Lynn Winterboer answers questions on user stories, how regulatory requirements play out in Agile DW/BI, examples of good acceptance criteria, and the recommended sprint length for DW teams.

Keeping up with IT is a tough business. There is always something new, and the current Big Thing is liable to be the next Old Thing (Old Hat?) fast enough to make your head spin. Sometimes it feels like it is almost impossible to keep up.

The statistics I have seen recently give me a euphoric feeling about the pace of Agile adoption. However, I feel that most of the so-called "Agile projects" are just the "water-Scrum-fall," which no one is willing to admit. I could list various reasons behind the failure, but one thing that stands out clearly is a poor Agile adoption strategy.

A while back, I was talking to an IT executive about a recent downsizing exercise that his company had gone through. As a result of an early buyout, the IT organization had persuaded 100+ people to take early retirement, which was roughly 10% of the IT group's full-time employees.

As the number of application programming interfaces (APIs) an enterprise uses increases, concerns around lifecycle management, security, and scalability start surfacing. Enterprises need to manage the API lifecycle and establish policies around the security and usage of those APIs. Many organizations have started adopting API management platforms to address some of the key capability needs, including:

Depending on their maturity (as determined by the Social Media Maturity Model we describe in Measuring the ROI of Social Media and Social Media Analysis Investments, companies can leverage the advantages of social media using the 4C strategy, which consists of Content, Communication, Community, and Collaboration (see Table 1):

Most current IT managers and enterprise architects have come up through the ranks of traditional programming, systems design, and systems analysis.

Say "42" to any geek, and they will know immediately what you mean.

Traditional performance management rarely assesses a person's actual performance. Most managers focus instead on one's behaviors and skills. In addition, managers rarely evaluate outcomes achieved by an individual or team member -- such as monetary results or quantifiable validated learning, however the team defines them -- which would instead ensure that individuals be accountable to each other and their teams' commitments.

Over the past decade those associated with EA frameworks have become familiar with the common components: business architecture, data (information) architecture, application architecture, and technology.

In a recent Executive Report ("Enterprise Architecture and Social Technologies") we explored the impact of social technologies when they are largely outside of the enterprise boundary.

Risk management is central to the concept of resilience, and the ability to manage risk has grown significantly through the increasing sophistication of governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) systems.

On a national, regional, and local scale in the US, it's compelling to watch the reactions to the recent snow and ice storms that battered everyone from the Gulf to the Eastern Seaboard.

Practical, authentic Agile culture encompasses both the planned and the flexible, the technical and the social. Agile in practice is the balancing act between the yin and the yang of methods.

The recent data breaches at Target and Neiman Marcus stores reveal some disturbing findings. Most troubling is that the malware involved was quite sophisticated, and was able to avoid detection by the retailers' security practices and anti-malware technology for some time.

The world around your company has changed. What does the Internet in general -- and the latest trends of cloud computing and Big Data in particular -- mean for knowledge about your customers? The core of these changes is the amount of connectivity we now have, as individuals and as a society.

In part I of this series of Advisors, I discussed the "Internet of Things" (IoT) and its industry/business counterpart the "industrial Internet" (see "The Internet of Things: Lots of Data, Lots of Opportunities -- Part I").

In recent memory, two US national security breaches stand out: those of Robert Hanssen and Edward Snowden.

In the past months there has been a growing interest in blueprints and frameworks for "scaling Agile" -- be it Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), Less, or other approaches.

As our economies continue slowly to rebound, we found in our 2013 annual IT budget survey (see "IT Budgeting in 2013: Are We Finally Back on Track?") that companies are still implementing programs to cut IT costs.

The "Internet of Things" (IoT) is more than a buzzword.

Traditionally, risk management is advocated and assumed to be a self-evidently correct framework. It offers a planning method for individual risks yet ignores systemic, complex risk and uncertainty. Often, ways of managing risk are established based on compliance with process. The process itself and its application are not themselves questioned.

Even today with Agile software development, it's comfortable to think that prescriptive strategies such as managing changing requirements in the form of a product backlog, holding a daily meeting where everyone answers three questions, having a single requirements owner (and thereby one neck to wring), and other such ideas will get the job done. But we all know that some of these "rules" are meant to be broken.

In an ongoing effort to add some sizzle to the BPM steak, analysts and educators are finding descriptors to add to BPM. A couple of years ago, there was some buzz around intelligent business process management suites, or iBPMS.