[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant Lou Mazzucchelli's introduction to the August 2015 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "What's Over the Technology Horizon?" (Vol. 28, No. 8). Learn more about Cutter IT Journal .]

For organizations considering the selection of a COTS business process management system (BPMS), this decision is not just a product choice, but an immediate determination about delivery. For many reasons, the cloud seems to be in the mix of these decision points, adding yet another dimension to the complexity of the decision.

One of my favorite professors in school used to say that "the sloppy use of words can lead to sloppy thinking."

Bifurcation of knowledge is a fact of life in most hierarchies. People at the top understand the context. Founders, the first 15 employees, and key managers know the business, the market, the product, the customers. They hold the financial information about how the company makes money and the current financial status. Since they hold this info, they also know what the company should do -- on a strategic and tactical level. Knowledge flows down, but mostly on a "need to know" basis -- a trickle, not a torrent.

A time horizon is a point of time in the future at which the EA process or its outcomes are achieved or evaluated. This is sometimes referred to as the planning horizon. Sometimes this is a relatively short time in the future and sometimes it is a much longer period. Generally speaking, EA needs to consider a mix of different time scales. Short term can be regarded as looking less than two years into the future. Medium term is often seen as a two- to five-year time horizon. And long term is five years or more.

Today there is an imperative to fill new jobs, to hire the best and the brightest to perform them, and to ensure that innovation survives and flourishes within the company.

Mobile connected devices, smart clothing, and advanced analytics are now being used in the treatment and management of chronic diseases and debilitating injuries. We are also seeing considerable activity among companies developing platforms for remote patient monitoring (RPM).

The advent of software-defined infrastructures (SDIs) brings to hardware many of the known problems of software: since software is invisible, it is not bound to physical constraints and can become much more complex than hardware.

In one open enrollment Lean software development class I taught, two participants were the development manager and manager of project managers of a very successful company that built sophisticated websites for other companies. They were currently at about 100 developers and growing rapidly. As successful as they were, the company had a serious technical problem -- about 5% of their installations would fail in the field and have to be fixed, causing about a 20% hit to the company's development effort.

If we view the practice of architecture as a business, then innovation at the business level recurses into innovation of the underlying business of architecture, so that the broader business is positioned to innovate.

When we have mental models or "laws" (such as E = mc2) that work predictably and reliably, we perceive these models to be almost indistinguishable from the underlying reality. Based on the limited number of laws that we have been able to tease out in disciplines like physics, where testability and proof are easier, it is reasonable to assume that robust laws are hard to come by. And, it would be good to take the view that architecture is perhaps closer to art than it is to physics. So, great architectural models are really rare.

A discussion of wearables really needs to be separated into at least two parts from the start. There is the fashion element, and how anything affixed to the person becomes a badge of class, status, or coolness; and there is the sensor/utility function, which is of greatest amusement to technophiles. 

It doesn't take much to nurture innovation. Our primary role in the executive suite is to get out of the way.

What makes a good PMO great? This Advisor covers a short list of items; there are many overall ingredients that go into a great PMO. 

GE has offered its Predix software platform for building industrial Internet and Internet of Things (IoT) applications for several years now. And GE has used Predix to build custom applications for its industrial clients, as well as to develop a line of industry and domain-specific IoT solutions it markets to customers. 

There are changes ... lying ahead in every road And there are new thoughts ... ready and waiting to explode When tomorrow is today ... the bells may toll for some But nothing can change the shape of things to come

"The Shape of Things to Come" -- Max Frost & The Troopers

In our previous Advisor in this series (see "Implementing the Integrative Framework, Part II -- Scalability"), we differentiated project scalability from organizational scalability. Project scalability addresses the ability to perform projects requiring large numbers of engineers; whereas organizational scalability is about instituting common development techniques (such as Agile) consistently across an organization. Both are important, but one should not be confused with the other. You need to consider quite distinct aspects, and initiate quite different actions for each. As discussed in the previous Advisor, we recommend that at any point in time you pursue only one of the two kinds of scalability.

In addition to the various consumer technology, enterprise IT, medical device manufacturers, and other health-related companies, there are a slew of startups that are focusing on developing mobile apps, wearable devices, smart clothing, and telemedicine services designed to support consumer-centric healthcare.

Human society is currently sitting at the dawn of digital revolution led by the evolution of a new and intelligent species: digital intelligence. The real question we need to ask ourselves is are we confident of retaining the supremacy of human intelligence forever? Or is it about time we start making note of the newer intelligent species and make efforts to tame it while it is still in its infancy?

EA governance provides a common vision of the future, shared by all stakeholders, and guides in the selection, creation, and implementation of solutions driven by business requirements. It also serves as a means to control the growing complexities of technology by setting enterprise-wide standards for IT that can be leveraged. This Advisor discusses the critical, key roles that EA governance plays for transformation programs to be successful.

This interview with Bart Baesens takes a quick look at some of the issues covered in his new book "Fraud Analytics Using Descriptive, Predictive, and Social Network Techniques: A Guide to Data Science for Fraud Detection," written with Véronique Van Vlasselaer and Wouter Verbeke. 

In this day of technological sophistication, citing a router outage as the cause of a major failure is akin to a student explaining that "the dog ate my report." If the world is going to be depending on the Internet, it is going to have provide a management and communications capability that is worthy of its new-found charter.

Today you see "impediment management processes" defined at the enterprise level, usually based on Excel spreadsheets or your favorite trusted ticket system. Sometimes managers feel that it takes too long in their organization to remove impediments, so they set up an impediment Kanban system to reduce the lead time of the impediment removal. Am I the only one who thinks that something is wrong here?