This case study illustrates that sometimes very significant business goals seem to get washed out of the process of specifying and building a system; the focus is on managing the solution (e.g., certainly reducing manual effort is solved with automation) rather than on managing the relationship be

The ability to analyze data in real time has enormous potential in significantly impacting business performance at both the departmental and strategic levels. Internal data sets spanning across multiple departments often hold massive amounts of valuable data. These data sets, coupled with carefully selected real-time digital data streams (DDS), are increasingly becoming critical in data-based decision making by departmental managers as well as strategic-level stakeholders.

Agile is well served by exploring the connections between knowledge, culture, psychology, and technology. As Cutter Fellow Vince Kellen states:

Too many organizations confuse activity with purposeful action. For them, especially in a crisis, it's important to do something. The worse the crisis, the more pressure there is to act. If you follow this path, at best your success will have had more to do with luck than with planning.

Trust is the bandwidth of communication.

-- Karl-Erik Sveiby

Trust but verify.

-- Ronald Reagan

My Executive Report "Agile Business: The Final Frontier" outlined some key elements of how we can extend and expand the fundamental concepts of Agile project management (APM) and Agile development to an holistic organizational approach to organizational agility.

The Circle -- the new novel from Dave Eggers -- is being billed as sort of a modern 1984 meets A Brave New World.

I've written multiple articles and given numerous presentations on the problems with establishing targets for your measures of improvement. It's worth reiterating what's wrong with them, though, because if you haven't tried using targets, chances are you will.

Hadoop is receiving a lot of attention from data mining and predictive analytics practitioners because it offers a scalable platform for building, training, and testing models that can be executed in parallel using massive volumes of data, as opposed to typical data mining practices involving the use of sample data sets for m

In moving from the 20th to the 21st century, powerful advances in connectivity and computing power, along with the trend of centralization of media sources and tech tools, have caused big shifts in many sectors.

If you visit an Agile conference these days, it's hard not to run into talks like "Scrum within a RUP project" or "Agile in a traditional organization." From a dogmatic Agile point of view, this reminds me a little bit of a veggie-stuffed beef recipe promoted as vegetarian food.

For a long time, the predominant business assumption was that specialization (around markets and business functions) was the right approach to complexity (divide and conquer), efficiency, and market responsiveness (closer knows best). In a divide-and-conquer paradigm, the "pipes and filters" pattern -- with islands (or silos) of information processing, decision making, and action, and "pipes" or information buffers between -- works well enough organizationally and for the technology firmament supporting that mode of business operation.

Information technology is often called a "tool" and is compared with other tools and technologies, such as railroads, electricity, the printing press, and so on. The extension of these metaphors from the realm of molecules to information is erroneous. First, IT isn't exactly a tool. It is better described as a tool-making process. We can fashion IT in many different ways to suit all sorts of purposes.

There is no escaping the talk (and rhetoric!) about Big Data. Vendors are peddling Big Data solutions; consulting firms employ Big Data specialists to help you with your Big Data projects; universities offer Big Data courses; Big Data conferences are aplenty; and tech journalists, magazines, and even blogs are buzzing about the Big Data revolution. This is great, especially after the Great Recession we just endured. We welcome any excitement about technology buzzwords!

Every year, we hear about a shortage of talent. Many people label it a "war for talent." Well, this war has been going on for decades, with no end in sight. Is it really a war?

No. And there's data to back me up.

Best practices are prescriptive, and Agile development opposes prescription. So, in this sense, there are no Agile best practices. Managers faced with a need to impose new processes are always in search of guidance, however, and need to know that they are doing what they have set out to do -- or at least are on track to do so. Guidance, whether it is called "best practices," "good things to do," or "useful approaches," is still necessary.

I've face various challenges in my consultancy assignments. Over a decade ago I started to think of EA as a unification framework, which describes the subject of effort spent every day by countless IT professionals.

Big Data is difficult to define precisely, yet we all seem to know it when we see it.

Hadoop continues to generate a lot of attention as the Big Data platform for the enterprise. Here are the benefits and obstacles I see that organizations should carefully weigh when considering how they can employ Hadoop.

Recently there has been a spate of negative financial news in the big IT space. In some respects, this is not exactly new news. Companies like HP and Dell have had financial problems for some time, but now more mainstream organizations like Cisco, IBM, and Microsoft are all reporting falling revenues.

The world around your company has changed. What does the Internet in general -- and the latest trends of cloud computing and Big Data in particular -- mean for knowledge about your customers? The core of these changes is the amount of connectivity we now have, as individuals and as a society.

I am currently writing a series of Executive Updates about the most practical architecture frameworks and how organizations are using them (see "A Practical Guide to the Most Useful Architectural Frameworks: Part I -- The Arc

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Matt Ganis's and Avinash Kohirkar's introduction to the October 2013 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "The Value of Social Media Data Analytics" (Vol. 26, No. 10). Learn more about Cutter IT Journal.]

There is no question that analytics has been undergoing significant upheaval as traditional BI, advanced analytics, and Big Data have come together. As we have pointed out in previous Advisors, recent attention has focused upon the velocity component, and application to real-world processes.

The economy is dragging. Even the Chinese have downgraded the US dollar. Businesses have shuttered their doors entirely over the latest words from Washington. Watch the news lately?