This Executive Update explains what architecture quality attributes are, and why they are one of the critical focus areas of an architect's scope of effort.

DevOps requires greater communication and coordination between development and operations in order to facilitate the rapid releases of working software. It is based around principles that have become well established in Agile development and are accelerating with mobility. Apps need to be developed and deployed rapidly, updated regularly, and they have to respond immediately to user demands. The need for apps to integrate with existing enterprise software is pushing DevOps ideas deeper into the development environment.

DevOps is more than a set of tools and scripts used to make software operations easier within a software engineering group. DevOps is also a set of principles based on the belief that when an organization improves its deployment frequency, it will find success with a faster time to market, a lower failure rate on new releases, a shorter time between reporting bugs and deploying fixes in production, and a heightened ability to respond to production operations issues. Increased deployment frequency leads to increased profitability due to these successes. As we explore in this Executive Update, when an organization begins an internal DevOps initiative, it will find that it needs architectural changes for its desires to come to fruition.

In this Executive Update we present survey findings pertaining to mobile technology adoption trends in the enterprise, the strategies organizations currently use, the strategic importance they place on mobile technology, and the success rate of responding organizations' mobile initiatives to date.

In this Executive Update, Tom Grant explores one of the biggest requirements challenges: the lack of information about the business context behind the demand for new software and the adoption of it. Without this context, changing the requirements media is about as meaningful as the choice between reading War and Peace as a novel or as a comic book adaptation. If you don't know anything about Europe in the age of Napoleon, much of War and Peace will make little to no sense, regardless of format.

It's an age-old story, which no one seems to question: any data is better than no data. This idea is absolutely wrong. The misconception may be borne of the accurate assessment that he who has data wins the argument against others who don't. But, we're not talking about using data, or measures, or information for the purpose of "winning" an argument. We're talking about using metrics for the purpose of winning in the battle for improvement. If we use measures properly, we do so to improve our business, organization, or our lives. In this respect, there are many times when having some data is not better than having none.

This Update describes how to maintain traceability between business-level SOA specifications and implementation artifacts.

The issue in negotiations is not about how we deal with senior executives or lawyers, accountants, or technical people. It is about how we deal with competitors, avoiders, compromisers, and so on. And there are many tricks and traps with each one. In this Executive Update, Dr. Sara Cullen looks at five styles that can affect negotiations more than expertise or seniority do.

This Executive Update explains how leading enterprise architecture teams create EA governance by having a stronger focus on architecture.

Many businesses are still adjusting legacy security policies to embrace the rapid explosion of services purchased from other providers, rather than building inhouse. Chief information security officers (CISOs) and CIOs may long for the simpler times, but now they must assess the impact of the Internet of Things (IoT). What are the new threat surfaces the "things" will introduce to the business environment and what countermeasures could be considered? Can security policies even be enforced, economically, with the available security controls?

As you probably know, Kanban boards, whether physical or online, are used as a tool for supporting Kanban. The success of Kanban has led to the creation of several excellent implementations of online Kanban boards. With such easy availability of these well-crafted tools, can we put them to other uses? As we explore in this Executive Update, if we step back and look at Kanban boards merely as information management tools, we find some very useful patterns of use. Let's dive in.

This Executive Update reveals that selected organizational and project factors encourage the use of Agile methods, while others discourage their use. While an understanding of adopting and using Agile approaches is emerging, more research -- preferably based on empirical data from real projects -- is needed to give better directions.

As we explore in this Executive Update, changes in processes and markets mean that businesses should reorganize to meet new demands for agility and access to special skills. This has led to increasingly modular-, workgroup-, and project-oriented organizations. We see this strongly within the IT industry, but it is becoming more common in other areas as increasing digitization brings larger amounts of work within range of digital manipulation and sharing.

Prof. Richard Nolan predicts and elaborates on the eight kinds of transformational corporate initiatives we'll see in 2015. In this Executive Update, he implores executives to move away from the "old" 20th-century ways to the future ways of 21st-century leadership and corporate structures.

This Executive Update invites you to reconsider a process-driven business process management methodology despite vendor training and previously conceived notions of how you plan and design for a BPMS.

Although social media tools like Facebook and Twitter were initially developed for personal communication, businesses quickly became enamored with social media as a mode of expressing their own messages and selling products or services. Numerous companies have one or more social media accounts today, handling everything from product launches to corporate damage control.

While Agile is commonly considered a successful methodology to add value to software development, is it possible to adapt Agile to bring better beliefs and practices to other areas of the organization beyond IT? If sales, branding, operations, or other business units were to be transformed for greater agility, what changes would be needed?

Although we see our people as our greatest assets, we don't do a good job of developing them. In many cases we don't use the training budget for training. If we do train, we tend to use inferior delivery mechanisms. We train on the wrong things. We don't evaluate the training. We don't spend our training budget wisely. But it doesn't have to be this way, as we'll point out in this Executive Update.

Enterprise architecture is reemerging as a practice that allows business and technology to respond to major transformation in an orchestrated way, paving the way for the CIO to approach technology enablement with a new mindset.

This Executive Update takes a practitioner's lens to business architecture and explains what the concept embodies. It also outlines some pitfalls to avoid while introducing the function to an organization.

This Executive Update examines survey findings pertaining to the status of mobile collaboration in the enterprise; types of mobile collaboration platforms organizations use (i.e., on premise or cloud-based); and trends in functionality organizations seek to provide with their mobile collaboration platforms

Part II of this Executive Update series completed an overview and critique, begun in Part I, of the results of a Cutter survey on developing privacy-sensitive software.

Agile development can be difficult to fit into existing practices because its management structure and oversight are different from traditional organization. Its team-oriented and self-organizing characteristics demand a high degree of cohesion within the team, but teams also need to fit the tasks at hand and exist within an overall organizational context.

Here in Part II ir this Executive Update series, we continue with an enterprise view of SRM (rather than an interpersonal one) -- but from the supplier perspective. What do suppliers think of your organization? Do they even care if you consider them strategic or otherwise?

The ways we partition EA affects both business and IT. So how do we decide the boundary around a segment or capability architecture? How do we deal with overlaps? And what costing, funding, and governance models help us manage the distinctions?