On occasion, I have witnessed seemingly excellent agile teams fail. The developers and testers are fine craftsmen building astonishing software. Management has understood the nuts and bolts of self-organization and does a perfect job in supporting the teams.

In my more recent engagements, I have had the opportunity to move away from consulting within the infrastructure world of SOA and into the realm of pure business process management (BPM). Prior to that, I had more of a conceptual appreciation as to how BPM technology could integrate within an SOA.

In February 2010, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) implemented its first mobile app: the FCC Mobile Broadband Test (see "About the Consumer Broadband Test (Beta)"). Computech, Inc., in a joint development effort with M-Lab and Ookla, led the building of this crowdsourced app, which was designed to provide a quick, simple way to check the performance of an Internet connection against the advertised broadband speed.

Habits form an important and inevitable part of our lives. We are all about baselining our routine activities into habits and conserving our energy for more productive and interesting tasks. These habits exist as patterns in customer behavior data (e.g., clickstream, logs, social media, sales). The right kind of data, aided by an intelligent analytical solution, can identify these habits and yield valuable customer insights.

In my last Advisor ("Reflections on Innovation — Part V: Words, Words, Words"), I suggested that you read Ian McGilchrist's book The Master and His Emissary, where McGilchri

A lively debate about the nature of the agile process often erupts in my executive workshops. Participants, who have not been exposed to agile methods, usually expect the software process (or any process, for that matter) to be predictable.

One of the most important skills of an architect (be it a business architect, IT architect, or enterprise architect) is that of “critical thinking.” It has been defined by the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking as: "the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or gener

One of the most important skills of an architect (be it a business architect, IT architect, or enterprise architect) is that of “critical thinking.” 

Habits form an important and inevitable part of our lives. We are all about baselining our routine activities into habits and conserving our energy for more productive and interesting tasks. These habits exist as patterns in customer behavior data (e.g., clickstream, logs, social media, sales). The right kind of data, aided by an intelligent analytical solution, can identify these habits and yield valuable customer insights.

Companies have used Hadoop mainly to process high volumes of unstructured data for Internet operations.

In my previous Advisor ("Inflection Points for Decisions and Profit, Part I"), I pointed out that all exchanges of goods and services are exchanges of risk and opportunity between the pa

Common wisdom in process improvement efforts includes the notion of a "sponsor." The sponsor is a person (sometimes a small group of people) within an organization who buys into -- often literally as much as figuratively -- the improvement effort.

As business architecture becomes more mainstream, many large and complex enterprises across the private and public sectors are embracing its primary concepts. For most of these organizations, BA plays a significant role in defining the primary value proposition for the enterprise architecture.

It may seem reckless to challenge the notion that cloud computing poses new security risks. IT magazines are full of dire warnings, and cloud providers, as well as security consortia, are now holding regular conferences such as SecureCloud. Yet some claims may be overstated, while others are ignored.

Somewhere in prehistoric times, a clever ancestor stumbled upon the advantages of applying shareable knowledge to common problems. Thus, collaboration was born.

In my previous Advisor we described enterprise architecture (EA) and portfolio management (PM) ("Putting Enterprise Architecture and Portfolio Management Together, Part I").

As every golfer knows, getting on the golf course early on Saturday morning doesn't improve your golf game by itself.

As an architect, I find that what architects do is not well understood, and we are frequently challenged to justify the value that we add to the enterprise. So I am always looking for opportunities to add value.

[From the Editor: This week's Advisor is from Cutter Fellow Lynne Ellyn's introduction to the March 2012 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Is Leadership a Science?" (Vol. 25, No. 3).

One important development expected to lead to greater use of Hadoop and MapReduce in the enterprise is the (ongoing) integration of the technologies with relational databases and SQL-based tools.

Cutter Business & Enterprise Architecture Practice Director Mike Rosen and I recently presented a one-day workshop on enterprise architecture (EA) and portfolio management (PM), and how they work together. Part of Mike's contribution was about technical debt and how it fits into both EA and PM. Planning the workshop created a new awareness of how important both EA and PM are and how, together, they can produce superior insight into delivering value to business and government organizations.

Cutter Business & Enterprise Architecture Practice Director Mike Rosen and I recently presented a one-day workshop on enterprise architecture (EA) and portfolio management (PM), and how they work together. Part of Mike's contribution was about technical debt and how it fits into both EA and PM.

I recently met with the Scrum rollout team of a new client -- an enterprise software F500 company. This inhouse rollout team has been "Scrumming" for a little over a year now. The team has already trained/coached about 40 Scrum teams.

Selecting tablets for enterprise computing currently comes down to three choices: the Apple iPad, Android-based devices from various vendors, and Research In Motion's BlackBerry Playbook.

Agile development has revolutionized the way systems are developed from a waterfall or phased-based approach to an iterative-based approach that continuously reexamines development progress, current priorities, and sufficiency of solution.