Innovation has become accepted as central to competiveness in today's world, both in new product development and in enhancement of internal processes. Companies struggle with innovation, and there have been numerous attempts to regularize and program it. But the development of truly breakthrough ideas is difficult, and recognizing them when they do arrive can be harder still.

The news of the past few months has been more than a little alarming. Ebola crosses into the US. Rioters take hold of Ferguson, Missouri. The stock market plunges, and plunges again. Watching the news of ISIS (or ISIL, if you prefer), the beheadings, and the imminent threats to any semblance of world peace can make you want to hide under the covers and stay in bed. Is there anything that those in the executive suite can do in this situation? YES! And it doesn't involve profiteering on the backs of tragedy after tragedy. It involves a simple message of sanity and hope.

No project manager would deliberately make an irrational decision. The issue arises when we mistakenly believe we are making a rational decision when in fact it's a biased one. The following examples are just a few of the unconscious biases that can potentially lead to irrational decisions.

A natural human propensity causes us to approach new technology with old thinking, which significantly slows the rate at which we truly take advantage of the change. In this Advisor, we analyze this syndrome -- which I call the "Technology 1.0 Syndrome" -- and discuss how to break out of it in the case of mobile computing technology.

For a given technology, the progression from discovery to development to integration may involve different people. From senior management to junior staff, the people who are good at discovering new technologies often like to continue doing that, just as integrationists like building on new and existing technologies.

This article is based on a briefing I had with Sensoria CEO Davide Vigano. Part I covered the company's platform, combining textile and traditional sensors and mobile and cloud technologies to enable manufacturers to create biometric-sensing garments with sensors embedded directly within the fabric of clothing (see "Sensoria, Biometric-Sensing Fabric, and Wearable Technologies, Part I").

Over the last decade, software developers Mary and Tom Poppendieck and others have pointed out that just as in manufacturing, software development benefits from Lean thinking. More recently, Lean methods have extended to broader business processes, including both development and operations (DevOps).

Infectious disease experts from the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and medical advisors from other US public health agencies have repeatedly stated that the US healthcare system is more than capable of dealing with any incidences of Ebola that occur in the US. Since the outbreak began in West Africa, the press has cited various officials saying that the US -- indeed, the western world in general -- leads in understanding Ebola and how to contain the disease.

The attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City on 11 September 2001 exposed the need for developing business continuity planning and disaster recovery (BCP-DR) strategies. After those attacks, IT infrastructure planners and data center architects across the world started incorporating alternate sites and high availability of applications and services in their designs.

By looking ahead to a time when monitoring blood sugar and delivering insulin can occur in real time, one can see a time when worldwide diabetes might be brought under control, and with it all its terrible side effects. Moreover, research has already shown promise that blood sugar monitoring can be made nonintrusive. Google, for one, has patented a contact lens that monitors blood sugar via the fluids in the eye.

Earlier this month I participated in an international symposium mounted in honor of Professor Piet Ribbers' retirement from Tilburg University, Netherlands. Piet has been a leader for more than 30 years through his teaching, research, and with his development of graduate and professional programs in information management.

One of the more frequent approaches to "scaling Agile" is a set of development teams doing what they call "Scrum" in a larger project. The overall project management has heard of Agile and has also given its consent to use Scrum, but otherwise is working the same way it has worked for 20 years. After all, managers argue, "Scrum is only a development method." Some consider this approach "disciplined" for whatever reason; others call it "Scrum inside a waterfall." Here's a war story about what can happen in this setting.

Evolution is one of the eight factors that lies at the heart of enterprise architecture (see "Eight Factors in All Enterprise Architectures"). Roadmaps help analyze, plan, and manage architecture evolution. Roadmapping is the process of creating and using roadmaps, and it is one of the key capabilities for members of an EA team.

Another week, and yet another news story about a new or upgraded IT system released before its time.

The subject that every distributed Agile team is questioning is the topic of setting up visual walls. Conflicts arise when purists argue in support of setting up visual boards across all locations, while the distributed teams consider it an inconvenience.

In a previous Advisor (see "Mobility: Did Thee Feel the Architecture Move?"), we observed that the enterprise's architecture has begun a move toward the edges of the enterprise. And, with that extension to the "edge," it is obvious that the enterprise can no longer be the sole architect of the structures that prop up the edifice of business.

We know that stakeholders are those individuals who are actively involved in our projects and/or have a valued interest in the outcome of those projects. However, if you've ever managed a project, I'm sure you know that even though those stakeholders may be involved in our projects or are interested -- be it financially or otherwise -- in the outcome or success of our projects, that doesn't mean they will be involved or engaged along the way, even when it may be in their best interest to be so.

A key promise of SOA is that the activities in business process models that business analysts define can be instrumented by engineers to invoke SOA services. This approach to building applications is supposed to help align the business and IT sides of the house. In principle, this alignment increases agility by diminishing the impedance between conceiving a business process and executing it. Where a business process management system with a process execution engine is in place, it is even possible in some cases to directly execute business process models.

Every software executive that faces the decision whether or not to ship code must answer the question, "Do the economic benefits of shipping outweigh the economic risks?" To decide, the executive must have a view of each. The hoped-for benefits are clear in that they are up front in the decision to build the software. They can include revenue, meeting contractual obligations, enterprise efficiency, or supporting some enterprise initiative such as a new service offering. The economic risks can involve exposures resulting from software failures, leading to the following:

Every software executive that faces the decision whether or not to ship code must answer the question, "Do the economic benefits of shipping outweigh the economic risks?" To decide, the executive must have a view of each. The hoped-for benefits are clear in that they are up front in the decision to build the software. They can include revenue, meeting contractual obligations, enterprise efficiency, or supporting some enterprise initiative such as a new service offering.

It would be hard to overlook the rise of social technologies, yet many enterprise architecture (EA) teams do not consider managing social technologies as part of their brief. This is partly because of the organic nature of social technologies and partly because they lie beyond the enterprise boundary. Social technologies change the boundaries, nature, and scope of EA. Organizations, senior executives, business managers, and IT leaders are all under pressure to find ways to deal with and take advantage of the attraction of social technologies.

The direct cost of machine downtime in most industries is significant. In addition, downtime also severely impacts customer satisfaction due to unplanned work stoppages and missed production schedules.

Recently I overheard a nerd debate between two rival colleagues. One was energetically advancing the architectural approach of one brand of high-performance networking switches; the other was defending another.