The architecture of an enterprise is complex. Enterprise architects must understand and manage complex issues and concerns on a day-to-day basis.

Let's be clear: data is a critical asset along the same lines as inventory, cash, buildings, personnel, and accounts receivable. Without good data, we are unable to make the correct operational, tactical, and strategic decisions that are the difference between those organizations that live and those that die. Yet there are very few organizations that have stepped up and established the role of a chief data officer (CDO) with the responsibility and authority to deal with the many complex and interrelated issues, both political and technical, that swirl around data. In the accompanying Executive Report, we look at this role and its responsibilities.

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An executive dashboard addresses the need for an executive to have timely information regarding exceptions in the operation of the enterprise. However, when the dashboard reveals an exception of concern, typically the executive must go elsewhere to determine the more specific cause of the exception and identify those responsible for taking action.

In his book High-Risk Society, economist Michael Mandel wrote, "Over the long run, success will go to the people, companies, and countries willing and able to accept uncertainty.

Enterprise architecture (EA) used to be about IT. Over the years, it has expanded to include business and operations subject matter. Then it became strategic, encompassing organization and management issues.

There has been so much investment in IT by every company over the past years with the intention of making the business more competitive by improving productivity, optimizing the supply chain, enabling e-business, and so on.

The accompanying Executive Report introduces the "API Economy" to CxO-level executives of industries outside IT. It follows a novel dialogue format, as if it were a transcription of an introductory consulting session with the CEO and CIO of a fictional company in the oil and gas industry.

Mergers are like marriages. Two entities come together to form a union that should, in theory, be greater than the sum of its parts, often with the goal of accelerating growth, cutting costs, increasing market share, or taking advantage of other synergies.

More and more volumes of data are being created at increasingly fast rates. The variety of information available to use, especially on the Internet but also within an enterprise, is growing.

Global competition, increasing customer power, and quantum advances in technology have combined to demand a new and more adaptive approach to managing the business. In spite of significant advances in methods to improve business performance, such as TQM, Six Sigma, Lean, BPR, ERP, CRM, SaaS, and the cloud, many organizations continue to struggle in executing improvements to business performance.

Note from the Managing Editor: The Agile Manifesto places value on individuals and interactions. Nonetheless, according to feedback from our readers, "soft" skills remain an area of difficulty for many in IT. Negotiation, a necessary element for successful projects, can be a minefield for anyone.

Coherence is a highly desirable characteristic of every human enterprise. Everything should "hang together" and be "true as a whole," to quote common dictionary phrases. Yet one of the most frustrating and disturbing aspects of working life is that everything doesn't hang together and isn't true as a whole. Most things only "sort of" fit -- if they fit at all. Gaps and inconsistencies abound. Assumptions must constantly be made.

Organizations, especially large and global ones, are inundated with methods for everything. There are methods, processes, standards, frameworks, guidelines, and policies that apply in development, quality, governance, project management, and architecture — at varying levels in an organization. These methods and their variances are “owned” by roles.

The chairman of a large manufacturing conglomerate, a Fortune 500 company, was troubled by several major software failures of projects terminated before completion. He was also concerned with the dissatisfaction expressed by customers in the quality of the software the corporation produced and by the inability of software executives to explain why the problems occurred and what might be done to eliminate them.

It is not uncommon for seasoned project managers who use a traditional methodology on enterprise data warehouse/business intelligence (EDW/BI) projects to feel completely out of control. The requirements appear to be a moving target. Communication between staff members takes too long. Assigning tasks in a traditional way seems to result in too much rework.

Business stakeholders are far more interested in business agility than they would ever be in software (or project-level) agility. The issues and challenges associated with the organizational adoption of agility, together with the deployment of business analysis (BA) competencies across an entire organization, require separate and dedicated attention.

As an IT executive in today’s global business world, you negotiate every minute of every day, and, increasingly, those negotiations take place with people from cultures other than your own. Your customers come from all over the world, as do your employees, vendors, service providers, and business partners.

For as many years as there have been projects that are managed using some type of traditional project management (TPM) approach, there have been projects plagued by one or more of four different and commonly occurring "creeps": scope, feature, effort, and hope. The accompanying Executive Report examines these four creeps in detail:

Agility is far too precious to be treated only as a software development method. Instead, it plays a significant role in rendering an entire organization agile. Such organizational agility, however, requires a combination of agile values and principles together with formal business analysis (BA) work.

For the past 20-plus years, the Web has been based on a document-centric model, despite recent workarounds to provide enterprise-quality applications, new types of user experiences, and multimedia and real-time capabilities. With a renewed focus on applications, programming interfaces, enhanced graphics, offline behavior, and modern communications, the Web is entering its next phase of life.

Businesses depend on products to meet customer needs and processes to deliver and support products. Product and process are at the heart of business -- yet are frequently on the periphery of business and enterprise architecture.

As we pointed out in Part I of this two-part Executive Report series, some may argue that IT's capacity to contribute to business competitiveness has faded, but we suggest instead that it has evolved and expanded, maturing and changing within a subset of companies that have effectively managed to use IT in various ways. However, it's important to note that not all companies achieve equal success with their mature approaches to IT-based capability and value creation.

As we pointed out in Part I of this two-part Executive Report series, some may argue that IT's capacity to contribute to business competitiveness has faded, but we suggest instead that it has evolved and expanded, maturing and changing within a subset of companies that have effectively managed to use IT in various ways. However, it's important to note that not all companies achieve equal success with their mature approaches to IT-based capability and value creation.

Although some may argue that IT's capacity to contribute to business competitiveness has faded, we suggest instead that it has evolved and expanded, maturing and changing within a subset of companies that have effectively managed to use IT in various ways. In this two-part Executive Report series, we examine the status of the use of IT to improve organizational capabilities and promote business value, identifying varieties of use and directional trends as well as managerial challenges and critical success factors through five case studies.