Business intelligence (BI), big data, and analytics have emerged as three of the most important business trends of the 21st century. This trajectory has unfolded from the convergence of the following technology advancements:

Although not many organizations are fully Agile at this time, those that are display the following qualities:

When there are administrative tasks that need to be done, there are certainly ways to make them less unpleasant and frustrating, and more rewarding and fulfilling. Here are seven tips for reducing the burden of governance and turning a necessary obligation into something more useful and beneficial.

The healthcare industry has embraced the Internet of Things (IoT) and is making widespread use of sensors in a range of applications and services. One key trend is the development of connected medical devices designed to be worn by patients (or implanted in them) to communicate their biosensor-based readings to wearers, physicians, and other medical personnel via Wi-Fi, cellular, or Bluetooth communications. By analyzing vital patient data and warning about changes in their health conditions or status, connected medical devices can help reduce costs, readmissions, and provide better-quality care to patients overall.

"You have reached the end of voice mail."

Recently, I have been involved in a fairly complex interactive voice response (IVR) redo, and I have begun to wonder if we have been working on the wrong technology. Most of us struggle with IVR systems more and more often, challenged to "touch 1 if ...," "touch 2 if ...," and more. Indeed, I have changed vendors a number of times after becoming frustrated with their IVR or voicemail applications.

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. This effect is so consistent that it is one of the very few things I actually promise before starting a transition.

A business architecture function can be a sustainable option to design and implement transformation opportunities. Once an organization decides to take this path, it needs to ensure that the journey is smooth. In this Advisor (and in Figure 1), we highlight some pitfalls organizations should avoid when starting up the business architecture function:

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Fellow Bob Benson's and Pieter M. Ribbers's introduction to the January 2015 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Improving Trust and Partnership Between Business and IT" (Vol. 28, No. 1). Learn more about Cutter IT Journal .]

In current organizations that have a culture where relationships are highly valued and are most often maintained and developed through a lot of face-to-face interaction, the adoption rate for a digital platform for knowledge sharing and information integration is low. Organizations need to promote a culture that motivates staff to increase usage of digital platform for knowledge sharing. Here are some of the ways I would suggest organizations go about responding to that question.

Rigidity in an organization can have a number of significant effects, including cultural as well as process issues. Without sufficient review, the organization can become brittle and less able to adequately respond to new conditions, while seemingly remaining in compliance with all imposing standards. The brittle organization will have problems in meeting changing business conditions, and it will also be less resilient and under greater threat from sudden problems such as natural disaster or catastrophic shifts in the market or in technology.

In an Agile world, we often talk about the importance of involving the client (or key stakeholders) throughout the development cycle. My work experience mainly allowed me to work with two types of clients: internal clients (as part of the IT department in the mid-to-late 1990s) and with product management teams (from 2000 to 2010).

EA is an information and knowledge management discipline. By gathering information about the architecture, its components, and its domains, we come to understand the architectural landscape, and it is through information that we communicate our plans to change and evolve the architecture.

Contracting has a long history in IT, and most companies have experience in using contractors in various roles. Among the advantages that contract workers can provide are the following:

The Internet of Things (IoT) is about more than just sensors and a lot of data and analytics (although these certainly are key components); it also involves the application of new technologies and practices like mobile devices, collaboration, and smart networks that are literally changing how businesses operate and people work. Lately, I've been examining how such technologies are having an impact in manufacturing, engineering, and other industrial environments.

At its core, leadership is an emotional process. To lead others, you must first develop self-awareness regarding your own emotional responses to situations and then the self-management skills to control those emotional responses in real time. After that, sharpen your senses so you can understand and manage the emotional responses of your followers. In order to strengthen people's ability to lead, help them develop greater capacity to understand and manage their own emotions, and then to understand and manage the emotional responses of those around them.

In the early 2000s, I ran a software company called Gray Hill Solutions that specialized in software-for-hire for the government sector, specifically in transportation management and traveler information. Among other projects, we built the original 511.org site for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in the San Francisco Bay Area. We specialized in rescuing government projects that had spent most of their budget and their time, yet had little to show for the effort.

The bottom line is that we should expect enterprise mobility to continue to grow in importance, spreading to more areas of the enterprise. The main benefits organizations seek from adopting mobile technology are improved worker productivity, improved response to customer needs, and better collaboration and knowledge-sharing among employees.

This year marks the centennial of the start of the First World War. One of the fiercest battles in WWI was the Battle of Passchendaele in Belgium. This manslaughter took place from July-November 1917, with more than 500,000 men lost on both sides for only a few kilometers gained, which were retaken soon afterwards during the German Spring offensive.

Something that differentiates consumer devices from business and enterprise devices is the impact they have on the manner in which people live, their concerns, and how they occupy their time. The ability to immediately monitor a wide variety of characteristics and behaviors on an everyday basis and feed that back to a repository in the cloud inevitably creates an opportunity for control. This control may meet the objectives of the consumer, or it may be targeted to meet the objectives of a vendor. The opportunity for control is likely to become more significant as the IoT develops. Aspects of behavior become a part of a conversation.

Within minutes after the New York Mets -- a baseball team that was legendary for its haplessness -- clinched the World Series on 17 October 1969 against the favored Baltimore Orioles, a spontaneous and wild ticker-tape celebration erupted across New York City's financial district.

In the early days of Agile software development, some believed incorrectly that Agile was the rejection of disciplined software development. A better perspective is that Agile was a rejection of techniques such as the waterfall lifecycle that are ill-suited to the dynamics of software.

Companies across many industries face pressures from disruptive companies using technology in entirely new ways to saturate the market. Progressive companies tasked with this challenge realize the benefits inherent to enterprise architecture (EA) or capability-based planning. EA is reemerging as a practice that allows business and technology to respond to major transformation in an orchestrated way, paving the way for the CIO to approach technology enablement with a new mindset.

The consumer device market has revolutionized how individuals connect and perform daily activities, leading to a rapid change in employee mobility demands and needs, but most enterprises are still struggling to keep in sync.

"There is nothing more intoxicating than victory, and nothing more dangerous," explains Robert Greene in his book, 48 Laws of Power. That intoxicating feeling clouds the minds of team members and management, resulting in an unrelenting craving for more.

I've been spending a lot of time with social media analytics and exploring how organizations are adopting and applying the technology. There are a number of obstacles confronting organizations seeking to implement social media analytics. These include technical and organizational considerations, as well as dealing with societal or consumer concerns when it comes to privacy. The latter appear to be particularly troublesome for end-user organizations.