One of the joys of IT is that it gives people the opportunity to learn new concepts and new skills and explore an inner mental world of creativity and show off their new creations.

What I have found over the years of deploying Agile is that organizations forget one of the fundamental reason why they deploy Agile practices: you want your scrum teams to mature as a team and as they mature you should expect that the level of quality in the software delivered will be higher than it used to be.

This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant Vince Kellen's introduction to the October 2015 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "IaaS: Ready for Liftoff?" (Vol. 28, No. 10).

The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to generate incredible amounts of data from a myriad of connected consumer devices and industrial applications. Achieving business value from this massive data stream will require the use of big data storage and analysis technologies that have the ability to scale to meet the constantly increasing demands placed on organizations. Of course, this brings up the question: just how familiar are organizations with the various big data technologies? A Cutter Consortium survey that asked 80 organizations worldwide about their IoT plans helps offer some insights into this question.

Takeaways for developers from the companies developing wearables are clear right now. You can find them in the public keynotes at developer conferences from Google and Apple as well as the not-for-disclosure documents widely available to developers for those and other platforms. Detailed APIs are available to developers, and with little effort you can find discussions and test code on public and semi-public resources such as GitHub and YouTube.

From the fantasy to the real world, there is already an emerging business in large shared-screen experiences. Museums, libraries, hotels, and resorts are among the first locations where organizations can see an immediate return on their investments in creating engaging experiences for visitors in an anonymous fashion. Currently most of these experiences are a small step forward from digital signage, providing people with the opportunity to navigate their own way through the content provided and in some instances share the content to their personal devices.

As with most flawed ideas, there is an element of truth in the idea that "leanness" and absence of slack have benefits to companies over the long term. The hierarchical organizational forms that characterize most modern companies were developed in an era when we did not have our current communication capabilities. A large part of the function of traditional hierarchies was to manage information flow. Some of the changes that we have made to organizations have been inevitable adjustments to reflect the fact that we no longer need to devote as much effort to managing information flow because of the nature of new technologies. 

In order to understand the many dimensions of sociotechnical systems, in particular their relevance and importance to the enterprise, we first need an overview of the key issues in the field of systemics, such as complexity.

Culture change is hard. It takes effort and commitment. While people may see the benefits of changing the culture, resistance arrives and is not always rational. Based on this company’s change effort and others, here are five things you should know about creating a culture of trust.

An effective EA measurement program typically begins by identifying a set of precise and easy-to-use metrics recognized by both business and IT organizations across the enterprise. At a strategic level, EA metrics establish a number of quantifiable parameters that enable practitioners to assess and evaluate the EA program, the IT assets employed, and their relevance to delivering business value for the enterprise. At a tactical level, EA metrics include parameters that impact the EA and its effectiveness across the organization — both directly and indirectly.

Recruitment is another area in which emerging developments in big data, analytics, and artificial intelligence begin to show their seams. Before mechanizing a process, it is important to achieve a finer degree of understanding, and to create a model that accounts for elemental components. 

Industrial, manufacturing, and process industries have used sensors, analytics, and other technologies to monitor and measure how equipment and processes are performing for some time. Now, we are seeing companies seek to apply sensor-enabled devices to support more human-centric monitoring in industrial settings.

Efficiency and productivity were the watchwords of the late 20th century, but today the emphasis needs to be more on agility. The prescription for organizational agility is markedly different from the prescription for efficiency and productivity.

Development and operations groups play equally important roles and must synchronize their work to enable organizations to rapidly produce software products and services. The awareness of this has resulted in the development of the operating principles known as "DevOps."

Disruptive technologies unleash tremendous creativity, with effects far beyond the initial change. Successfully creating disruption requires more than just ideas and technical capacity; there's also cultural capacity.

The digital economy calls for inside-out exposure of core business processes across the enterprise to enable the seamless integration of data across partner ecosystems, social computing platforms, hyperconnected customers, and self-learning machines. More than ever, today’s digital world forces enterprises to quickly course-correct their business strategies and operating models to stay afloat. Course-correcting strategies and changes in operating models call for a robust foundation that is nimble and agile enough to adapt to both internal and external changes.

As organizations ramp up their Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives over the next few years, the huge volumes of sensor data generated by connected devices, machines, people, and processes is going to provide considerable opportunities for analytics and automation. Combined with data from enterprise and industrial systems, and mobile, social, and other sources, sensor data, when analyzed, will help companies better understand how customers use their products and respond more appropriately to their needs. But just how experienced are organizations with managing and analyzing sensor data?

Rather than look for champions of the change you've selected to implement, find the champions of any improvement. Actively seek them out. The key is that you have to be willing to not only let your champion work on his or her passion, but you have to actually support your champion's effort. It doesn't matter if the improvement was on your wish list or if it has high-visibility potential. If it will benefit the organization (at any level), and your worker is passionate about making it happen, that is your focus point.

The representation of architecture in the form of architecture artifacts is less important than the act of representation. Architects are no less susceptible than others are to pitfalls of assumptions and beliefs that are suspect and, perhaps, outdated. The act of representing forces architects to think. The goal of architects is not to create works of art that pander to the need for certainty and control, but to deliver frameworks that provide the context to question, poke, and prod. The goal is to surface concerns, bring out possibilities, and expand, at least a little, into the vast darkitecture that envelops the visible enterprise of architecture.

In a culture of innovation, a culture in which "failure" has no useful meaning, a culture where we cannot predict the outcome of our work, we're going to have to get a new idea about efficiency. We will not "get it right the first time." Well, we might, but that would be an accident. No amount of planning and arrangements will guarantee a valuable outcome. What we used to abhor as failure becomes a fact of life, a key feature of our work processes. We must fit our expectations to the fact that of the things, services, and ideas we find innovative, many if not most will not display immediate value.

Consider this: when the IT world wrote its first line of code, there were no methods and we were “flying by the seat of our pants,” so to speak. Then came the structured systems analysis and design methods and entity-relationship modeling for relational structures. Later, the object-oriented methods and the formal project management through Prince-II and PMBOK all provided increasing sophistication in developing solutions but, at the same time, added overheads and bureaucracies to the way in which we worked.

Evolution within security needs to move in a more adaptive direction. The contest between security and intrusion is an arms race like the "Red Queen Hypothesis" — the faster the threat evolves, the faster the response must become, and it is never possible to get ahead of the game.

Recently, I received a 750-page, five-year IT outsourcing contract and was asked to offer my opinion. I didn’t have to read it to express my viewpoint; I just replied, “It’s 700 pages too long.” It was not devised for human comprehension.

I have to admit, I’m not a particular fan of metrics. Many managers still seem to believe that you can manage an organization by setting numerical objectives and tie them to financial bonuses. This approach has utterly failed; most prominently as one of the root causes of the ethical and economic breakdown of major parts of the financial industries in 2008.

Growing up, many of us remember walking to school alone, hanging out with friends in the park, and then, eventually, finding our way home for supper. Today, for children of the same age, such activities are considered dangerous or even illegal. It’s staggering. But norms change. The challenge for most of us is keeping up with the pace of change.