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.

If you only adopt one practice of Agile, adopt retrospectives. The rest will emerge from that.

The architecture of many enterprises is designed to perpetuate existing capabilities by maintaining the status quo.

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.

Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) means allowing the use of personally owned devices to access enterprise architectural assets and public networks of functionality and data.The emerging Semantic Web and the related changes in Web and social technologies introduce a change that is widely called the "consumerization of IT."

As I write this, General Motors (GM) has announced its 49th through 54th recalls of the year, involving some 8.5 million vehicles. Overall, GM has recalled a staggering total of 28 million cars and trucks worldwide so far in 2014, or nearly the equivalent to all of its worldwide vehicle sales since 2011. And GM is letting it be known that yet still more recalls may be on the horizon.

As I write this, General Motors (GM) has announced its 49th through 54th recalls of the year, involving some 8.5 million vehicles. Overall, GM has recalled a staggering total of 28 million cars and trucks worldwide so far in 2014, or nearly the equivalent to all of its worldwide vehicle sales since 2011. And GM is letting it be known that yet still more recalls may be on the horizon.

Large enterprises going through the Agile transformation journey tend to set up Agile coaching groups or centers of excellence to promote and scale Agile in the organization. In this Advisor, I share the benefits and challenges of having such a central group to drive enterprise agility.

Companies today require both an enduring focus on continuous improvement and an organization-wide emphasis on exceeding customer expectations to achieve operational excellence (OpX). In years past, the quality function most often drove OpX.

Earlier this year, members of the International Society of Service Innovation Professionals (ISSIP), including myself, Yassi Moghaddam, Haluk Demirkan, and Jim Spohrer, wrote an article for Cutter IT Journal (CITJ) entitled, "How to Thrive as IT Professionals in a Converging ICT World." In the article, we discussed today's changing business environment and how individuals can proactively prepare for its dynamic nature.

Microsoft has several projects in the works designed to extend its Azure cloud platform to support Internet of Things (IoT) applications and services. These platforms are currently in "limited public preview" but are expected to become generally available in the near future.

Those of you who have been anxiously following this series of Advisors about the advances in translation technology and who have dreamed of one day having your very own Babel fish may have been wondering when "instant translation" might be available . You are about to be shocked. As it turns out, one of the largest high-tech companies in the world has announced that you will be able to do instant translation next year! That's right, next year. And it's not coming from any of the companies I've been singling out -- not Google, not WebLens -- not any of the companies that I thought were leading the translation pack. No, this instant translation is coming from a subsidiary of Microsoft, namely Skype.

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.