By the time you get to the bottom of this Advisor, you will have at least three new ideas on how to get people engaged in your meetings. That's a powerful suggestion. In fact, the only reason that some of you continue to read this is because I just made that promise.

Thanks to some initial findings from a recent Cutter survey, we now have a better understanding of the extent that organizations are actually implementing (or planning to implement) enterprise app stores.

Cyber warfare has been in the news more and more and, increasingly, this news has dealt with the murky world of Internet/computer security attacks by nation states and other quasi-official groups. Over the last couple of years we've seen ominous terms showing up in a number of major developments widely reported in the media.

When done well, IT's role is easy to explain. IT serves the business by enabling its current goals and strategic ambitions while enlarging its plate of future opportunities. In effect, business and IT are an ecosystem.

Coherence is a highly desirable characteristic of every human enterprise. Everything should "hang together" and be "true as a whole," to quote common dictionary phrases. Yet one of the most frustrating and disturbing aspects of working life is that everything doesn't hang together and isn't true as a whole. Most things only "sort of" fit -- if they fit at all. Gaps and inconsistencies abound. Assumptions must constantly be made. Confidence is hard to muster.

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant Ralph Hughes's introduction to the October 2012 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Turning Big Data into Big Benefits" (Vol. 25, No. 10).

The realm of Big Data is described by volume, velocity, and variety. Volume and variety have frequently been discussed, centering upon support for Hadoop and MapReduce. Volume, of course, refers to the sheer size of data sets, and variety is mainly about the increasing need to analyze unstructured data.

In the first Advisor in this series ("What's a Knowledge Worker to Do? Part I"), I pointed out that knowledge worker jobs are increasingly being replaced due to the rise of Big Data analytics and significant improvements in high-performance computing.

"So when you come in here to help us start with agile, we also expect to benefit from your collection of best practices you must have as a consultant" is one of the more frequent client expectations we have to disappoint. "We don't have best practices," we answer, "and we don't think it's a good idea to have them."

Judging from the regular press, one might get the impression that Microsoft doesn't stand a chance when it comes to tablet computing.

I recently worked with two client management groups on the basics of trust and partnership between IT and business. This is a continuing and ongoing issue that affects our profession and is somewhat amazing to me, since we have been dealing with this problem for so many decades. It continues, however, and the question is exactly what is to be done.

The proliferation of mobile devices for business use, in part fueled by the popularity of the "bring your own device" (BYOD) strategy, is helping drive corporate interest in enterprise app stores. To date, however, adoption of enterprise app stores has been limited for the most part to larger organizations.

By the time you get to the bottom of this Advisor, you will have at least three new ideas on how to get people engaged in your meetings. That's a powerful suggestion. In fact, the only reason that some of you continue to read this is because I just made that promise.

The "conversation" paradigm of agile methods provides a quantum leap in terms of the philosophy of managing IT projects. A crucial element that beseeches discussion in agile projects is not just what to measure or not to measure but, in fact, whether to measure at all.

A common question asked by organizations that are defining their architecture programs is: "What should architecture look like?

Each time I fly, I notice flight attendants taking passengers' food and drink orders on a pad of paper. I've thought for some time now that would be a perfect scenario for using a tablet device. So you can imagine just how pleased I was to learn recently that American Airlines (AA) is going to be doing just that.

One of the most popular articles ever written for the Harvard Business Review was authored by Frederick Herzberg in 1968.

In this Advisor, I want to introduce the book The Soul of Design: Harnessing the Power of Plot to Create Extraordinary Products that I coauthored with my friend and colleague Rob Austin. It is also an introduction to the webinar that I am hosting with Cutter on 24 October ("The Soul of Design: Plot, Coherence, and Resonance in the Structure of 'Special Things' ").

In this Advisor, I want to introduce the book The Soul of Design: Harnessing the Power of Plot to Create Extraordinary Products that I coauthored with my friend and colleague Rob Austin.

As project manager, you have a great deal of say regarding decisions affecting your project, but everyone on the team -- including engineers, QA, sales, customer service, and other stakeholders -- knows that the project will only succeed if there is substantial consensus on what to do.

The title of a recent article in The Economist reads, "Companies Hope That "Chief Customer Officers" Will Provide Better Service.

My Advisor last week on the battle between proprietary and open source cloud standards seems to have struck a chord in the cloud community (see "Who Is Driving the Bus? The Cloud Standards Battle").

Many people, when they think of Big Data development environments, tend to think of the main Hadoop distributors such as Cloudera, HortonWorks, or MapR. But other providers have innovative Hadoop offerings, too. One I've been examining recently is DataStax.

"It often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong."

-- Abraham Lincoln

Using a case study approach, we have researched why managers often disengage from project risk management. We singled out significant adverse events for a range of IT rollout projects, projects that involved the physical provision of client-server infrastructure plus (usually) a consistent set of software applications. We asked about key risks that the project managers associated with these events, whether and why those risks were known, and what actions, if any, they took in response.