[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.

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.

"Technical debt (also known as design debt or code debt) is a neologistic metaphor referring to the eventual consequences of poor system design, software architecture or software development within a codebase.

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.

Robert Jordan: But did thee feel the earth move? -- From Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls

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