In this Executive Report, Michael Mah and Mike Lunt share observations about real-world agile projects and how they measure up against waterfall and other projects in terms of productivity, schedule, and quality. This was made possible by juxtaposing them against trends from a contemporary worldwide database of more than 7,500 completed projects. Specifically, we look at more than 20 agile releases from five companies.

At the heart of risk management and governance of service-oriented applications is the need to achieve agreed and measurable quality of service (QoS) levels.

IT strategy

Those organizations with years of application development and no application cleanup are discovering the large cost of "application gridlock."

Innovation is a key to the competitive differentiation equation. This Executive Report presents a story that with charming acuity conveys key principles of innovation, relates the lessons to system development. 

Knowledge management (KM) and business intelligence (BI) have developed in a mutually isolated fashion. I consider KM and BI as distinct but interrelated in terms of common foundation, mutual effects, complementarity, and synergy.

This Executive Report by Sam Bayer explores the application of an agile approach to the selection and implementation of COTS software.

This Executive Report by Bhuvan Unhelkar discusses sourcing as a formal business strategy that enables organizations to focus on their core competencies and alleviates pressure to carry out all of their business activities themselves.

Market mechanisms

Apple's App Store represents a new value proposition, one that is likely to have far-reaching consequences for the IT world.

The sale of software through a brokered clearinghouse is likely to usher in an era of drastically changed software pricing and an entirely new take on the notion of open source software.

A strategic audit is a useful tool to help organizations identify which IT areas require increased focus, which represent potential risks, and where hidden opportunities may lie.

What works for corporate environmental and energy strategies has absolutely nothing in common with marketing savants, buzzwords, or cheerleading from green biz promoters and gurus. Meaningful and enduring solutions are hard to accomplish.

Responsive, highly functional, and customizable, rich Internet applications (RIAs) are more than a cool front end for a traditional Web application. A RIA turns the browser into a fully programmable platform, relocating user interface (UI) code, cleaning up the application architecture, and simplifying the development job.

This Executive Report describes applied research that is intended to help readers understand and measure the impact of the deployment of technologies commonly referred to as Web 2.0. These technologies include wikis, blogs, podcasts, folksonomies, mashups, social networks, virtual worlds, and RSS filters.

This Executive Report by Sebastian Konkol focuses on temporalities embedded in enterprise architecture and offers a means of organizing them inside technology management processes.

Security

The forces that oppose crime and fraud on the Internet are almost completely overwhelmed by numerous and ingenious would-be exploiters.

If money grew on trees, companies would have no need for IT investment prioritization. In good times and bad, financial and other resources are not there simply for the plucking and, indeed, might prove quite scarce. In these situations, managers must rely on tools to sequence the order in which investments are made. What technology should we invest in today, tomorrow, or next quarter? Methodologies exist to answer these questions.

Modeling your enterprise architecture in a consistent, concise, and precise manner so that all of the stakeholders' views are addressed can be a formidable task. Making that architectural model readily available and understandable to those who need it can be even more challenging.

Business intelligence (BI) and enterprise search are converging, and vendors now offer products that combine the ease of use of search engines with the reporting and analysis capabilities of BI tools.

Technical debt, devops, software governance, development methodologies--from applying the nuts and bolts of Agile, to transforming your organization at the enterprise level, Cutter is your resource for the objective information you need to make Agile a source of strategic competitive advantage. Read a description of our publication types »

With insight gleaned on the business, information, applications, technology, security, and performance architecture domains, your organization will be able to hone its architecture development, design, governance and portfolio management and planning practices. You'll discover just how to produce specific architectures and models, standards, reference models, roadmaps, processes, and more. Read a description of our publication types »

The business landscape is littered with failed agile adoption programs.

Software development

In spite of a loudly articulated assurance from the agile community that the waterfall lifecycle is dead, it isn't.

Waterfall approaches, though widely belittled, are enjoying something of a resurgence. The reasons for this are at least two-fold: (1) a flight from the challenge implicit in a more agile approach and (2) a compulsive focus on predictability and accountability.

Project management (PM) technologies and methodologies must change. Not only has the environment for projects in the enterprise become more complex, but the assumptions underlying most PM tools may not be valid with today's projects.

The outsourcing of innovation is evolving rapidly as companies seek to decrease research costs and extend the discovery of new products and new ways of doing business into uncharted territory. The consumer electronics industry has been most heavily affected to date, but IT is likely to be next. This Executive Report by Brian J.

IT industry

The decades-old trend of computing and datacom hardware becoming "faster and cheaper" is about to change to just "faster." This change will affect how users approach IT budgeting, the way vendors approach hardware and software product lifecycle planning, and could ultimately spark a renaissance of software engineers who actually care about the efficiency of their code.

While it is quite obvious that firms exist to serve customers, it is not as obvious why the business and IT strategy often does not start or end with the customer.