This year is my 50th working in IT. I began as a part-time programmer while I completed a law degree (now that seems like a non sequitur, but it's how it happened). The technology was certainly rudimentary: punch cards, very slow tape drives, the first really usable commercial disk drive (not RAMAC but an actual removable multisurface drive), chain printers.

Problems are mostly caused by people. Thus, if one can improve the people factor, it stands to reason that the success of projects will increase.

In my experience, the three important factors that contribute to making people more successful in software development are:

The last couple of weeks have not contained a lot of good news for CEOs, CIOs, and corporate security folks.

Recently, discussions with CIOs around social applications have changed. I did some research in June of 2011 that showed that 45% of those interviewed thought IT was in control of social programs in the enterprise.

I've been saying for some time now that in order for Hadoop to really make it in the mainstream enterprise, it needed to provide better support for traditional SQL-based data management and analysis tools and offer the kind of interactive functionality that business users have come to expect from their BI environments.

A few years ago, I wrote an Advisor titled "As the 'Net Kills Newspapers, Who Pays for Free?" about the problems that serious newspapers and magazines all over the world face from the Internet and electronic media.

"Disciplined Agile" may sound like an oxymoron and has certainly been controversial for some in the Agile community, but it is essential for sustained success. Discipline does not mean "heavy-handed" -- we all know that too much management, overplanning, overdesign, and overly large projects are not effective. However, undisciplined teams that use Agile as a justification to avoid doing what is necessary are also not effective ... and, by the way, are not Agile.

Given the rapid expansion of social and mobile technologies, organizations have increasing opportunities to connect with customers.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him.... The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself.... All progress depends on the unreasonable man.

-- George Bernard Shaw

For established firms, the large-scale market trends of the past 20 years have brought myriad challenges due to the still-increasing rate of change.

In case you missed it, Doug Engelbart, one of the great thinkers of the computer age, passed away recently.

In recent Advisors I have explored the differences between product and project thinking in software development and the importance of long-term thinking to sustain an economically successful software system (see "On Projects, Products, and Gaming Theory" and "Software As an Asset").

Business architecture helps portfolio managers prioritize IT-based projects by mapping projects to a business capability architecture (BCA). A BCA can aggregate what's important, urgent, and doable in an organization, and this aggregation can then be used to prioritize projects.

I still remember the nights filled with the tremendous rush of adrenaline that accompanied my getting the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) IBM 360/50 in stand-alone mode for system programming work. Being the sole "master" of millions and millions of lines of operating system code was intoxicating for the young kid that I was then.

Several weeks ago, I discussed how collaboration by Silicon Valley tech companies with the US National Security Agency (NSA) in its data gathering program (i.e., "Prism") could pose problems for US-based cloud companies (see "US Cloud Companies and the NSA's Data Col

Software running on mobile devices has grown to a level in which it has earned major status on the overall system's usability, capabilities, and performance.

In The Art of Agile Practice, I discuss why organizations should embed the values and practices of Agile within their existing planned and formal approaches and how they can go about doing so.

As the role of enterprise architecture widens in scope, the number and variety of stakeholders increases. And as the complexity of the EA landscape increases, requirements become more fluid and difficult to define.

Management and leadership husbandry is the use of scientific methods to establish and maintain a population of leaders whose individual and collective attributes provide optimum support to enterprise objectives and to ensure judicious use of those resources. Leadership husbandry, therefore, has several requirements:

A model of leadership based on measurable attributes

Standards for each attribute

A diagnostic, objective assessment process to profile the attributes of each individual

Big Data is having important effects upon infrastructure requirements, particularly as we move into a need for real-time analysis and prediction.

Back in March 2012 (see "Tablets for the Enterprise"), I wrote that Microsoft leadership, knowing that the company was in danger of being left behind by Apple and the Android-based product vendors when it came to the mo

The roller coaster of business cycles appears to be headed up and accelerating. The economy is recovering, companies are beginning to hire, the real estate market is improving, and even new housing starts are up.

In my previous Advisor (see "Realizing the Benefits of Agile Outsourcing"), I discussed the critical ingredients for successful projects with outsourced Agile development teams from a customer's perspective.

Enterprise architecture is a strategic capability, not a support activity.

In an earlier Cutter IT Journal article on the promise of a diverse, interoperable cloud ecosystem (see "The Promise of a Diverse, Interoperable Cloud Ecosystem -- And Recommendations for Realizing It"), I stated that the cloud is most likely here to stay. It has become a vital part of the information and communications technology (ICT) ecosystem, even though it is still a dynamic, fluid, and ever-changing addition to the ICT environment.