Business resilience has become increasingly important in the wake of an unusual period of natural disasters around the globe, and new technologies and organizational models have yielded improved capabilities to move forward in the face of any disaster.

In my last Advisor ("Cloud Architecture: Leveraging Strategies, Blueprints, and Roadmaps -- What's Different Today?"), I shared some common chal

[From the Editor: This week's Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant Jim Love's introduction to the May 2012 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "The Consumerization of IT: Blessing or Curse?" (Vol

The good news for mainstream organizations that want to conduct Big Data analysis using Hadoop is that a lack of comprehensive, supported environments no longer remains the most significant barrier to adoption.

Information technology in the modern large enterprise is becoming increasingly expensive. With new IT systems going online every week and an ever-increasing range of products and systems flowing into the enterprise, there is a vital need for a governance structure to control the amount and quality of IT systems on which the business is based.

"How agile are we?" is one of the frequent questions we -- and probably most agile consultants -- get asked.

If you recall the tale, our young heroine Goldilocks had to choose from three beds. One was too hard, one was too soft, and the third was just right. I think we can draw an important analogy with architectural governance:

Collaboration, like all human interactions, can indeed be like a game. But this game is played for very high stakes. The future of our companies and our careers -- the standard of living we enjoy -- are all based on our ability to not just play the game, but to change the game. You can build a true culture of collaboration, despite the barriers.

Open source software (as I am sure you know) is software that can be freely copied, modified, and redistributed, either in its original or derived form, for sale or for free. There are many variations in open source licenses defining the conditions for these activities, but those are the core issues.

Do we have a common, coherent view of the distinctive mission and subject matter of the academic and professional "IT" field? Does this make it difficult to effectively communicate our role to the business and to the people who work for us?

When adopting agile, many teams focus on specific agile techniques and methods and lose track of the values that motivate agile software development. These values are described in the Agile Manifesto:

With the explosive growth in mobile payments, security becomes a paramount concern. Increasingly, the security focus is turning to biometrics. Biometrics facilitate the automatic authentication of a living person based on his or her unique physiological or behavioral characteristics. Common physical biometrics include fingerprints; hand or palm geometry; retina, iris, or ear shape; or facial characteristics. Behavioral characteristics include signature, voice, and gait. Of this class of biometrics, technologies for signature and voice are the most developed.

There are those lucky few: the ones who strive, thrive, and succeed in spite of the chaos and confusion in the ever-changing landscape of IT. For the rest of us, senior executives need to be mindful of what environment is best suited in helping emerging leaders grow. It's not complex to create an environment conducive to supporting and developing leadership, but nor is it easy given the unique nature of the IT industry.

Back in October, Oracle acquired Endeca. Last week, IBM announced it is buying Vivisimo.

I am once again back at my local McDonald’s sipping a cup of coffee and eyeing the competitive landscape that continues to change before me. This particular McDonald’s sits in Central Park, Virginia, one of the largest concentrations of retail stores in the US.

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Most IT professionals agree that the implementation of cloud computing has reached greater acceptance in the IT industry over the past five or six years.

When you open an email and see a big chunk of text, are you excited to dig right in and read it? Probably not. (Yet, do you ever find yourself sending those types of emails? Probably.) The reason why you lack excitement in reading such an email is obvious. Large chunks of text generally don't get the extra thought required to pare them down and helpfully section them off with subheads. Such content is basically a first draft, with possibly a once-over edit pass. It takes less time to construct.

The data warehouse, unlike the other IT systems in an enterprise, is an exclusive data platform with a data model as its backbone. In general, one may conceive an IT system to be a combination of processes and data. However, the data warehouse is only about data, and even the processes within a warehouse are data-centric. This trait of data warehouses prompts different vendors, big and small, to develop data models for every industry (called "industry data models") as a standard offering to decrease the turnaround time in developing data warehouses.

A remarkably prescient group of early technology pioneers first conceived the vision underlying modern, Internet-based IT value creation. In a 1945 Atlantic Magazine article, "As We May Think," Vannevar Bush anticipated the interconnectedness and indexing structures of the Web. Later, in 1968, J.C.R.

Much like agile requirements aim toward a goal, agile engineering practices help teams write code that meets the goals of an iteration and changes direction easily. To be an agile team, you need agile code. The agility of a code base is related to the architecture, development practices, and the delivery model. As working software is the main way of evaluating progress on an agile project, agile engineering practices can drive agile planning techniques when they are lacking.

At the end of last year (December 2011), The Open Group released the updated version 9.1 of TOGAF.

[From the Editor: This week's Advisor is from Cutter Director Mike Rosen's introduction to the April 2012 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Tackling Today's Enterprise Security Challenges" (Vol. 25, No. 4).

I've been examining the application of BI and data warehousing in education. Like organizations in other lines of business, educational institutions are seeking to reap the benefits offered through better data management and the application of BI analytics.

"Lingua franca" is common working language. It is used to bridge gaps in cultures, in organizations, and between individuals. The key is that it's "common." Thus, any discussion about your own lingua franca might seem oxymoronic. It's not.