The latest trends, including DevOps, prove that we must extend quality assurance (QA) efforts to the operations and maintenance period, and we must focus them on the services provided by IT. QA work also involves the amount of time and money spent, right? Not necessarily.

Cloud computing is considered the great equalizer between small and large client firms by many senior executives and pundits. Is this true? And what are the emerging practices and lessons from cloud adoption by SMEs? To answer these questions, we describe three illustrative cases in depth: the Dana Foundation, Diesel Direct, and Art-World.

In the report, we first review the current state of the EA discipline in terms of successes and ongoing obstacles that call for further development of the profession in terms of delivering true business value. Next, we introduce a services-based architectural viewpoint and model kind: the service-role-player (SRP) viewpoint.

The accompanying Executive Report is certainly not the first attempt to articulate an inclusive set of value propositions for enterprise architecture (EA). The scope of this discipline is matched only by the purview of the CEO and board of directors, or, say, an executive director in a public sector organization. The EA function is responsible for the joined-up representation of the enterprise elements and interfaces. This inclusive definition requires EA to provide joined-up views of the elements of the enterprise, along with their static and dynamic interfaces.

This Executive Summary outlines some of the actions your organization can take to benefit from Agile practices applied to BI projects.

Today, IT executives are dealing with major trends and substantial technological and business issues in any cloud transformation of their company. Based on our 2014/2015 research, this Executive Report, the first of two in a series, covers four major questions executives regularly ask us.

The relationship between business and IT is similar to a married couple setting up and running a home. The "home" in this case is an "enterprise."

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Everyone is in sales, and the IT organization is no exception. As we discuss in the accompanying Executive Report, the challenge is that many of the technical people in IT organizations have never been trained in sales skills, don't feel comfortable with these skills, and even regard the concept of selling as distasteful.

Business rules and complex event processing (CEP) are technologies that have been around for some time now. Both technologies provide options to support one of the long-standing objectives in enterprise architecture (EA): to adapt and accommodate rapid-pace business change with a constant, stable, and sustainable architectural foundation. The accompanying Executive Report examines how we can use techniques in enterprise architecture to provide a solid basis for supporting business rules and CEP.

The accompanying Executive Report explores some simple actions to alter your thinking and ultimately improve your approach to getting the right things done. We'll talk about two of the most common and far-reaching oversights made by today's CIOs: how we frame the situations we're faced with and how we decide. Every decision we make is greatly impacted by these two tasks.

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This Summary outlines how companies across multiple industries are applying a new mindset to enable organizational agility and the adaptive enterprise through the use of enterprise architecture.

Until now, the focus of the Agile movement has been predominantly on teams and sometimes programs. Back in 2003, when Agile was not even widely accepted for software teams, my team and I began transforming entire IT organizations. As there was no precedent, these organizations learned from trial and error. This Executive Summary and its accompanying Executive Report compile knowledge gained through years of experiment and application, all of which led to proven effective practices. They provide directions and pointers that, if followed, will lead to a consistent and evolving Agile organization.

"Business model" is a catch-all phrase that covers models of a wide variety of types, so we start the accompanying Executive Report with a taxonomy of business model types. The report then goes on to give examples of the various types of business models in our taxonomy. Next, the report goes on to examine some of the key changes required in enterprise architecture in recent years as a consequence of changes in business models. Finally, we look at several business model frameworks that the EA team can use to convert or translate business models into architectural descriptions.

For an organization to flourish, different people must take on leadership roles at all levels of the hierarchy: from frontline staff and managers who must lead small groups of direct reports, peers, or projects through various processes and decisions; to middle managers who lead senior staff, other managers, their peers, and their own management; to upper-level managers and executives who lead larger groups of people, entire departments, and substantial corporate-wide initiatives.

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:

The purpose of the accompanying Executive Report is to define the nature and impact of "digital transformations" in the eyes, minds, and hands of CIOs and other CxO leaders: "eyes" in the sense of recognizing six concrete transformations; "minds" in the sense of understanding the meaning of these transformations for the organizations; and "hands" in the sense of driving some actions.

Much has been said about innovation. The argument is twofold:

The Industrial Internet is well underway. Connected-machine technologies and practices are inspiring companies across a broad range of industries to develop innovative applications and services that transform the way they operate and facilitate widespread collaboration and knowledge sharing -- from the factory floor to C-level executives.

 Outsourcing, by its very nature, is driven by planning, contracts, processes, and deliverables. Once Agile is understood and accepted as a strategy and a culture rather than just as a method for developing software solutions, it can play a substantial role in reducing cultural and regional barriers in an outsourced/offshored environment.

Roger Evernden looks at EA maturity, focusing on jumping the maturity gap and making the transition from average to excellent. He reveals the real issues behind the barrier and show how EA teams can bridge this barrier to reach higher levels of maturity.

Complex projects have either a goal or a solution or both that cannot be clearly defined at the start of the project. There are nine dimensions present to varying degrees in every project. The level of complexity is measured along each dimension. 

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.