In the late 1880s, a set of maladies associated with the social and economic turbulence following the full impact of the Industrial Revolution afflicted many of the business, political, and upper-class elite of the US.

Data virtualization1 is touted as applicable for a range of business operations and applications, ranging from those associated with data analysis, analytics, and information management to business process management (BPM) and enterprise integration, portals, cloud services, and enterpri

In my mobile development practice, often the most challenging aspect of a project is to convince the customer that strongly held beliefs and emotional investment in a product vision can be counterproductive.

A recent Cutter Consortium survey (conducted July through September 2013) of 39 end-user organizations worldwide gives us some idea of the extent to which organizations are using NoSQL databases to support analytics.

As noted in Part I of this Advisor, the idea of riskfare itself isn't new (although I think I may be the first to use the term); the concept has been radically transformed over the last 60 years in light of the development of modern portfolio theory and behavioral economics.

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.

In a 2012 Cutter IT Journal article entitled "Business Capability Architecture Is the Tie that Binds All," Andrew Guitarte discussed how to use business capabilities to improve efforts related to business strategy, enterprise change, and project portfolio prioritization. We concur that strategy, enterprise change, and portfolio management are managed more effectively using business architecture, and agree that capabilities are a component of business architecture.

Traditional enterprises have been very interested in using Hadoop. But until recently, they have been hampered by a lack of suitable uses case for applying it.

The Middle Ages used a phrase to describe a term that was not meaningful as "a distinction without a difference." Oftentimes, in the desire to catch a technological/marketing wave, salespeople and consultants overuse terms coined to describe one thing to mean something entirely different.

We must refrain from the male altogether.

So spoke Lysistrata, the heroine main character in Aristophanes's circa 410 BC comedic play of the same name, who forms an alliance among the women of Greece in which they agree to withhold sex from their husbands until the men decide to end the Peloponnesian War.

"Context over content" is a good metaphor to keep in mind when considering a technical debt assessment, reduction, and prevention engagement. Specific patterns in your code and the intricacies of your programming environment are paramount factors in determining how general insights will be turned into actions. In other words, it is unlikely that a technical debt engagement in your company will evolve along similar lines to those taking place in your competitor's "shop" down the street.

The primary definition of "architecture" in the Oxford English Dictionary is "the art or practice of designing and constructing buildings." However, the secondary definition of architecture is "the complex or carefully designed structure of something." It is this second definition of

Organization agility is the ability of an organization to respond quickly and effectively to unanticipated events in its environment.

A recent Cutter Consortium survey (conducted July through September 2013) of 39 end-user organizations based worldwide helps shed some insight into corporate BI and data warehousing spending trends for the upcoming year.

Building products that customers love is the mantra for this century. As such, there are no defined processes or methods that provide a magic formula for achieving this. Building innovative products still requires creative people with good leaders driving the process. Even the most popular method embraced in the IT industry -- Scrum -- does not provide the needed support.

For those of you who track such things, October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM) in the US. As you know, I am really concerned with cyber security. I'm not sure, however, that we really need a precise month for this right now.

Building products that customers love is the mantra for this century. As such, there are no defined processes or methods that provide a magic formula for achieving this. Building innovative products still requires creative people with good leaders driving the process. Even the most popular method embraced in the IT industry -- Scrum -- does not provide the needed support.

Successful organizations have a dilemma. Should they continue growing what is making them successful, or should they disrupt the market that they are successfully leading? What if they choose to grow their current business and later get disrupted by an upstart innovation? Or what if they disrupt a successful business too early? What if they overestimate the potential of an external disruption?

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant Giancarlo Succi's and Tadas Remencius's introduction to the September 2013 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Profiting in the API Economy " (Vol. 26, No. 9). Learn more about Cutter IT Journal.]

The Internet of Things (IoT) as a topic of interest is arising again, and with good reason. The IoT envisions a world in which all devices are attached to the Internet, providing enormous possibilities in control, data acquisition, and, most importantly, analysis.

On a recent day, The New York Times was down. Not the publishing plant, not the news gathering service, not even the New York Times Internet site that contains its Internet content. All of that was working fine; you just couldn't get to it. Now, this was something of a blow to me personally.

In his recent Cutter IT Journal article "Out of the Gate & Running Wild: Why There's No Stopping IT Now," Cutter colleague and Fellow Steve Andriole foresees and foretells a new kind of equipoise between IT and the business units it supports.

Natural resources are precious and in limited supply. Business environments are inherently complex and unpredictable. As we face these and other constraints on our ability to manage change, is it possible to produce sustainable enterprise architectures?

Butler Health Systems in Butler, Pennsylvania, USA, is using a real-time asset tracking and patient visibility solution (developed and marketed by Ekahau) to optimize patient wait times and streamline hospital workflows.

Data exploration is an attractive use case for traditional enterprises seeking to capitalize on Hadoop's extreme processing capabilities.