We are seeing a serious push by vendors and organizations to incorporate machine learning (ML) techniques into both consumer and enterprise applications, where the technology is being applied to automate the analysis of large amounts of data, identify patterns, and learn preferences and behaviors.

Wearables (like tablets before them and mobile phones even earlier) are described in terms of what’s already familiar and known. The challenge for developers, marketers, and ultimately users is to look at new devices such as wearables on their own. This doesn’t happen overnight, and it also doesn’t necessarily happen along the lines of a scenario shaped by marketers (or even the media) that follow technology and trends.

The special properties of nanotechnologies are opening up new possibilities in medicine, electronics, photonics, biotechnology, and a host of other industrial applications.

The recently announced VW emissions debacle is something that I take personally.

Clarity, conditions, and constraints must work together to create the right balance of freedom and responsibility for teams. Without appropriate freedom, companies waste the experience, intelligence, and creativity of their employees. Without appropriate responsibility, teams may miss the mark or do foolish things. Conditions make it possible for teams to do work. Clarity and constraints bound autonomy and maintain the balance between freedom and responsibility.

The timing of bringing innovations to market affects the long-term viability of the enterprise. This Advisor calls out this timing issue specifically in order to focus more on opportunity cost, or potential revenue and profit. Creating new sources of revenue is not a mechanical or technical issue. It is a people issue. EA can support or create barriers, or it can help transcend them.

Over the next few years, we should expect to see some stunning new wearable products that are going to profoundly affect our technology, business, social, and legal landscapes.

There has been considerable talk among industry proponents and analysts about the need for standard frameworks and practices for building applications and products for the Internet of Things (IoT). But how do mainstream organizations actually view the importance of industry standards when it comes to supporting connectivity and interoperability between various IoT devices, machines, and applications? A recent Cutter Consortium survey that asked 80 organizations (worldwide) about their plans for the IoT helps answer this question.

The unfolding Volkswagen emissions control cheating scandal has all the ingredients and drama of a great Shakespearean play.

At the heart of the Agile movement is the concept that collaborative problem solving is a better way to work than having people sit in their cubicles working by themselves.

Maybe, just maybe, if we had thought of architects as archists, we would have been in a different future today. But maybe it is not too late? Maybe there are techniques and ways of thinking about the future that can be part of the future of the discipline we happen to call “architecture.”

Location data provides a rich store of accessible data that can be used in a growing range of applications. It is now about to become even more significant as we move into the era of the Internet of Things (IoT) and embedded analytics.

Within a few years, much of what doctors, lawyers, engineers, computer scientists, and professors — among many other professionals — do will be extended and replaced by smart machines. There will be a fundamental change in the definition, development, and deployment of "expertise." After an initial period of resistance (and some hysteria), we will welcome the capability and accessibility of our smart digital friends with open arms. In fact, we already desperately need them.

As a method for practicing continuous improvement on a day-to-day basis, the improvement kata complements Agile methods and integrates with familiar Lean tools.

An ongoing issue with enterprise architecture (EA) is how to make a compelling case for its value with business decision makers and stakeholders. The cost proposition is one area where EA can deliver unique value. 

Organizations have several choices for implementing IoT infrastructure.

Recently I discussed Cutter survey findings pertaining to development trends for organizations building mobile apps that customers can download and run on their smart watches (see “The Smart Watch as a Customer Touchpoint: App Development Trends”).

From the time most people are able to put together their first cogent thoughts, the question arises: Who do you want to be when you grow up? It's a simple enough concept. Do we want to be firefighters? Captains of industry? Doctors? Lawyers? Astronauts? But as we achieve a reasonable level of maturity, we come to the realization that we simply want to be happy with ourselves and with the world around us.

In part IV of this series, we explored how alignment leads to autonomy (see "Implementing the Integrative Framework, Part IV -- Autonomy"). We now shift our focus to empowerment as the last "ingredient" in the (Scalability -> Alignment -> Autonomy -> Empowerment) cycle. It is this full cycle that makes the integrative framework so powerful.

The pattern I propose for a service assurance architecture is based on ideas taken from the operations support system (OSS) developed in the 1980s and 1990s. The original OSS, created for the telecommunications industry, covered a broad range of subjects and considered networking systems. The pattern presented here narrows the scope of interest to service assurance and casts the OSS principles into the IT systems area.

Many large organizations that are facing volatile and stagnant markets in their existing businesses decide to acquire another organization to augment their strategy or compete more successfully. This is a major decision and a critical inflection point that needs to be navigated through with a lot of thought. Unfortunately, data suggests that many companies that acquire other companies do not succeed in capturing the value that they had hoped to in closing the deal. Why is this true?

A recent Cutter Consortium survey that asked 80 organizations (worldwide) about their plans for the Internet of Things (IoT) helps provide some insight into how organizations are responding to the introduction of the Apple Watch and the growing consumer use of smart watches in general.

The IT community has a huge stake in minimizing the probability and severity of any backlash. One major asset is that their executives are, on the whole, more publicly respected than their counterparts in most other industries. They have bully pulpits that they can and should use to get in front of both technical and broader sociopolitical issues likely to bring on or intensify backlash.

Conventional wisdom holds that alignment and autonomy are contradictory. This is a false dichotomy. Alignment actually enables autonomy by providing each and every project team with its goals, measures, and boundaries. The project team is strongly encouraged to operate independently within its own context. As long as a project teams has a well-specified set of clearly derived measures, it can do what it needs to do to achieve its measures without the interference of external management.

I was recently discussing the possibility of writing up some success stories, about enterprise architecture initiatives in particular, with a young colleague who then asked me: "And do you have any anti-success stories to tell?" Leaving aside his interesting choice of words, perhaps unconsciously aimed at avoiding the dreaded word "failure," this made be think of several cases where my clients snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory, so to speak, and what lessons we (or our clients) can derive from them.