As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Business & Enterprise Architecture practice for today's Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members. Your questions and comments not only make it possible to create lists like this, they help focus Cutter's Senior Consultants' research on the areas that are most important to organizations like yours. So please keep your feedback coming.

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Cutter IT Journal this year for today's Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients and those that created controversy among Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows. Your questions and comments don't only make it possible to create lists like this — they help focus Cutter's Senior Consultants' research on the areas that are most important to organizations like yours.

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Data Analytics & Digital Technologies practice this year for today's Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients and those that created controversy among Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows.

In this series of Advisors, we share a conversation among Cutter colleagues of the Agile Product Management & Software Engineering Excellence practice. In this installment, Practice Director Tom Grant shares his thoughts on Agile frameworks.

Question leadership is a question-based management principle not a bumper sticker. Most brilliant, innovative leaders know that leading by asking questions is a more powerful leadership style than just having the “right” answers, and gets you not only better business and organizational outcomes, but also more widespread employee — and customer and stakeholder — commitment. Moreover, asking the “right” questions, in the right order, communicates the goals you want to achieve.

Jelly molds come in all shapes and sizes. You can get ones in the shape of a rabbit, pig, cat, or butterfly, and dinosaurs are really popular. In addition to animal shapes, there are airplanes, castles, or a traditional pudding shaped–mold. But the key thing about jelly molds is that every time we pour jelly into the mold, it will produce the same shape. And that is true of architectural jelly molds as well; they force outputs into a specific shape or pattern. If we look at enterprise architecture today, there are a small number of jelly mold styles that get used over and over again.

With this issue of Cutter IT Journal, we aim to bring more perspective to the question of how to digitally transform. All the contributing authors agree that digital transformation will be profoundly complex, but this complexity does not prevent them from bringing useful perspectives to the table and suggesting approaches for how to frame and launch transformation. This issue does not glorify startups, big-bang disruption, or Silicon Valley; it does, however, investigate what lessons incumbents can take from digital natives. It also broadens the scope to include historical framing of the challenge, as well as the authors' rich experience and expertise in working with incumbent organizations.

Last week, IBM launched the Watson Internet of Things (IoT) business unit. The goal: apply the natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and other advanced analytic techniques of its Watson cognitive computing platform to capitalize on helping clients develop IoT applications tailored to specific industries and applications. The initial focus will be on automotive, electronics, healthcare, insurance, and industrial manufacturing.

Tomorrow's problems and the innovation needed to solve them are likely to require multiple disciplines. One person with multiple domains of knowledge becomes increasingly valuable. 

While Agile is pretty mainstream by now in Web and app development, it is still a major challenge in system design, where software plays only a part of the game, although that piece is steadily increasing. Whether we're talking about manufacturers of cars, chips, or medical devices, they all need to respond to the increasing pace in the market. Only one or two decades ago, these industries were content with product cycles of three to five years. Today, some chip manufacturers are capable of delivering a new version of their product every second month, causing excitement for their customers and despair for their competitors.

At the heart of the psychological contract is a philosophy — not a process, tool, or formula. This philosophy reflects the contract’s deeply significant, changing, and dynamic nature. It is the spirit of the agreement.

Our survey findings strongly suggest that the security solutions providers are going to have to develop new technologies and methods to support IoT applications. This includes better threat detection and prevention technologies for embedding within the connected devices themselves as well as for deploying within the networks and platforms intended to manage them and all the data they generate.

A method is essentially a pattern. Just as a design pattern abstracts and encapsulates knowledge of many experts which, in turn, can help fast track new designs, similarly a method provides guidance for new initiatives based on collective past experiences. Agile as a method (notably Scrum, but also other methods under the Agile umbrella such as XP) brings to us the experiences of practitioners who discovered that visibility, honesty, cross-functionality, and iterations can help a software project immensely.

One of the descriptions of EA often heard is that it provides a bridge between strategy and implementation. Fair enough, but what does that actually mean?

As a customer, have you ever wondered why companies force you into a customer service environment that seems to be convenient only for them? We choose to interact with organizations for a variety of reasons with a desired end result in mind. We have a general expectation of how service should be delivered and the amount of time we are willing to invest in the interaction. Today's customer is experienced, knowledgeable, demanding, and willing and able to defect to another company at the drop of a credit card. Frustrating customer experiences are rooted in customer-facing services designed from the inside (them)-out (you), absent of what's important to the customer, and more concerned with cost containment than with revenue opportunity.

Companies are developing connected vehicles and transportation applications to enable better management and compliance of consumer, fleet, and urban transit vehicles and associated infrastructure through monitoring and predictive maintenance, and to achieve reduced energy consumption via optimized route planning and delay avoidance. In addition to business needs, government regulations are also driving connected vehicle solutions development to improve the tracking, safety, and servicing of consumer, commercial, public, and emergency vehicles.

When you read the literature, it all seems so easy: everybody just works together to build a high-quality system that provides users exactly what they need — on schedule and under budget. However, as you might expect, Agile and DevOps are not "magic potions"; nor are they “free.”

Wearables have the potential to transform the way we engage with technology. The new generation of personal electronics will change (and in some cases already has changed) many industries. 

Somewhat surprisingly, it is only relatively recently (from the 1980s) that business has come to recognize the importance and value of knowledge as a resource.

Architects and architecture exist with the intent of providing something of value. But intent does not always translate to results. Sometimes we get in our own way if we are not careful. Are there habits of mind that can work at cross-purposes to the value we seek from the enterprise of architecture?

Mobile security is a complex issue that is growing more difficult as devices multiply within the organization. New devices include new ecosystems and new operating systems, which can conflict with existing security measures as well as adding less understood modes of access to online data. Lack of familiarity creates innumerable vulnerability points that may be exploited by sophisticated hackers, as devices become more widely used in critical applications. We have looked at mobile security before, mainly around the proliferation of smartphones in the office. But the issue is likely to become much more complicated as we enter the era of the Internet of Things (IoT).

Are your teams delivering products that delight? These are just a few of the things that you can do to help your teams move the dial. 

One major purpose of the IoT is to collect massive amounts of very discrete data for analysis. Thus, the relevant privacy problems of big data come into play, specifically those of aggregation, scale, and difficulty in understanding what predictive analysis may ultimately affect the individual's interaction with the object.

For many enterprise architects, the concept of systems thinking is almost synonymous with EA. But knowing about systems thinking and applying that knowledge in our daily work can be very different things. Is that finally starting to change? Is systems thinking finally hitting mainstream EA?

Fog computing, also referred to as "Edge computing," is an IoT applications architecture designed to distribute the resources and services of computation, communication, control, and storage closer to the devices and systems at or near the edge of an IoT network or its endpoints (e.g., mobile devices, connected machines, users).