In my last Advisor ("Predictability, Reliability, Serendipity"), I highlighted the role of serendipity in value realization, as follows:

This week I was speaking at a cloud conference and not surprisingly there were a lot of sessions about Internet as a service (IaaS) platforms, software as a service (SaaS), elasticity, cost savings, mobility, social media, and more of the

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant Bill Keyworth's introduction to the June 2012 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "ITIL/Operational Excellence" (Vol. 25, No. 6).

Real-time Complex Event Processing (CEP) has been around for more than a decade. Traditional (legacy) CEP systems were constrained in scalability and performance and lacked real-time ability. Today, the business case for CEP is becoming more evident due to the real-time impact of various social channels, capital market volatility, increased threat through network attacks, and the emergence of decision making "on the fly" based on raw business intelligence.

I recently had the opportunity to hear Dr. Paul Roehrig, assistant VP of corporate strategy for the 140,000-person consulting firm Cognizant, talk about the coming changes in the workforce. Underpinning these changes, importantly, are high and, in parts of Europe, alarmingly high levels of unemployment.

In my recent Advisor, "Process as a Service," I described the agile process as a reliable process all too often subject to unrealistic expectation of predictability, as follows:

I just returned from yet another client engagement that had the same symptoms and, not surprisingly, the same root cause.

We have traversed several periods in the last 100 years -- from the agrarian era to the knowledge era. Leadership has continually changed in each of these eras based on changes in the associated business environments and with people's perspectives. We now stand at the end of the knowledge era and at the beginning of the consciousness era. The focus of the knowledge era was on people leading toward competence-building activities.

A friend whose company provides data recovery services mentioned to me that his firm had been hired by a company to delete proprietary information from the mobile phone of an employee it had recently fired. In other words, he was going to have to go through and remove company information from the employee's personal device.

The project management community remains one of the growth industries in business, reaching its tendrils deep into diverse sectors of the economy, ranging from petrochemical to information technology.

"Scrum and distributed teams are no problem" some consultants claim. Others recommend that while Scrum "in theory" claims colocated teams, Kanban could help you to run distributed teams in an agile way.

In the 2001 film, Analyze That, Dr.

The entertaining film, Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, tells the story of Billy Beane's revolutionary shift in the selection of baseball talent and the strategy used to construct a winning team. Impressions and "seasoned judgment" on the part of wizened veterans were replaced by empirical analysis of player skills and competencies. The result? Startling choices that disrupted the established order of baseball's "good ol' boy" network. IT leaders can learn some valuable lessons from the film.

In socially infused enterprises such as healthcare IT, Big Data analytics is quickly becoming the cornerstone for ongoing transformation. Like many professionals in the field, I recognize that Big Data is big; in fact, it is huge and complex. Furthermore, it has significant prospects for businesses of all sizes.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

Products and processes are probably the most demanding components in enterprise architecture when it comes to involvement of large numbers of decision makers, designers, analysts, and architects who are highly experienced, knowledgeable, and skilled.

Over the past 15-plus years, the Web has proven to be the quintessential delivery vehicle for enterprise applications. Instead of delivering native desktop clients with additional infrastructure to handle updates, versioning, and ensure privacy and security, the Web browser is an IT manager's deployment shell. It's guaranteed to exist on every OS platform and the Web itself is the deployment infrastructure.

Thierry de Baillon, in a challenging blog, talks about "organizational redefinition and the pocket calculator." In this context, unleashing the power of horizontal networking inside and across organizations represents a promising answer to some of the toughest chal

Last month, I said that the biggest challenge facing traditional enterprises seeking to implement Hadoop applications is not a lack of suitable tools, but a shortage of skilled personnel knowledgeable in implementing the technology into corporate IT environments (see "Talent Shor

In olden days, folks made a distinction between labor and work. Men and women did work. Work served both heaven and earth; ennobling workers, carrying on the culture, and pleasing God. Brutes (sometimes human) did labor, which required only force.

Agility is far too precious to be treated only as a software development method. Instead, it plays a significant role in rendering an entire organization agile.

Abstraction is one of the fundamental concepts of architecture. Wikipedia defines abstraction as: “a process or result of generalization, removal of properties, or distancing of ideas from objects.

For the past 20-plus years, the Web has been based on a document-centric model, despite recent workarounds to provide enterprise-quality applications, new types of user experiences, and multimedia and real-time capabilities. With a renewed focus on applications, programming interfaces, enhanced graphics, offline behavior, and modern communications, the Web is entering its next phase of life. Today's Web has become a standardized, programmatic framework for developers to create exciting, active applications.

Mainstream organizations don't want to just use Hadoop in a standalone manner. They want to integrate the insights discovered with Hadoop into their data warehousing and BI environments.

Cutter Business Technology Strategies Director Ron Blitstein, Piet Ribbers, and I are working toward a book on the characteristics of successful and effective relationships between IT and business organizations and their managers.