target and leverage business opportunities using big data and analytics. Could you expand on what these business opportunities might be?

In this Advisor, Ken Orr asserts that even though nonlinear thinking is not intuitive for everybody, it will help you understand how to get out of significant traps.

Dependably and accurately estimating the effort required to deliver against business requirements is a very important part of the Agile value proposition. Often, the early stages of Agile adoption are spent in large part coming to grips with the subtleties of estimation.

The phrase "Agile architecture" evokes two concepts:

Mobile devices and cloud computing continue to redefine basic concepts of IT and challenge the concepts taken for granted over the preceding decades. One of the issues in ferment today is that of defining access and providing secure and differential availability of computing resources to users as needed.

Most news coverage of drones focuses on their use by the military -- especially US forces in the Middle East, where they are used in combat and anti-terrorist operations. Amazon also managed to get a lot of free publicity around the 2013 holiday season when company reps suggested the company might use drones to deliver packages to consumers in the future.