Connected devices are set to dramatically change healthcare in general and clinical and pharmaceutical studies and the treatment of chronic diseases, in particular. The key to utilizing sensor data generated by personal health, fitness, and medical devices is to correlate it with other more traditional healthcare and medical data -- such as doctor-created medical records, clinical research, and individual genomes -- data sets that are typically unstructured, fragmented, and not easily integrated or analyzed.

Although a lot of social media content is textual, consumers are also using rich media types, including sound, video, and photos in their postings. So how does one extrapolate consumer sentiment from such sources? You can use basic keyword search or simple text analysis to analyze the metadata associated with such files, but more often than not, such data offers just a bare-bones, summary description of the file. Typically, it does not capture the intention of the author or what is going on in the photo.

The Apple Watch is significant because it legitimizes the market for wearables (in general) and smart watches (in particular) by dramatically increasing the visibility of smart watches. (Smart watches are wearables designed to run 3rd-party apps; general wearables are fitness bands, activity trackers, and the like, that do not run third-party apps.) It is also leading to a wave of innovative new products -- including apps designed to work with the Apple Watch, as well as new smart watch offerings from other vendors that have been inspired by Apple's innovation. And, perhaps most importantly, the proliferation of smart watch users will offer companies a new and very dynamic touchpoint for engaging with customers.

The Apple Watch is the biggest announcement in wearable tech this year. And, in just a few days (24 April), it will start to appear on the wrists of large numbers of consumers.

Most people know that innovation requires time to think, reflect, experiment, fail, revise, and explore. But many have likely not contemplated how directly cost pressures can impact innovation efforts. Psychologist Donald T. Campbell developed a model of innovation in 1960 that can help us understand just what's at stake. The Campbell model was inspired by Darwinian evolution. It portrays innovation as a two-step process, as follows:

The Agile principle of delivering working software frequently, in the shortest feasible timeframe, can scare DW/BI teams into avoiding Agile practices if they can't conceive of how they would deliver working software in a matter of weeks. However, teams that think creatively about how to work toward this principle have found effective approaches. In this article, I provide a case study that shows how one team approached this challenge: by identifying the business value in the steps of the DW/BI delivery process.

Externalizing business logic has long been a goal for EA. Business rules and complex event processing (CEP) are two ways to achieve this. So what are the differences between business rules and CEP architectures? And how can we use EA to prepare for using business rules or CEP?

One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat on a tree. "Which road do I take?" she asked the cat. "Where do you want to go?" asked the cat. "I don't know," Alice answered. "Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter." -- Lewis Carroll

Offering connected products can require a company to reinvent itself; in effect, to transform from a product-oriented business into a service-oriented business. Moreover, it is likely that it will also require the business to transition into a software and services provider -- at least to some extent.

I wonder what Marx would have observed regarding the history of IT projects in California. Last month, Elaine Howle, the state's auditor, released yet another report detailing California's continuing IT project management misadventures.

Software professionals have a hate-hate relationship with requirements. They hate that requirements have been an unsatisfactory guide to action, and they hate that they still depend on them. Agile resolved part of this dilemma, replacing the traditional requirements tome with user stories. Over time, the Agile requirements toolkit expanded to include epics, themes, storyboards, wireframes, story maps, and other types of content.

Enterprises need architecture because of complexity; an architecture explicates the essence of an enterprise's capabilities and qualities. We can consider an architect to be an enterprise of sorts, too -- an enterprise, with some specific qualities. Just as architecture quality attributes make a system effective, so does an architect's qualities make the individual who acts in that role successful.

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant Dave Rooney's introduction to the March 2015 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Value-Added Agile Strategies" (Vol. 28, No. 3). Learn more about Cutter IT Journal.]

Although very new, the predictive API (or PAPI) concept is important. With PAPIs, we see the direct availability of machine language analysis to create predictions in a manner that can easily be integrated with other APIs. This can be employed to create sophisticated mashups with predictive capability for use in decision making. It is linkage to decision making and the ability instantly to invoke machine language prediction from diverse realms that makes PAPI important. While relatively few examples exist today, the development of the API economy and the further progress of big data will ensure that many more PAPIs are developed in more diverse areas.

This morning we happened to notice an announcement of a project portfolio management (PPM) conference for this summer. And Cutter's Summit in Boston features a Wednesday morning (6 May) roundtable on PPM.

We concluded Part III of our series "One Size Does Not Fit All" discussing horizontal flow in vertically siloed organizations (see Figure 1). In such organizations, both the flow of data and the flow of decisions across the silos might not be fast enough to satisfy the needs of the enterprise. The project teams may well be frustrated with the speed of the decisions that impedes their ability to deliver. An overly burdensome approval process leaves them powerless to improve.

Because of the importance of documentation, just like a building architect would do for a construction project, EA has a vital role to play in ensuring that organizations carefully plan and execute transformation initiatives against a blueprint with a current and target state.

Teams composed of business and technology professionals should identify problems and opportunities together. The era of top-down autocratic control is over. Teams with deep knowledge of technology and business models and processes should perform the tasks listed in this Advisor to generate credibility and trust.

I suggest when teams start off, they go with shorter iterations, and once they feel they've got the Agile process down, and they're working together well, and they've got a good mindset shift, then they can expand to two or three weeks. Anything bigger than that and you're shortchanging yourself on your learning cycles.

With Russia's intention to assert data sovereignty by requiring all firms to keep data and systems in Russia, and many other countries already requiring this or quickly following suit, we are seeing what I expected a few years back: nations exerting control over their cyber infrastructures and using corporate IT infrastructure as a means to thwart competing nations. While techno-optimists usually equate IT with democratization, I am not sure despotic or even democratic rulers think the same.

In the previous two Agile Advisors in this series (see "One Size Does Not Fit All, Part I" and "One Size Does Not Fit All, Part II"), we described characterization of projects using three criteria:

Innovation -- determines the kind of performance measures to be used: descriptive, predictive or combination of the two.

Complexity exists everywhere. Would it not be helpful to understand specific kinds of complex situations where the services of architects are particularly valuable? This would help enterprises use architects' capabilities more effectively.

When you introduce Agile into existing organizations, you regularly get two types of seemingly conflicting results if you ask for employee satisfaction. First you get the satisfaction boost. Once the teams have learned to deliver valuable stuff, they experience the satisfaction of accomplishment. They finally deliver and get feedback from real customers. In most organizations this leads to a significant increase in employee satisfaction.

In June 2014, I discussed some of the possibilities the commercial use of drones offers. Since then, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), after several years of study, has finally issued proposed guidelines for the commercial use of drones in the US. Moreover, the FAA appears to be more receptive to commercial drone usage, and we are now seeing an increase in their use by companies, government agencies, and researchers.

Security in the IT realm is a very complex issue to deal with, largely because the very attributes that create vulnerabilities are the main creators of value for individual users, businesses, and society itself. Just as the value of a network increases as the square of the number of nodes on that network, so too does the probability of a bad actor exploiting the network to his or her own ends.