Gamification is a tech industry buzzword referring to the use of gaming techniques in non-game applications. Big Data refers to data having properties like huge volume, high velocity, variety, and variability. A lot of people are already talking about Big Data, but many people question what to do with this data and how to make actionable insights out of it.

Gamification is a tech industry buzzword referring to the use of gaming techniques in non-game applications. Big Data refers to data having properties like huge volume, high velocity, variety, and variability. A lot of people are already talking about Big Data, but many people question what to do with this data and how to make actionable insights out of it.

Time and again, I read articles about the restorative power of vacation time. Holidays. Time to get away from it all. I can think of nothing more horrible. As a self-confessed workaholic zealot, the thought of copious amounts of open time on my calendar completely freaks me out.

In his recent novel The Circle, Dave Eggers draws the picture of a fictitious Internet company called "The Circle" that has broken the anonymity of Internet communication and subsequently has bought Google, Twi

While most companies have become adept at improving processes of small scope, many firms continue to struggle with large-scale process change. The challenges that such firms face are rarely related to the mechanics of process improvement.

As is well known and often stated, organizations do not change -- people do. Employees, managers, colleagues, partners, suppliers, customers -- one at a time and then many. Without change, people become stagnant and organizations die.

Schools in the US states of Indiana, California, Idaho, Washington, and Virginia are now using real-time location systems (RTLS) to help ensure the safety of students, teachers, and other staff. The systems -- developed by Ekahau Inc.

In the grand scheme of things, the invention of the wheel, which one would think was so fundamental for human progress, came rather late. Most likely invented around 3500 BC, a thousand years after the potter's wheel, the wheel was most likely extended from the design of sledges.

Many large organizations set up Agile focus or mentoring groups for driving Agile implementation across the organization. They entrust those Agile groups with improving IT delivery capabilities by applying suitable methods. In this Advisor, I share four practical tips to be aware of while operating Agile focus groups.

Just from the title alone you will probably guess what my conclusion will be: that enterprise architecture is both art and science. Well, I certainly would agree that EA is both an art and a science, but there are a couple of points that I need to make here.

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Scott W. Ambler's introduction to the November 2013 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Disciplined Agile Delivery: The Foundation for Scaling Agile" (Vol. 26, No. 11).

As we move into the era of Big Data analysis and extensive use of unstructured data, it is time to take a closer look at data-quality issues. While there have long been procedures in place for ensuring quality of transactional data, unstructured data has been less well served. Unstructured data and data sources outside of the firm can be relatively opaque. Processes should be developed to ensure that data is maintained for future use -- adequately stored, accurate, and secure.

As we move into the era of Big Data analysis and extensive use of unstructured data, it is time to take a closer look at data-quality issues. While there have long been procedures in place for ensuring quality of transactional data, unstructured data has been less well served.

The concept of notice and consent pervades modern privacy law and regulations. The efforts are laudable, but our cognitive limits and the rapid pace of advancing technology are straining their usefulness.

This case study illustrates that sometimes very significant business goals seem to get washed out of the process of specifying and building a system; the focus is on managing the solution (e.g., certainly reducing manual effort is solved with automation) rather than on managing the relationship be

The ability to analyze data in real time has enormous potential in significantly impacting business performance at both the departmental and strategic levels. Internal data sets spanning across multiple departments often hold massive amounts of valuable data. These data sets, coupled with carefully selected real-time digital data streams (DDS), are increasingly becoming critical in data-based decision making by departmental managers as well as strategic-level stakeholders.

Agile is well served by exploring the connections between knowledge, culture, psychology, and technology. As Cutter Fellow Vince Kellen states:

Too many organizations confuse activity with purposeful action. For them, especially in a crisis, it's important to do something. The worse the crisis, the more pressure there is to act. If you follow this path, at best your success will have had more to do with luck than with planning.

Trust is the bandwidth of communication.

-- Karl-Erik Sveiby

Trust but verify.

-- Ronald Reagan

My Executive Report "Agile Business: The Final Frontier" outlined some key elements of how we can extend and expand the fundamental concepts of Agile project management (APM) and Agile development to an holistic organizational approach to organizational agility.

The Circle -- the new novel from Dave Eggers -- is being billed as sort of a modern 1984 meets A Brave New World.

I've written multiple articles and given numerous presentations on the problems with establishing targets for your measures of improvement. It's worth reiterating what's wrong with them, though, because if you haven't tried using targets, chances are you will.

Hadoop is receiving a lot of attention from data mining and predictive analytics practitioners because it offers a scalable platform for building, training, and testing models that can be executed in parallel using massive volumes of data, as opposed to typical data mining practices involving the use of sample data sets for m

In moving from the 20th to the 21st century, powerful advances in connectivity and computing power, along with the trend of centralization of media sources and tech tools, have caused big shifts in many sectors.

If you visit an Agile conference these days, it's hard not to run into talks like "Scrum within a RUP project" or "Agile in a traditional organization." From a dogmatic Agile point of view, this reminds me a little bit of a veggie-stuffed beef recipe promoted as vegetarian food.