The latest technology tsunami creates great market opportunities, and simultaneously wreaks havoc on the business world. The Internet of Things (IoT) is all about connecting sensors and other data-generating devices to everyday objects and ultimately to the Internet, generating a wealth of intelligence and real-time data, and merging and blurring the physical and virtual worlds. Already established in the consumer products world, the IoT offers corporations the opportunity to develop new offerings or to reconfigure existing products to collect intelligence. This will drive an increase in big data implementations, cloud, and other emerging technologies as corporations begin to capitalize on this up and coming phenomenon. Every new trend comes with its share of challenges and …
Author
Christine Generali
Where is IT headed these days? With technology at the core of everything we do, and “traditional web” software moving on to mobile devices faster than one can say “mobile”, does this make the need for a fully-staffed IT department less critical? What is/will be the role of IT in our technology-driven era? How will IT attain a cross-departmental competitive edge? One prediction is that the typical in-house IT department will go up in the value chain, combining its expertise with the domain expertise of the CMO, COO, CFO, etc. IT will no longer be heads-down, technology- and operations-only focused, but will be collaborating with the business side at a higher level than currently being …
Recently there have been rumblings within the industry along the lines of “what’s next after agile?” and “what does the post-agile landscape look like?” These rumblings reflect the challenges organizations face when adopting agile within an enterprise environment. Although popular, Scrum only provides a small kernel upon which to build an agile strategy, leaving you with the heavy lifting of tailoring an end-to-end agile strategy that reflects the realities of your environment. Worse yet, the simplistic strategies promoted by agile purists sow seeds of confusion and doubt amongst people still struggling to adopt an agile mindset. Beliefs that agile requires small co-located teams, downplays architecture, delivers no documentation, doesn’t work in regulatory situations, and doesn’t …
The expanding investments in people and the retracting investments in people precede the economic business cycle of boom or bust. In other words, when companies begin to re-invest in people, productivity increases, creativity soars, new products appear and new customers are engaged. When companies pull back on people investments, sales start to sag, productivity declines, product introductions slow to a trickle and soon the business falters. The faltering of business is usually obfuscated initially by the drive for efficiency and financial engineering of the books but the employees reflect the dropping corporate barometric pressure. Rumors fly, people begin to hang out at the water cooler to commiserate and speculate about what is going on. High …
Cutter IT Journal Call for Papers with Guest Editor Jim Sutton. The heart of a modern enterprise is the knowledge work it does. How to run a factory effectively is fairly well understood these days. But strategy, market positioning, effective services and the like are what make for an effective business. These are all knowledge work activities. Enterprises and knowledge work leaders are moving away from the mass production paradigm and into a systems view using the Lean paradigm. Lean knowledge work emphasizes getting the most from people through appropriate decisionmaking, from executives through workers. This trend is reversing the short-term, every-division-for-itself fractionalization that many organizations adopted during the financial pressure years spanning 2008 – …
Cloud computing, as an IT service delivery model, is advancing at a staggering pace. It is being adopted by a spectrum of stakeholders — individual users, businesses, educational institutions, governments, and community organizations — and is causing a paradigm shift which has huge transformational potential. To successfully and fully embrace the promise of clouds, adopters must of course use one or more of the three foundation cloud services — infrastructure, platform and software/applications. But they must also address factors including security, privacy, user access management, compliance requirements, business continuity and more. Furthermore, they may have to use services from more than one provider, aggregate those services, and also integrate them with their legacy applications/systems. They …
IT organizations worldwide use dashboards to provide managers with the key performance metrics they need to steer their organizations in the right direction and make important strategic business decisions. However, the data being measured must be meaningful for the dashboard to be valuable. Considerable effort and resources can be wasted tracking the wrong information. Dashboards need to be regularly reviewed to ensure they incorporate data from all relevant sources. For example, organizations must now incorporate and leverage the vast amount of data coming in through their various social media channels, as this data provides key information on trends that can affect an organization’s bottom line. So what is the secret to designing a dashboard that …
Change at an architectural level is always transformational. But too often architects have struggled to demonstrate or realize this potential for making a significant, positive difference at the enterprise level. Instead, big changes are more frequently driven by the architectural opportunities from new technologies. This is starting to change, and leading enterprises are planning architectural change that genuinely combines the organizational, business, and technology perspectives. Enterprise transformation that successfully unites all three viewpoints requires a new technique to raise the architectural debate to the level of senior decision makers. Enterprise Patterns elevate the debate by: * Providing a means for aggregating viewpoints and lower level patterns into a holistic visualization of architectural possibilities. * Focusing …
Is there something intrinsically incompatible between Agile and CMMI that will forever keep this conversation burning? This always heated debate hasn’t lost its steam yet. But maybe it should. Instead of focusing on “why or why not” – let’s focus instead on “how” Agile and CMMI can work together to effect successful software projects. The upcoming Cutter IT Journal with Guest Editor Hillel Glazer seeks practical advice and insight on how to improve the understanding and compatibility between Agile and CMMI. How can Agile or CMMI as products and services — provided via training or education — contribute to fanning or resolving the conversation? Or is there a viable reason they should part ways? Let …
Recent Comments