Architecture without governance is futile. How, then, does business architecture govern? One area where I have seen business architecture make an impact is in IT project portfolio management.

The recent announcement that NATO and the US Pentagon were retracting a statement reporting that Taliban attacks against coalition forces in Afghanistan had declined (in 2012) is a good reminder of just how important training and data quality are when it comes to analytics and decision making.

A company's data has value, but to date, data assets have not been shown directly on companies' books, although it is sometimes there as goodwill, and sometimes it is partially reflected in the price of the stock. We need to make the value of data more apparent. For example, airlines and travel websites such as Expedia capture travel-related data.

In his landmark blog post, "My agile testing project," Brian Marick provided a model for agile testing.

With the continued adoption of TOGAF as the industry standard EA framework, many organizations are struggling with how to get started and how to adapt TOGAF to fit them.

Have you ever written an email, blog post, or Tweet that caused you to take a deep breath and cringe before you showed it to the world? That was the reaction I experienced last fall before I submitted my article, "The Agile CMMI Conversation Is a Dead End," for publication in the November Cutter IT Journal. In this article, I presented a case for why I think we are spending too much of our time continuing to debate the Agile CMMI issue.

While the term "Big Data" continues to encroach on the common vernacular, it's important to understand the drivers of the phenomenon, its possible value, and also its potential for misuse. Many of the "misuse" examples come from areas of privacy and ethics, but there is also the potential for misuse that is just bad business.

"We don't test for hedgehog, either."

Devops has only been around for a brief few years, and it is already having a significant impact throughout the development community. While there are those who might view the integration of development and operations as a useful fad that serves a limited number of situations, evidence suggests that there are serious advantages to this approach.

To enhance customer satisfaction and improve user responsiveness, a common ingredient of choice in today's modern, pan-enterprise, services-oriented enterprise is cloud computing. So what really is cloud computing? It is a way to run a data center that allows users to serve themselves and gives your staff the opportunity to go home on time. I'm being facetious but that's the bottom line. It's an efficient manner for users (end users and developers) to help themselves to computing resources.

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Fellow Vince Kellen's introduction to the February 2013 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "SMAC: Social Media, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud Computing" (Vol.

Various vendors, including Greenplum (EMC), Kognitio, ParAccel, Teradata, and Vertica Systems (HP), have offered versions of their high-performance analytic databases tailored for use in cloud environments such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platforms for several years now.

In today's rapidly changing business environment, innovation is key for survival. Companies may become obsolete in no time in the absence of new and innovative products. A classic example of this phenomenon is the demise of Kodak. At the same time, companies like Apple and Google have not only contributed toward building innovative products but at the same time made their investors many times richer.

Building executive support from a business perspective is often the most challenging aspect of launching and delivering a business-IT transformation initiative. The first step requires understanding what role the business must play and how to overcome common roadblocks.

In today's rapidly changing business environment, innovation is key for survival. Companies may become obsolete in no time in the absence of new and innovative products. A classic example of this phenomenon is the demise of Kodak. At the same time, companies like Apple and Google have not only contributed toward building innovative products but at the same time made their investors many times richer.

I have written a lot lately about the definition of architecture, such as the fairly abstract statement: "the structure of the fundamental elements and their relationships in an environment," which, by the way, I think is a good description.

Last year, I had a client identify a concern regarding the communications gap that seemed to exist between team members in the trenches and those in the executive suite. The response? We developed a series of "Communicating UP" workshops, designed to facilitate better communication up the food chain.

To view social media as monolithic in nature is to ignore some of its most interesting attributes. One area of growing importance is the use of social participation to create crowd behavior that suits a variety of interesting purposes.

The term "Big Data" is becoming part of the common vernacular. So what does it mean? Basically, Big Data refers to the huge amount of data created and collectively examined through many online sites, as well as offline sites and vast repositories. The amount of data created now is staggering when compared to just a few years ago. Consider the following:

I have claimed that devops affects the entire solution delivery lifecycle from end to end. Let's explore each Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) phase one at a time and see how this is true.

It seems that hardly a day goes by when the poor state of systems security isn't driven home with another report of some stunning new attack. What's even more distressing to security experts is that the frequency of such attacks and their sophistication are increasing.

Every model helps us see and make sense of some things, but obscures other aspects of the situation. And so it is with Moore's technology adoption lifecycle and the fabled chasm. Moore's model describes marketing high-tech products. But agile isn't a product, even though some firms try to sell it as such.

User experience analysis (UXA) can be described as the understanding, modeling, documenting, and reviewing of multiple aspects of a user's (and user group's) relationship with the business with the aim of creating lasting and sharable value.

Last year, I had a client identify a concern regarding the communications gap that seemed to exist between team members in the trenches and those in the executive suite. The response? We developed a series of "Communicating UP" workshops, designed to facilitate better communication up the food chain. It was a surprising success.

Since the publication of "CMMI for Development, Version 1.3," we would expect an end to the discussions about whether agile can be combined with CMMI. In its current version, CMMI explicitly adds guidance for organizations using agile methods. However, our experience reveals that practitioners still think CMMI and agile are incompatible because they lack accurate information about agile development.