In this Executive Update, we explore the process of building out a project team and what differentiates good and bad teams, as well as what it takes to lead that team and get it to follow you into any battle.

Architecture is becoming more visible. It is necessary to create a solution that is capable of high-speed change and linked to analytics and the increasing stream of infrastructure data that has become available from the Internet of Things. The possibilities with this new architecture are immense.

IT service leaders are under constant pressure to deliver reliable and available services within the budgetary constraints of the business. They look for opportunities to optimize their support model, extracting repetitive, nonvalued inefficiencies and effort that inflate support costs. As we discuss in this Executive Update, the shift-left service strategy focuses on moving issue resolution and request fulfillment to the lowest cost level in the tiered-model service organization, with a focus on "one and done" -- providing the internal customer with resolution at the service desk (Level 1) or self-service portal (Level 0).

In this Update, we explore how to collect and communicate contextual information, increasing the odds that customers will see value in software and willingly adopt it. The same principle applies to contextual information that applies to any kind of requirements insights: the type of information needed, and the medium for communicating it, varies according to the question asked. Therefore, software professionals need to develop a toolkit of techniques that will vary across teams, projects/products, organizations, and time, since the same questions do not arise for everyone.

There is plenty of evidence that organizations can achieve cost savings through outsourcing. But there are limits to providers working smarter to achieve the holy trinity of (for the client) dramatic savings and higher KPIs and (for the provider) a decent profit margin.

There is a silent leadership crisis going on right now in many workplaces around the world. The generation shift taking place in the market and the changing needs of the current workplace, including software development teams moving to Agile and its model of "servant leadership," are forcing an older generation of leaders to evolve their leadership styles. This Executive Update explores this leadership crisis from different angles and attempts to point toward areas where leaders can observe their own behaviors and consider new possibilities.

This Executive Update explores the long-time hiring vs. training debate, which has been energized by an influx of new technologies requiring new skills. 

This Executive Update shines a light on the "darkitecture" that envelops architecture, by first observing what enterprises do and then spotting the obvious blind spots indicated by what many organizations ignore.

This Executive Update provides a brief history of enterprise architecture to show its evolution and to highlight its key contributions over the past 40 years — from the first discussion of the term around 1975 to its 40th anniversary in 2015.

A large percentage of businesses are looking for ways to stretch their operations budgets while their user bases grow. Containerization helps with this in a number of ways.

Offshoring can be a dirty word to some, but I much prefer our connected globe and the access to great skills at low cost. But this Executive Update isn't about the politics of offshoring; it's about the tricks and traps. Offshoring sensibly can have great results, be quick (with good follow-the-sun practices), and cost a fraction of what it might cost onshore. It isn't easy, however, and it isn't for the impatient.

This Executive Update centers on continuous delivery in contrast to all of DevOps, as it is much more well defined and a process upon which IT management practices have a direct and observable impact. We should, however, view continuous delivery as an element of DevOps adoption that is focused on the flow of work from development into production. Hence, these two terms are used interchangeably within this Update.

This Executive Update completes a review of mobile offerings by the major enterprise applications players and makes some general observations about the barriers to adoption.

This Executive Update surveys how major enterprise application vendors are harnessing mobile technology, beginning with SAP and Oracle.

As we explore in this Executive Update, the problem that cross-training solves is the natural creation of islands of expertise and its consequences. While some people certainly need to be experts, cross-training problems occur at a lower level.

In this Executive Update, Sheila Q. Cox reveals the three essential steps for effective delegation.

The governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) area has been developing for the past several years toward a more centralized and comprehensive approach. Historically, it has always encompassed an area of large data. Today, it is about to become a focus for big data.

This Executive Update provides an understanding of the concepts behind fork and pull and its possible applications for internal and external software development projects, as well as its potential for other applications.

When we use targets for our indicators of success, they become more than an indicator of how well you are doing -- they become the "goal." The targets supplant the valid goal you created and become more important than the thing they were designed to measure. This is the metamorphosis Martin Klubeck warns you about in this Executive Update.

Today's customer is experienced, knowledgeable, demanding, and willing and able to defect to another company at the drop of a credit card. Frustrating customer experiences are rooted in customer-facing services designed from the inside (them)-out (you), absent of what's important to the customer, and more concerned with cost containment than with revenue opportunity.

This Executive Update -- the final in a four-part series -- focuses on survey findings pertaining to the IoT, including how organizations view the IoT in terms of importance, IoT technologies that organizations deem most important for their business, and organizational support for wearable devices.

In this Executive Update, we take a look at application development challenges facing Jake, an inexperienced Agile coach. We then review some ideas and retrospective practices that will help Jake overcome these obstacles and successfully fill his new role as an Agile leader.

We are living in a time of technological revolution, globalization, uncertainty, and economic crises. The Internet of Things (IoT) is one such disruption. Consequently, there will be a demand for leadership in the fast-growing and disruptive IoT sector. In this Executive Update, we try to identify the leader's role in an IoT enterprise and point out potential leadership pitfalls.

This Executive Update -- Part III of a series -- focuses on survey findings pertaining to mobile application development trends and the issues confronting organizations with implementing their initiatives, including primary obstacles and issues affecting corporate mobility adoption/implementation efforts, mobile application development trends, corporate use of mobile device management platforms, and corporate use of enterprise app stores.

In this Executive Update, we review recent cases demonstrating that old-school brick-and-mortar insurance policies (CGL and D&O) provide coverage for technology risks. The goal is to assist companies in finding coverage in their existing policies for what has become, in the age of the Internet, as common as shipping losses were when modern insurance was created.