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:

We've recently noticed considerable discussion about the role of IT and the CIO in these turbulent, IT-intensive times. Generally, the discussion ranges from whether the CIO/IT will exist as a distinct, enterprise-level construct in the future, to "It's a technology management role" and on to quite lofty strategic business transformation/leadership roles for the CIO and senior IT folks.

There are a great many ways to consider software. For example, software can be thought of as pastime, a profession, or a science. Clearly, it can also be thought of as a branch of technological marketing. And one of the great software marketing coups of our time was the Agile Manifesto. Short and to the point, it asked its adherents to adopt a "new" approach, which combined a number of software organizational and management ideas, and which became the rallying cry of a generation of "Agile" developers and managers.

Partitioning is a key technique in enterprise architecture (EA). Architects can use partitioning to make it easier to manage development, evolution, and governance of architectures and to simplify the overall architecture landscape. In a recent Executive Update (see "Best Practices in Partitioning Enterprise Architectures"), we take a close look at today's best practices in partitioning enterprise architectures.

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.

Mobility ranks high on the list of must-have technologies organizations are seeking to implement in the coming year. A recent Cutter Consortium survey (conducted in July–October 2014) that asked 49 organizations about their mobile technology practices and adoption plans helps shine some light on corporate mobility spending trends for 2015.

The combination of data (including open data) with apps often represents cooperation between an app developer and a database or data set designer. They may be working jointly on a single project, but very frequently each is working on a component (data set or app) that will be paired with other components (app or data set) that have not yet been thought of.

There's an important question to ask at this point: who is doing this work? The answer to this question gets into the new world of app development.

As a kid, I remember picking up one of my mom's House Beautiful magazines with a picture of Frank Lloyd Wright's "Fallingwaters" house on the cover. Right then I decided I wanted to be a "real" architect. I kept that goal in the back of my mind until I went off to college, and though I still wanted to be an architect, there were a couple of things that held me back. For one, the school that I was attending -- while having a strong engineering school -- didn't have an architecture department. That, and the fact that I couldn't draw.

Organizations have missions. Specific roles have missions, too. The fact that we go to some trouble to define missions is an indication that there is some utility in doing so for entities designed to accomplish something of value. We are currently putting architects in place in our enterprises. But there are so many varied definitions of "architect" within enterprises, let alone across companies. So can defining an architect's mission help?

In last week's Advisor (see "Using (and Abusing) the Agile Testing Quadrants, Part I"), we introduced my and Janet Gregory's version of the Agile testing quadrants (2008) based on Brian Marick's Agile testing matrix. In this Advisor, we will discuss how to use the quadrants to help your team build the right product in a sustainable way.

The use of APIs has continued to increase in the past year with the continuing development of the API economy. APIs are not new, of course, but they have risen to particular prominence recently through their association with mobility and the cloud. APIs offer access to sophisticated services that can be explored through very simple applications. This is ideally suited to mobile devices, which are now generating a large market for mashups that bring together and integrate APIs from diverse services.

Not long ago, it was possible to sequester the enterprise behind its firewall and DMZ, creating a clear and defensible boundary. But mobility, cloud technologies, and social networking are eroding this separation. 

Models are useful for software development as well as for our daily lives. As new models are dreamed up, they're out in the world for other people to use, adapt, and evolve, or possibly try to destroy.

Models are useful for software development as well as for our daily lives. As new models are dreamed up, they're out in the world for other people to use, adapt, and evolve, or possibly try to destroy.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has generated considerable hype over the past few years. Probably nowhere has this hype been greater than when it comes to wearable devices like smart watches (Apple Watch), smart glasses (Google Glass), activity/fitness trackers (Misfit), and smart badges (for location tracking, security, etc.). This includes the use of wearables as general consumer electronic devices, as well as for their possible application in business scenarios designed to help workers perform their jobs.

A good relationship between parties is critical to the success of any important contract. Although many may talk about the relationships between "parties," it's common knowledge (and common sense) that relationships are between people, not entities.

Reasons vary as to why the use of speech as a means for employees to interface with enterprise applications has received only limited use. Arguments run from limitations associated with the accuracy of early speech recognition systems to questions pertaining to their expected ROI in business scenarios. But I think the biggest reason has been the lack of a real need to actually use speech systems in the enterprise. Simply put, it has just been easier for employees to access most enterprise systems using a keyboard while they were at work; and this was the case for years.