Last September's Cutter IT Journal contains many insightful contributions about 21st-century IT professionals to help you gear up for the new world in which products like smartphones and tablets are playing a growing role (see "21st-Century IT Personnel: Tooling Up or Tooling Down?" Vol. 24, No. 9). The articles touch on the essentials for the 21st-century IT professional, including usability, user interfaces, smart devices, and so on.

Every year I am asked, "What's next for collaboration?" I came up with 10 predictions for 2011, with about an 80% accuracy, according to my own calculations. I began to work on this year's predictions in mid-December, hoping to finish them by the New Year.

I had the good fortune recently to attend a bimonthly breakfast meeting of CIOs. In addition to me, seven of the 23 regular members of the group were in attendance.

It often starts as a seemingly plain training request. Having decided to go the agile route, a client would like Cutter to train a certain number of employees in one agile method or another.

As architects, we are constantly challenged to provide value to the business. Much of the value we provide comes from avoiding costs and problems before they occur and is difficult to demonstrate or quantify. But architecture can also deliver value by providing a better, broader, more flexible, and extensible solution to business requirements. I always look for opportunities or projects where an architectural approach will provide a better solution and try to seize these chances when I can.

A 1983 New Yorker cartoon shows a man taking his son on a walk. "It's good to know about trees," he says to the boy, then adds almost as an afterthought, "Just remember, nobody ever made big money knowing about trees."1 Self-motivation is a well-established explanation for why people get involved.

With Facebook closing in on one billion people (one in every six people on the planet is on Facebook), it is clear that consumer social networks are having great influence on how the enterprise is now using these technologies.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

"Who will guard the guardians?"

Roman poet Juvenal supposedly asked that question nearly 2,000 years ago, and it is one that often comes to mind when speaking of the current financial crisis as it drags itself into yet another year.

Agile and lean adoptions don't always work. This Advisor shares a few examples of lean and agile adoptions that failed to make things better. These types of agile adoptions are more common than we would like to think. If you are experiencing any of these failure states, you are not alone. But remember that you do not have to accept results like these; they can be fixed. Let's examine four of these failure states more closely.

Today's unprecedented growth rate of data (structured and unstructured) necessitates faster and cost-effective processing for near-real-time decision making. Over the years, many have viewed high-performance computing (HPC) as a monster too complex and too unaffordable for processing large data. However, that viewpoint is changing rapidly due to open source innovations such as Apache Hadoop, the advent of the cloud, and simple and affordable platforms like Microsoft.

Much has been discussed about the potential and perils of cloud computing. While there is promise in provisioning elasticity on demand, cautionary tales point to security, interoperability, portability, and privacy, among others. A recent edition of Cutter IT Journal was forward-looking with excellent suggestions on architectural and operational strategies for effective cloud sourcing (see "Cloud Computing: A CIO's Perspective," Vol. 24, No. 7).

"Big Data" was one of the hottest IT buzzwords of 2011, and you can expect the hype only to increase this year. BI vendors, the IT press, and analytics gurus go on and on about the need for organizations to meet their Big Data requirements. All the excitement around Big Data is not just hype, however. Today we are seeing organizations develop some very impressive applications that were impractical, if not impossible, just a few years ago.

"Big Data" was one of the hottest IT buzzwords of 2011, and you can expect the hype only to increase this year. BI vendors, the IT press, and analytics gurus go on and on about the need for organizations to meet their Big Data requirements. All the excitement around Big Data is not just hype, however.

A financial services client last month asked me if I had read anything about management and the relationship to "commander's intent." While I had to confess that I had not, I did some quick searching to find out what the concept was about and how it might relate to effective management practice.

In my last Advisor (see "Big or Little, Devops Needs a Complete Picture," 23 November 2011), I promised to provide examples of using systems thinking to

Welcome to the seventh-anniversary edition of my enterprise architect's New Year's resolutions. I hope it will give you food for thought and some inspiration for architectural growth in 2012.

Welcome to the seventh-anniversary edition of my enterprise architect's New Year's resolutions. I hope it will give you food for thought and some inspiration for architectural growth in 2012.

[From the Editor: This week's Advisor is from Patrick Debois's introduction to the December 2011 issue of Cutter IT Journal "Embedding Devops in the Enterprise" (Vol. 24, No. 12).

Happy New Year! As we head into 2012, I thought I'd offer some predictions as to what I see happening with predictive analytics. This analysis is based on various surveys and other research1 we've conducted over the past year or so, as well as on discussions with readers, clients, and vendors.

This week, we're taking a look back at five of the most read articles in Cutter's Business Technology Strategies practice over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and pare it down to just five.

This week, we're taking a look back at five of the most-intriguing articles published in Cutter's Agile practice over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and pare it down to just five articles.

This week, we're taking a look back at five of the most intriguing articles published in Cutter's Business & Enterprise Architecture practice over this past year.

This week, we're taking a look back at five of the most intriguing articles published in Cutter IT Journal over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and pare it down to just five articles. Look for these lists from each of our four practice areas for a compilation of Cutter's 20 most intriguing articles of the year.

This week, we're taking a look back at five of the most-intriguing articles published in Cutter's Data Insight & Social BI practice over this past year. As you might imagine, it was no small task to cull the list and pare it down to just five articles.

In just about every due diligence engagement I carry out, the VC and I spend a lot of time on scalabity of the software architecture. The company whose software architecture we are evaluating usually has a good track record of successfully scaling up on quite a few technology and business dimensions. If we extrapolate the historical growth rate a few years into the future, the company really looks attractive. The concern, however, is that the company might run into a hard barrier for growth.