For established firms, the large-scale market trends of the past 20 years have brought myriad challenges due to the still-increasing rate of change.

Business strategy is all about devising how we will compete. In a fast-paced, ever-changing world with limited resources and shifting opportunities and threats, strategy is, in essence, a matter of determining how we will create and sustain competitive distinction through compelling value propositions, taking advantage of changes in the environment and emerging opportunities and responding to threats.

Egyptians throughout history have been known as successful entrepreneurs in their Africa-Middle East region -- moving across nations and being actively involved in trading and growing businesses in different sectors. This is something that somehow changed during the last few centuries, when the aspirations of many Egyptians became about working for the government or the public sector. The motive was to secure a job with minimal daily challenges and risk. Some would wait for years until a government employment opportunity surfaced.

What is the most important resource in the world today? Hint: it's not oil or gas or precious metals -- although they're certainly valuable. It's data.

Do you know your coworkers' hometowns? Their favorite colors? Their current level in Farmville? If you answered "yes" to all three questions, there may be a very serious management concern here.

The beauty of Agile software methods is that they enable us to focus with a singularity of purpose on the iteration management and project management aspects of the software delivery process. Numerous other aspects of software delivery, such as those illustrated in Figure 1, are, of course, of critical importance.

In a recent Advisor (see "Techniques for Requirements Management and Managing Stakeholders"), I discussed changes in requirements as they become more fluid and difficult to define and described some techniques

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant Rebecca Herold's introduction to the August 2013 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Privacy in the Internet of Thing

In May of this year, IBM's Watson computer system, famous for winning the TV game of Jeopardy, entered into the realm of customer engagement.

I have read a number of books recently as preparation for one that Piet Ribbers, Ron Blitstein, and I are completing. Here are three that have really gotten my attention:

With the popularity of "design thinking," companies are encouraging their designers to be in the field interacting with end users. Like any other new methodology or process adoption, design thinking requires a fair bit of change in the mindset of designers along with some new skills.

In this Advisor, I will briefly explain the design thinking process and detail its skills requirements. My intent is to help companies to be better prepared to embrace design thinking.

The standard design thinking cycle is shown in Figure 1.

Back in April, I discussed a mobile app undergoing trials with the New York City Police Department (NYPD) designed to provide foot-patrol officers with fast, easy access to information assembled from various separate databases when they attempt to investigate a building or question a pos

Real-time location systems (RTLS) combine software -- including location-finding algorithms and mapping programs -- and Wi-Fi-based active (i.e., "smart") RFID tags to provide users with immediate visibility into the location, condition, and status of assets, people, and workflows.

Over the years, the progression from transactional data as the basis for most management reporting and business intelligence activities has increased rapidly. Right now the industry is going through a major set of transitions, with the latest being explosion of Big Data initiatives.

This year is my 50th working in IT. I began as a part-time programmer while I completed a law degree (now that seems like a non sequitur, but it's how it happened). The technology was certainly rudimentary: punch cards, very slow tape drives, the first really usable commercial disk drive (not RAMAC but an actual removable multisurface drive), chain printers.

Problems are mostly caused by people. Thus, if one can improve the people factor, it stands to reason that the success of projects will increase.

In my experience, the three important factors that contribute to making people more successful in software development are:

The last couple of weeks have not contained a lot of good news for CEOs, CIOs, and corporate security folks.

Recently, discussions with CIOs around social applications have changed. I did some research in June of 2011 that showed that 45% of those interviewed thought IT was in control of social programs in the enterprise.

I've been saying for some time now that in order for Hadoop to really make it in the mainstream enterprise, it needed to provide better support for traditional SQL-based data management and analysis tools and offer the kind of interactive functionality that business users have come to expect from their BI environments.

A few years ago, I wrote an Advisor titled "As the 'Net Kills Newspapers, Who Pays for Free?" about the problems that serious newspapers and magazines all over the world face from the Internet and electronic media.

"Disciplined Agile" may sound like an oxymoron and has certainly been controversial for some in the Agile community, but it is essential for sustained success. Discipline does not mean "heavy-handed" -- we all know that too much management, overplanning, overdesign, and overly large projects are not effective. However, undisciplined teams that use Agile as a justification to avoid doing what is necessary are also not effective ... and, by the way, are not Agile.

Given the rapid expansion of social and mobile technologies, organizations have increasing opportunities to connect with customers.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him.... The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself.... All progress depends on the unreasonable man.

-- George Bernard Shaw

For established firms, the large-scale market trends of the past 20 years have brought myriad challenges due to the still-increasing rate of change.

In case you missed it, Doug Engelbart, one of the great thinkers of the computer age, passed away recently.