There are two main strategies available for implementing Agile: incremental and all-at-once ("big bang"). The incremental approach has generally been recommended and is likely to be the most widely used, but there are advantages in an immediate big bang approach.

It took home improvement retailing giant Home Depot about a week before it finally confirmed it had suffered a data breach. Home Depot first reported the possibility of a breach on 2 September 2014, but did not actually confirm the hacking until 8 September. During that time, the company made somewhat vague statements that it was still carrying out an investigation to determine whether or not its systems had actually been compromised.

When I was a first-line manager at IBM, I often interviewed college graduates for entry-level positions in sales or systems engineering. I remember surprising my boss when I rejected a young man with a stellar résumé. He had great grades from a top-notch school. He was a varsity athlete and head of the student council.

In a previous Advisor (see "Database Futures I: Big Data, Cyber Security, IoT, and a Database Called 'Cockroach'"), I suggested that database thinking was in the most innovative stage since the 1970s and 1980s.

Professions are like people: as they get older they learn new things and forget old ones. Sometimes in the excitement of learning new things, they forget really important old ones.

Recently, I supported a team that was unhappy with its Scrum implementation.

In its early manifestations, enterprise architecture was an IT function. The chief enterprise architect generally reported to the CIO, and the enterprise architecture work was focused on IT issues such as enterprise application integration, and (the lack of) technology standards across the enterprise. But just as business process reengineering (BPR) efforts illuminated the need to consider technology in BPR, so too did enterprise architecting efforts illuminate the need to consider business process -- and more broadly, business architecture -- in IT reengineering.

In the Kansas City Star recently, an educator posted an editorial that suggested all students graduating from college these should days should be "job ready." The educator argued that the current college curriculum w

In January, I discussed key developments with IBM's Watson natural language understanding and analytics question-and-answering system (see "IBM Bets the Future on Watson").

How do business technology professionals stay current or, ideally, ahead of the constantly changing business technology curve? Unlike lots of disciplines, technology is an always-moving target. Business models change just as quickly.

Early in my career as a project manager I invited my client to work with me on a particularly complex software development project that my team was ready to start for them.

Enterprise software has come in waves over the years. The first wave introduced mainframe applications that rested on the business premise that automating certain routine operations could power a large company to new levels of productivity and efficiency.

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Fellow Ken Orr's introduction to the August 2014 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Data Hacking: No Day at the Breach

Marketing has always been a first mover in digital technologies, being vital for monetization of all processes on the Web and leading the way for communications and service delivery.

Your organization has decided that it wants to build a mobile application. Congratulations! How exactly are you going to go about accomplishing that?

In a recent Executive Report ("Jumping the Maturity Gap: Making the Transition from Average to Excellent"), we showed how levels of EA maturity should relate to the types of initiative and the outcom

We hear of few organizations that debate whether the enterprise needs a marketing function. However, there is interminable wrangling about the value proposition for enterprise architecture (EA), and considerable effort devoted to crafting and articulating persuasive arguments for EA's existence.

Organizational change today is aided by emerging concepts of enterprise agility, as well as by a growing range of technologies that can buttress key components of a change strategy.

The real value of the Internet of Things (IoT) is not achieved by connecting individual sensor-enabled devices separately to the Internet or mobile network.

In the Kansas City Star recently, an educator posted an editorial that suggested all students graduating from college these should days should be "job ready." The educator argued that the current college curricul

Taken together, Head, Heart, and Hands (HHH) form an holistic, integrated framework that enables organizations to review, assess, and improve human-centered processes and constructs. It can be applied vertically from the senior executive to the front-line staff level, and horizontally across many points in an applicable value chain.

The latest advertisements from Microsoft comparing its new Windows 8-powered Surface Pro 3 tablet with Apple's MacBook Air laptop have me thinking about the market for tablets in the enterprise.

"The tech jobs are coming! The tech jobs are coming!" We hear the cry around the globe. "We don't have the talent! We don't have the talent!" We hear the response.

Database thinking tends to go in waves. In the 1960s and 1970s there was an enormous amount of imagination and experimentation with various different types of database models: hierarchical, network, inverted file, and relational.