The primary definition of "architecture" in the Oxford English Dictionary is "the art or practice of designing and constructing buildings." However, the secondary definition of architecture is "the complex or carefully designed structure of something." It is this second definition of

Organization agility is the ability of an organization to respond quickly and effectively to unanticipated events in its environment.

A recent Cutter Consortium survey (conducted July through September 2013) of 39 end-user organizations based worldwide helps shed some insight into corporate BI and data warehousing spending trends for the upcoming year.

Building products that customers love is the mantra for this century. As such, there are no defined processes or methods that provide a magic formula for achieving this. Building innovative products still requires creative people with good leaders driving the process. Even the most popular method embraced in the IT industry -- Scrum -- does not provide the needed support.

For those of you who track such things, October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM) in the US. As you know, I am really concerned with cyber security. I'm not sure, however, that we really need a precise month for this right now.

Building products that customers love is the mantra for this century. As such, there are no defined processes or methods that provide a magic formula for achieving this. Building innovative products still requires creative people with good leaders driving the process. Even the most popular method embraced in the IT industry -- Scrum -- does not provide the needed support.

Successful organizations have a dilemma. Should they continue growing what is making them successful, or should they disrupt the market that they are successfully leading? What if they choose to grow their current business and later get disrupted by an upstart innovation? Or what if they disrupt a successful business too early? What if they overestimate the potential of an external disruption?

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant Giancarlo Succi's and Tadas Remencius's introduction to the September 2013 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Profiting in the API Economy " (Vol. 26, No. 9). Learn more about Cutter IT Journal.]

The Internet of Things (IoT) as a topic of interest is arising again, and with good reason. The IoT envisions a world in which all devices are attached to the Internet, providing enormous possibilities in control, data acquisition, and, most importantly, analysis.

On a recent day, The New York Times was down. Not the publishing plant, not the news gathering service, not even the New York Times Internet site that contains its Internet content. All of that was working fine; you just couldn't get to it. Now, this was something of a blow to me personally.

In his recent Cutter IT Journal article "Out of the Gate & Running Wild: Why There's No Stopping IT Now," Cutter colleague and Fellow Steve Andriole foresees and foretells a new kind of equipoise between IT and the business units it supports.

Natural resources are precious and in limited supply. Business environments are inherently complex and unpredictable. As we face these and other constraints on our ability to manage change, is it possible to produce sustainable enterprise architectures?

Butler Health Systems in Butler, Pennsylvania, USA, is using a real-time asset tracking and patient visibility solution (developed and marketed by Ekahau) to optimize patient wait times and streamline hospital workflows.

Data exploration is an attractive use case for traditional enterprises seeking to capitalize on Hadoop's extreme processing capabilities.

Recently, I commented on the increasing vulnerability of smart, Internet-connected devices for the home (see "Computer Security and the Internet of Things, Part I").

In a recent Advisor "Software as an Asset," I argued that most software systems are actually products that need to be managed with a product management perspective rather than a project management perspective.

Big Data is difficult to define precisely, yet we all seem to know it when we see it.

The early Web was a battleground of de facto standards and proprietary technologies with most sites (to our collective shame) bearing announcements saying, "This site is best viewed in browser X." Welcome back to the war -- only now it's, "This tree/building/menu/whatever is best viewed...." The comparison is more th

There are few things in the software development world that are as complex or difficult as understanding, documenting, and testing the business rules that go into modern decision models.

Does a comprehensive proposal replete with data points, success stories, and implementation details galore win the client over? The purpose of this article is to understand challenges in the vendor-client relationship zone and what a vendor can do to get the client to act favorably on a proposal.

While Agile development continues to flourish both on its own and in coexistence with waterfall development, it is becoming increasingly apparent that we need to pay greater attention to metrics. For smaller organizations, departments, and specialist shops, conventional metrics may not be so important.

One of the problems that business architecture attempts to solve is the lack of coalignment between strategy and changes in the enterprise. The business analyst community, through the efforts of the IIBA, wants to incorporate more business architecture thinking in its BABOK Guide. BABOK V3 puts business architecture front and center though the use of the business capability architecture (BCA). Figure 1 shows the concept map for the Situation Analysis knowledge area currently under review.

The proliferation of mobile devices for business use, driven to a considerable degree by bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives, serves to increase corporate interest in enterprise app stores.

Corporate and government security officers will want to take the next few weeks to assess and reassess their organizations' security and encryption capabilities after the most recent revelations about the US National Security Agency (NSA). Specifically, they should ask: Whose products are we using?

As I have said before, it is hard for me to put a finger on exactly what's wrong with computer and Internet security today.