So says Dumbledore in J.K. Rowling's book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, commenting on a mirror that shows us what our most desperate desires want us to see.

Janet Gregory and I have been sharing our success stories of the whole-team approach to testing and quality for almost 15 years. So why isn't everyone doing this? Well, even good ideas can take a long time to catch on. Look how long it took to convince medical doctors to wash their hands. We continue to hear success stories from people embracing collaboration.

Different parts of an enterprise architecture evolve at different rates: some change frequently, while others take longer. So it is not surprising that the pace of change is seen as an important consideration when making EA decisions.

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant Sebastian Hassinger's introduction to the December 2014 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Mobile Security: Managing the Madness" (Vol. 27, No. 12). Learn more about Cutter IT Journal .]

The Internet of Things (IoT) is already having a big impact on the transportation industry. Probably nowhere is this being felt more than with the railroads. I know of a number of projects under way utilizing sensors, analytics, and mobile technologies to optimize rail operations by collecting and analyzing data to determine real-time vehicle location and operating factors (e.g., average acceleration, speed, idle times, number of stops), and to assess KPIs on equipment wear and roadbed conditions.

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Business Technology Strategies practice this year for today's Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients and those that created controversy among Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows.

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Business & Enterprise Architecture practice for today's Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members. Your questions and comments not only make it possible to create lists like this -- they help focus Cutter's Senior Consultants' research on the areas that are most important to organizations like yours. So please keep your feedback coming.

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Cutter IT Journal this year for today's Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients and those that created controversy among Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows.

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the most intriguing articles published by the Agile Product & Project Management practice this year for today's Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients and those that created controversy among Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows.

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Data Insight & Social BI practice this year for today's Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients and those that created controversy among Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows.

[From the Editor: A number of Cutter Senior Consultants weighed in with their predictions of upcoming trends in IT. See what they had to say here.]

The Internet of Things (IoT) is creating high expectations from businesses and consumers about the possible ways it can help create new revenue models, increase efficiencies, and enhance customer experience. Businesses are looking to tap into the new business opportunities generated by the IoT, while consumers are seeking intelligent products and services that provide all kinds of insights to help them use those products and services optimally.

Software development falls roughly into three classes:

Many organizations lack automation in their deployment processes. When asked, developers and operations engineers often talk about their many deployment scripts, their pages of documentation, and their personal knowledge of their applications' deep internal settings and configurations. Yet this doesn't really give us a clear idea of how well automated the deployment process is. We must drill deeper to understand the current DevOps process by asking the following questions:

Data validation is emerging as a stumbling block on the way to optimal use of big data. In its earliest uses, big data was little concerned with data validation, because much of it was experimental. Capability to elicit anything useful at all out of big data came as something of a surprise. However, as organizations become more dependent on their use of analysis of huge data streams for very critical processes, the validation issue is certain to raise its head.

Imagine you are responsible for a production plant. Let's assume it's a plant that produces a few hundred cars per day. Now you hire a new consultant who promises to reduce your cost by a factor of four. He issues some policies and makes some changes to your production process and, alas, after five months your cost really drops down to half. This was not really what he had promised, but it's still quite impressive, isn't it?

For the past three or four years, mobility has continually ranked near the top of the list of "must have" capabilities when it comes to corporate technology adoption plans. This begs the question: how do organizations view the success of their mobile technology efforts to date? A Cutter Consortium survey (conducted in July–October 2014) that asked 49 organizations about their mobile technology adoption and implementation practices helps shed some light on this question.

No matter how disciplined your approach to security, there will always be a non-zero chance of an exploit occurring and bad actors gaining access to the internal data in your system. It is therefore extremely important to secure user data internally. Storing passwords and personal data unencrypted will multiply the negative impact of a security breach far beyond the simple fact of the breach itself. Encrypting and securing all sensitive data will add complexity, performance overhead, and expense to your server infrastructure, but it's a necessary cost.

Over the past few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has generated a lot of hype, touting how embedded sensors combined with mobile technologies will lead to a multitude of connected devices and services (all generating a deluge of data), which will open up a gold rush of opportunities in the consumer, business, technology, and industrial worlds. We've also learned that the IoT is not just about sensors and a lot of data and analytics; it also involves the application of new technologies including drones, wearable computers, and smart networks, as well as new practices such as predictive maintenance.

Forget big data, digital exhaust, data lakes, and all the other trendy terms created to describe big piles of data. Gang-tackling new terms to describe stores of data isn't going to advance the current state of affairs much. While we are at it, throw in the term "chief data officer." I have a simultaneously oscillating aversion and desire for that title, just like a pigeon that skittishly jumps back and forth between pecking at the bird feed and scattering away from the oncoming wreck of a car. Should I grab it or should I flee from it?

I always look forward to attending Agile conferences. It is a great place to hear speakers sharing their experiences and secret recipe behind their success. However, I have come to realize over a period of years that what I hear at conferences needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, analyzed well before implementing in our organizations. In this Advisor, I would like to share a few tips to keep in mind while borrowing new ideas and rolling out in the organization. There are some situations that could do more harm than being useful.

In a recent Executive Report, we looked in detail at how contemporary architecture teams use roadmaps. Here, we summarize some of the key learning points -- drawn from the experiences of organizations with widespread use of roadmaps -- to provide tips and suggestions for creating better and more useful EA roadmaps (see "EA Roadmaps and Strategic Vectors"):

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Ron Zahavi and Alan Hakimi's introduction to the November 2014 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Internet of Things: Technologies, Opportunities, Solutions" (Vol. 27, No. 11).

People made decisions for many millennia without the benefit of IT, and it's not self-evident that we make our really big decisions in the computer age consistently better than before. Smaller decisions, in relatively information-rich situations, are another matter. But IT, properly used, has become and will continue to be important to decision makers in critical ways: