Think about your late summer/early fall expectations. Either you're vacationing OR you are diving into the end-of-the-fiscal-year melee. In either case, you have little time to suffer fools gladly. And you have less time to read about it.

Though there are tons of material on the importance of feature teams in an Agile setting, the dominant way to structure teams in most organizations I run into is still based on components. Usually there are good reasons for this -- specialization being one of the major ones.

Today's cloud technology comes in many flavors. Business software, traditionally offered as commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software solutions to be deployed at the client company's data center (on-premise), are being rapidly replaced with software as a service (SaaS) cloud-based solutions.

The art of business transformation has a long history of mediocre success as companies have attempted to make great changes for quality and efficiency and to contend with significant movements in the market.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to gain acceptance over the next few years, the huge volumes of data generated by sensor-enabled devices, processes, people, and machines is going to offer incredible opportunities for data collection, analytics, and automation.

Years ago at a wireless provider, the organization had a problem: how to ensure that customers wanting face-to–face contact with a company representative were handled in an efficient manner.

Given the major importance and impact of nonfunctional requirements (NFRs) on an operational system, it's worth focusing a bit more on them in the context of infrastructure and maintenance. These NFRs (often called "operational" requirements for obvious reasons) describe the many parameters of a system as it becomes operational.

One area of government where the Internet of Things (IoT) will have a big impact is in the administration and management of cities and other locales.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes a reality, the volume of data that will be generated by the multitude of connected devices, machines, and processes -- in the consumer, business, and industrial worlds -- is expected to be massive.

About two decades ago I thought I had a handle on big data. I was doing some data warehousing work with a telephone utility that had about 100 million transactions. That was a lot of data, I said to myself.

Outsourcing typically starts as an economic decision but is not limited to it.

People were always mobile. Even more so after the transportation revolution that started with Ford and others.

Risk committees have seen enough reports of spreadsheet errors to know that the probability of unseen risk materializing into something disastrous needs to be mitigated. Large errors are well publicized, with reports of multimillion-dollar fines and extra audit charges, such as the cases reported on "EuSpRIG Horror Stories."

Developments in technology and business are occurring at an ever-increasing pace, creating continuous shortages of available talent. Nowhere is this truer than in the analytics sector. New ideas do not necessarily require new hiring, but they do need more education.

If you've read the last few of my Advisors on Google Glass and Babel fish, you will have noticed that I've been more than a little overwhelmed by the speed with which technological change is outstripping my limited sci-fi-augmented imagination. Some of the products that I was forecasting to be years away (like real-time translation of speech in one language to another) are actually going to be available (in beta form, at least) as early as the end of this year. So the possibilities are really getting interesting.

For teams tasked with developing an organization's enterprise systems, there are extra issues to consider in addition to those encountered in a business-to-consumer context. For starters, any such project will have political and cultural repercussions. In business, there is generally a tacit understanding that the feelings that make people say and do things -- really -- are undiscussable. As a pungent blog post on the subject of corporate culture recently observed:

The reality of today's highly competitive and customer-demand-centric market conditions have pushed software (solution) delivery organizations beyond the traditionally accepted limits of software development and delivery capabilities. There is no argument that Lean methodologies such as Lean Six Sigma and DevOps can help improve operational solution delivery capacities through:

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Art Hopkins's introduction to the June/July 2014 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Empathy-Based Design" (Vol. 27, No. 6/7). Learn more about Cutter IT Journal.]

Empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble.

The new buzzword for measures for improvement is "analytics." Unfortunately, there is no new thinking to go along with the new name. Many leaders still go about getting, analyzing, and using measures in the wrong way. Rather than being the "leader," they fall back into the role of doer. It's a fascinating phenomenon.

That may not apply to B2B clients who usually have a burgeoning set of expectations of the service provider. Inability to manage expectations can hurt the service provider's client relationships. This Advisor examines the nature of client expectations in a B2B landscape and proposes actions to manage these very expectations.

The product owner plays a key role in Scrum. This role has migrated to most Agile practices whether grounded in Scrum or not. The product owner provides key stakeholder representation, ensuring an Agile project remains on track in meeting user needs and expectations.

Any doubts that US Internet, telecom, and cloud companies might have an image problem were shattered with the German government's recent decision to terminate its deal with Verizon Communications due to lingering resentment about National Security Agency (NSA) spying and electron

This is the dawning of the age of the Internet of Things (IoT), sometimes also referred to as the "Internet of Everything." Human participation in the Internet is being crowded by a growing array of devices that communicate with each other over various networks and, eventually, over the Internet.

The level of hype surrounding the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Industrial Internet is ramping up. A key point to keep in mind, however, is that most companies outside of the industrial or engineering realms have little experience building and operating sensor-enabled applications and products.