DW/BI teams that embrace an Agile approach are finding they can meet the top-priority needs in short time frames and with higher quality than they could using a traditional waterfall approach to project management. However, like many disciplines in life, Agile concepts are relatively simple to explain yet often difficult to master. Why do DW/BI teams find Agile transformation difficult, and how can they overcome those difficulties? What cultural/organizational challenges must be overcome for a successful DW/BI Agile transformation? What is the "vision" of a successful Agile DW/BI team to which teams in transition can aspire?

Social media is touted increasingly as an important source for identifying key indicators pertaining to consumer sentiment, product/brand preferences, market volatility, buying habits, and other trends that organizations can apply in their efforts to understand and influence consumer purchasing, opinion, and other behaviors.

Cutter Fellow Ron Blitstein, Piet Ribbers, and I have just finished a new book, due out in April.

I often get questions from management and teams about how many ScrumMasters they will need as an organization, how many product owners are sufficient, how many QA professionals they need, and so on. I think the better question concerns the number of nondeveloper, value-providing friends an Agile team needs and then finding a continuum to answer the question at the enterprise level.

Google has recently launched a buying spree for robotics companies, gaining attention through acquisition of Boston Dynamics, a creator of sophisticated animal-like robots for the US Defense Department.

The US government has been working to provide greater transparency and availability for its immense collection of stored data, and this is important for analytics. Government data ranges from census information to scientific information and transaction details for government actions.

Over the past 20 years, the Internet has matured past its troubled adolescence and now swiftly seeps toward global saturation. It has quickly moved from a throw-it-on novelty to a now fully intertwined quilt woven into a large swath of human existence.

Tools and technologies are an essential part of any distributed Agile development. Companies invest thousands of dollars in procuring high-fidelity video conferencing equipment at their onshore locations. However, one thing they nearly always ignore is the integration capability with their offshore locations.

Two countries that come to mind when discussing offshore development are India and China. Although both countries have good infrastructure for software development, there are two technology aspects that need careful attention.

The Object Management Group (OMG) has published the initial version of its decision model and notation (DMN) specification.

Trust is the bandwidth of communication.

-- Karl-Erik Sveiby

Trust but verify.

-- Ronald Reagan

The use of Hadoop in support of data warehousing and BI analytics efforts is still a relatively new development for many mainstream businesses. Some organizations, however, are implementing Hadoop in order to supplement their data warehousing and BI environments with its extreme processing capabilities.

One of the benefits of having worked in both product management and technology for over 35 years is that you gain a certain perspective. We live in an endless stream of invention. It seems as though everything is new. But to the astute, the observant, even in an explosion of discovery, patterns emerge.

Among the most intriguing books about leadership I've read in the last year was David Marquet's Turn the Ship Around, in which Marquet -- a submarine captain of the US Navy -- describes how he turne

The concepts behind cloud technology have had a huge influence on the evolution of infrastructure architecture. But from an EA perspective, what should we be considering after the cloud?

One of the most influential talks of my career was an internal talk Cutter Fellow Tom DeMarco gave about 20 years ago at the company I worked for at that time. "On Beyond Zebra" was its title and it was about politics in organizations.

The advent of cloud-based Watson-powered systems and services is significant. Outfitted with content and knowledge bases tailored to specific domains and industries, such systems can deliver expert reasoning and decision support that organizations can license. Thus, it increases the practicality of organizations to use such systems by reducing, if not eliminating, the need to deploy such high-end applications on-premises.

There are practices, tools, and techniques that can be adapted to a variety of situations and will enhance the organization's ability to achieve its change agenda.

What scaling factors should we consider when tailoring our approach to Agile solution delivery? Several years ago, while working with IBM customers around the world to adopt and scale Agile, Scott developed the Agile Scaling Model (ASM) to help answer this question.

Amidst the jargon and hype there is usually a semblance of some idea or truth that has practical value. The evolution of the Web is popularly divided into Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, and now there is talk of an emerging Web 3.0.

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Matt Ganis and Avinash Kohirkar's introduction to the December 2013 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "The Perception, the Power, and the Promise of Social Media Analytics" (Vol. 26, No. 12). Learn more about Cutter IT Journal.]

Google has recently launched a buying spree for robotics companies, gaining attention through acquisition of Boston Dynamics, a creator of sophisticated animal-like robots for the US Defense Department.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of Yale sociology professor emeritus Charles Perrow's ground-breaking book Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies.

The need for Agile BI is easily seen in the increasing velocity of business, reduced profitability windows for innovation, and rapid changes in the technological environment.

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 and clients and those that created controversy among Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows.