Hardly a day goes by without some security issue, information or identity theft event making the news. In this age of increased threat and reduced budgets, devising an enterprise approach to security architecture and ensuring security in an Enterprise 3.0 world is imperative for organizations to protect their valuable information assets.

The April 2012 Cutter IT Journal, with Guest Editor Mike Rosen, will address enterprise security architecture from a practice-based perspective. Please send us your ideas – proposals of interest are due 8 February 2012.

To respond, please visit http://www.cutter.com/content-and-analysis/journals-and-reports/cutter-it-journal/callforpapers03.html

Welcome to the seventh-anniversary edition of my enterprise architect’s New Year’s resolutions. I hope it will give you food for thought and some inspiration for architectural growth in 2012.

Understand business analytics. The past few years have seen dramatic increases in the capabilities of business intelligence systems, accompanied by decreases in costs, to the point where most organizations can easily afford to take advantage of business analytics. The problem is that the information that these systems need to analyze is not readily available. While this is not a trivial problem to solve, it does present a major opportunity for enterprise architecture. When we provide management or decision makers with information that they don’t currently have but that would help them make better decisions, it accomplishes several things. First, it sparks their interest in what architecture has to offer and, second, Read more …

Immerse yourself in Agile on day three of Cutter Consortium’s Summit: Executive Education+, 2-4 April 2012. You’ll find out how Agile, the software method that was conceived as a way to cope with change, is changing, how these changes can benefit your organization — and what you need to do to make that happen. Agile practice director Israel Gat has assembled an impressive team of Cutter consultants to present, including:

Patrick Debois: What Leaders Need to Know About Devops Jim Sutton: Reclaiming Business Glory through the Lean Worldview Hubert Smits: Want to be Radical? Here’s How and Israel himself: Agile 2.0: Change is Changing!

Limited-time Registration Savings

Like 2011, our best offers for Summit 2012 won’t last. Register now to bring two team members for the price Read more …

Mobility is now one of the top strategic priorities for organizations. In fact, supporting mobility is seen as so important that some organizations are offering employees the option of using their own personal devices. This “bring your own device” concept is seen as a way for companies to reduce costs, but the proliferation of smartphones and tablets in the enterprise means that IT needs to somehow practically manage these devices. And, when most IT people talk about “managing mobile devices,” they primarily mean ensuring that they are used correctly (i.e., according to company polices regarding data access, storage, and transmission) and do not become a “black hole” of a security threat to the company.

Mobile device management is an ongoing process that requires configuring devices so that they comply with the organization’s usage and security policies and then monitoring them Read more …

Colleague Stephen Andriole preempted me with his excellent 2012 prediction Valuation Models Will Overweight the Importance of Cloud Delivery. I could not agree more with his over-arching message:

Wall Street will dramatically modify their valuation models of software and technology services companies to overweight the importance of cloud delivery.

Human nature being what it is, I expect we will be witnessing a ton of “washing” in 2012 and beyond. In particular:

Cloud washing SaaS washing Multit-tenant washing

Your investment style is, of course, your own private business. For example, you might be very successful using The Greater Fool Theory.

However, if you are into Value Investing, I would allow myself a word of caution. For all three – Cloud, SaaS, Multi-tenant – it is a matter of the balance between the pros and cons in the Read more …

Today’s discussions of Big Data analytics almost invariably center on Hadoop, which includes a set of complementary solutions that aid in the development, management, and deployment of very large data sets. The projects include Pig, Hive, Cassandra, HBase, Avro, Chukwa, Mahout, and Zookeeper. Hadoop projects frequently use Hive and Pig, while the NoSQL databases HBase and Cassandra provide database platforms for many Hadoop projects.

While Hadoop has gained recent attention, it’s neither the only solution nor the first. Problems involving Big Data have been around for a long time, particularly in scientific computing, and many solutions have been found for specific problem types within areas such as high-performance computing (HPC) and grid computing.

As the Hadoop/MapReduce ecosystem evolves, the RDBMS-based data warehousing environment has also been developing to meet the challenges of Big Data analytics. This has included various methods Read more …

“Gaming the system” is the kind of phenomenon that makes pedantic software development managers end their careers in mental asylums. A metric is introduced in order to achieve a certain outcome. To enhance the prospects of achieving the desired outcome, individuals and/or teams are compensated on the measured value of the metric. Over time they learn how to “game it”; that is, skillfully improving the measured value irrespective of whether or not such improvements still are in good accord with the desired outcome. The means (i.e., the measured value of the metric) becomes the end.

“Gaming it” manifests itself as failure over time of the measured performance to fully represent actual performance. For example, a team is likely to develop the capacity to produce code with a low level of Cyclomatic complexity per class1 if the team gets measured on this Read more …

As expected and sudden was the inevitable and tragic end to Steve Jobs’s life, so too is it surprising yet necessary that an outpouring of praise and emotion would follow. We all loved his inventions. The Twitterverse was rightfully aflame with stories about Steve.

As if drawn nearly as perfectly as the interfaces he and his team dedicated their lives to, the final measure of his arc marks a very clean and a nearly perfect transition into history. The last brilliant burst that characterized his second tenure at the helm of Apple was a perfect, if not — from today’s vantage point — a seemingly inevitable concluding crescendo. Beethoven would have been proud. Jobs will have no discordant, lengthy, and painful downward spiral that we too often see afflict charismatic founding CEOs; no tragic battle with a colorful competitor that Read more …

All the focus on big data is missing the point. Yes, high performance computing architectures let us analyze very large data sets. And yes, that is interesting and helpful. But let’s go with a thought experiment here. Imagine the following:

Real-time data feeds from all source systems; Incremental, multi-generational real-time data feeds and data storage so all prior versions of data are accessible; The end of batch processing, nightly loads, ETL or other boring stuff in order to prepare data; All queries you can dream of (well, maybe 98% of the queries) running in in less than a second; All the rest of the queries running in minutes, not hours and yes, even crazy Cartesian products, intended or not; The ability to construct a hierarchy of models that users can then interrogate themselves, with queries on those models running in Read more …

Generations of music lovers have mourned the early death of Mozart, imagining the magnificent contributions he would have made had he lived into old age. Similarly, people today around the world, while celebrating the remarkable life of Steve Jobs, are simultaneously sorrowful as they contemplate the many ways he might have continued to delight us had his life not been curtailed. His ability to innovate and break new ground in so many diverse areas – from computing to animation, marketing to music – makes his loss all the more profound.

Steve’s Stanford graduation address is being replayed repeatedly today, full of life lessons for us all. But it’s also intriguing in the context of the discussion so prevalent today of developed versus developing countries, and innovation – the one card, Cutter Fellow Professor Rob Austin tells us, that developed nations Read more …