In my last couple Advisors, I have looked at what constitutes architecture and an architectural description ("Is It Architecture?

Creating or running a business requires continuous focus on many areas: the individual, the team, the group or division, the organization as a whole, and, of course, the customer. While it is impossible to keep all the people happy all the time, it is essential to embrace, rather than fear, the conflict that naturally occurs.

Last week, in Part I of this Advisor, I discussed important changes I saw happening in the Hadoop/Big Data world in order to accelerate enterprise adoption of the technology (see "Big Changes on the Horizon for Big Data -- Part I").

"Not one of us stood up and said, 'Dammit, stop!'"

Implementing an agile product development process has many challenges. One that is not regularly addressed is who will lead each of the Scrum teams. Many organizations default to the seemingly obvious answer of the Scrum Master. Often ill-defined (even with "certification"), this role is essentially the agile version of the project manager. But agile teams are supposed to be self-organizing, leaving project managers (who don't contribute in other ways) largely useless.

In Reframing Frameworks: Part I -- Making EA Frameworks Your Ally, I identified eight key factors common to all predefined frameworks.

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Ilenia Fronza's introduction to the January 2013 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Making Managerial Dashboards Meaningful" (Vol. 26, No. 1).

For the past year and a half, much of the hype surrounding Big Data focused on the technological aspects of Hadoop.

When writing about IT from the perspective of one's personal experience in consulting and managing, I have found it helpful to refer to references and frameworks. This allows me to compare my thoughts with others', and to frame those thoughts within some common reference points.

In the API Economy, an API is an application programming interface that is exposed (publicly or privately) on the Internet. It is the means by which one piece of Internet-based software can access the data and/or computational services of another, using standard Internet-based communications technologies. Until recently, the primary firms producing APIs were the vendors of operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, and IBM Linux/390.

In my last Advisor, I talked about some defining characteristics of architecture and looked at the criteria that IEEE 42010 specifies ("Is It Architecture? Part I").

Most large organizations have teams of business analysts. And a growing number have business architects. There are bound to be overlaps between the business architect and business analyst roles, but, curiously, the potential intersections and synergies between them are often neglected.

Corporate culture is an important part of the analytics effort. In a previous Advisor ("Staffing for the Big Data Future") we looked at team-building issues and the need to incorporate an emerging breed of data scientist.

The "consumerization of IT" is a catchy term for a sneaky trend that has been going on for at least 10 years, in which consumer devices and applications are increasingly incorporated into the workplace.

When we discuss software operations, we are often implicitly referring to the technical activities involved with day-to-day operations; that is, the parts of operations that are related to the infrastructure of a running system. This includes setting up and configuring hardware (whether virtual or physical) as well as the installation of operating systems and the base software needed for the final system.

According to our research, approximately 24% of organizations have standardized on tablet platforms for enterprise use. Another 27% say they plan to do so within the next 12 months or so.

On the face of it, photo processing is a fairly mundane business. Having taken a few photos, the photographer would like to produce copies to share with others. Traditionally, the image was latent on the photographic film. One had to physically take the film to an outlet that would expose the latent images and turn them into visible images. A second trip to the outlet would be required to pick up the photos (and the film).

With the advent of cloud computing and SaaS, there is a new business model that can be adopted by the IT industry that forces a direct linkage between the cost of IT and the value that the customer receives. First, cloud computing introduces a new business model where organizations can manage IT as an independent entity outside of the customer's business or business unit.

I was talking with a colleague this past week. He is not at all tech savvy. In fact, his remedial understanding of things is even self-proclaimed. And he just got a Microsoft Surface tablet.

"I love it," he blurted.

"Why?" I asked.

Jens Coldewey's Advisor "Why 'Agile vs. CMMI' Leads Down the Wrong Track" rightly argues that "Agile vs. CMMI" is not the right direction to go.

While conducting business process reviews has become a core activity for many business analysts, I have observed that there is still room for improvement on how these reviews are done in some organizations.

Think back for a moment to the best project experience you have ever had. It may have been in the workplace, part of some team sport you were involved with, or perhaps it was a major trip you undertook with your family. What are the characteristics that made that a great project experience?

The tablet market is currently very dynamic; not only are new products by the leading providers like Apple, Google, and Samsung getting introduced with hyper-frequency, but new vendors -- the most recent and notable being Microsoft -- are also appearing, while other players are fighting for their lives.

"Risk management was regarded as a constraint on the business rather than integral to it."

In his Advisor "Why 'Agile vs.