A key promise of SOA is that the activities in business process models that business analysts define can be instrumented by engineers to invoke SOA services. This approach to building applications is supposed to help align the business and IT sides of the house. In principle, this alignment increases agility by diminishing the impedance between conceiving a business process and executing it. Where a business process management system with a process execution engine is in place, it is even possible in some cases to directly execute business process models.

Principles describe a stable set of guiding values. So are there any fundamental core principles that consistently guide all enterprise architecture practice? And, if so, what are they? When we know these core principles, and make them clear to all stakeholders, then the purpose and value of EA will be more visible and obvious. In this Executive Update, we explore and answer these questions, and list the 10 core principles followed by contemporary EA practice.

This Executive Update is designed to help with some of the more common tricks and traps for the commercially unwary to prepare for the upcoming cloud burst. Every organization's cloud experience has been different, but there is enough collective experience out there now that we can start to learn from those who bravely went before us. These early adopters were willing to take a punt, and we are all the better for it.

This Executive Update focuses on survey findings pertaining the extent that organizations use social media to monitor and engage customers; the areas and domains in which organizations use or plan to use social media for customer engagement; the establishment of formal policies and procedures governing enterprise social media usage; formal employee training programs for using social media; the use of social relationship management (SRM) platforms; and the key sought-after functionality of SRM platforms.

Decision making is greatly aided by visual systems because we can't ignore a huge physical artifact that is showing us a need for change or action. In this article, Jim Benson looks at the kanban board as a tool to see work and gain insights into how to make work better.

Decision making is greatly aided by visual systems because we can't ignore a huge physical artifact that is showing us a need for change or action. In this article, Jim Benson looks at the kanban board as a tool to see work and gain insights into how to make work better.

There is no simple answer to decision making in project management. It comes down to striking the right balance among exercising logic, avoiding the biases of System 1 thinking, leveraging intuition, and sometimes just being lucky.

In a global setting, culture is an important facet of the decision-making process. To become a great decision maker, it behooves an individual to become educated about practices, values, and beliefs that are dominant in a culture and to understand others' frames of mind before making a decision. This recommendation inevitably suggests adopting an interdependent mindset.

This article will explore the mechanics behind various decision-making models and examine the boundaries and use cases for each. It discusses the qualitative value that experience or intuition can add to data-driven quantitative analysis, thereby providing the best approach to decision making. It is an attempt to understand the science of the art of decision making.

In this on-demand Cutter webinar, you'll learn how to get the most from your retrospective practices. Senior Consultant Diana Larsen will introduce you to a simple framework for better outcomes from retrospective meetings, maintaining the relevance of improvement to the work of your team, and great returns from the time your teams devote to every meeting.

Every software executive that faces the decision whether or not to ship code must answer the question, "Do the economic benefits of shipping outweigh the economic risks?" To decide, the executive must have a view of each. The hoped-for benefits are clear in that they are up front in the decision to build the software. They can include revenue, meeting contractual obligations, enterprise efficiency, or supporting some enterprise initiative such as a new service offering. The economic risks can involve exposures resulting from software failures, leading to the following:

Every software executive that faces the decision whether or not to ship code must answer the question, "Do the economic benefits of shipping outweigh the economic risks?" To decide, the executive must have a view of each. The hoped-for benefits are clear in that they are up front in the decision to build the software. They can include revenue, meeting contractual obligations, enterprise efficiency, or supporting some enterprise initiative such as a new service offering. The economic risks can involve exposures resulting from software failures, leading to the following:

Every software executive that faces the decision whether or not to ship code must answer the question, "Do the economic benefits of shipping outweigh the economic risks?" To decide, the executive must have a view of each. The hoped-for benefits are clear in that they are up front in the decision to build the software. They can include revenue, meeting contractual obligations, enterprise efficiency, or supporting some enterprise initiative such as a new service offering.

Every software executive that faces the decision whether or not to ship code must answer the question, "Do the economic benefits of shipping outweigh the economic risks?" To decide, the executive must have a view of each. The hoped-for benefits are clear in that they are up front in the decision to build the software. They can include revenue, meeting contractual obligations, enterprise efficiency, or supporting some enterprise initiative such as a new service offering.

It would be hard to overlook the rise of social technologies, yet many enterprise architecture (EA) teams do not consider managing social technologies as part of their brief. This is partly because of the organic nature of social technologies and partly because they lie beyond the enterprise boundary. Social technologies change the boundaries, nature, and scope of EA. Organizations, senior executives, business managers, and IT leaders are all under pressure to find ways to deal with and take advantage of the attraction of social technologies.

Conventional data management approaches have always emphasized the physical movement of data across enterprise systems. Data virtualization (DV) introduced a paradigm shift to this approach by virtue of not physically moving data. This innovative approach has successfully addressed some of the shortcomings of the conservative approach. However, DV is not a silver bullet for all data management issues and presents its own set of challenges, as we will explore in this Executive Update.

Conventional data management approaches have always emphasized the physical movement of data across enterprise systems. Data virtualization (DV) introduced a paradigm shift to this approach by virtue of not physically moving data. This innovative approach has successfully addressed some of the shortcomings of the conservative approach. However, DV is not a silver bullet for all data management issues and presents its own set of challenges, as we will explore in this Executive Update.

Recently I overheard a nerd debate between two rival colleagues. One was energetically advancing the architectural approach of one brand of high-performance networking switches; the other was defending another.

There are two main strategies available for implementing Agile: incremental and all-at-once ("big bang"). The incremental approach has generally been recommended and is likely to be the most widely used, but there are advantages in an immediate big bang approach.

It took home improvement retailing giant Home Depot about a week before it finally confirmed it had suffered a data breach. Home Depot first reported the possibility of a breach on 2 September 2014, but did not actually confirm the hacking until 8 September. During that time, the company made somewhat vague statements that it was still carrying out an investigation to determine whether or not its systems had actually been compromised.

Applying Lean practices to software and DevOps has multiple benefits. The disciplined application of Lean requires product flow measures. Unlike manufacturing, software and DevOps are artifact-centric processes. This Executive Report introduces artifact centricity and discusses how to specify, instrument, and apply product flows to artifact-centric processes.

Over the last decade there has been growing interest in applying Lean thinking to software. More recently, Lean methods have been extended to broader business processes that include both development and operations. DevOps practitioners set out to better integrate IT operations and software development to improve their joint responsiveness to change requests. These requests may include traditional IT problem tickets, new requirements for software for a specific market, fulfilling a contract, or for software embedded in a larger system. DevOps has the following goals:

This Executive Updateconsiders lessons from the first 10 years of SOA and examines how advanced practitioners are putting that learning to use in next-generation service-oriented architectures.

In a previous Advisor (see "Database Futures I: Big Data, Cyber Security, IoT, and a Database Called 'Cockroach'"), I suggested that database thinking was in the most innovative stage since the 1970s and 1980s.