The proliferation of mobile devices for business use, driven to a considerable degree by bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives, serves to increase corporate interest in enterprise app stores. To date, however, adoption of enterprise app stores has been somewhat limited, and, for the most part, primarily by larger organizations.

Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.

-- Paracelsus (1493-1541)

This is the final Executive Update in a three-part series examining a compelling and rapidly growing trend at the intersection of mobile, Web, and cloud technologies (among others): augmented reality (AR), which is enriching the physical world with digital information.

While there have been numerous attempts to develop Agile metrics through the years, it remains a difficult issue as we explore in this Executive Update. This is as much due to the "rules" of agility as it is to the nature of Agile processes themselves.

Companies are now using business intelligence in concert with active wireless RFID tags deployed on company equipment and personnel in order to better track, monitor, and manage such assets in real time.

With over 2,000 collaboration vendors offering solutions, is it hard to determine which is the best one for your organization? Or is that the wrong question?

Gamification refers to the relatively new trend of applying game design elements to nongame contexts to drive user motivation and participation.

Designing a technology platform that enables analytics demands a different mind-set as compared to designing one for operational needs. While defining the enterprise architecture (both data and application) is primarily about laying down the right dots pertinent to the business, analytics is about connecting those dots and sometimes ignoring existing connections for insights.

The impact of the mobile software product grows every day, reaching a point in which mobile devices become one of the most important platforms for the distribution and utilization of user-oriented software. Mobile application stores host thousands of apps, reporting millions of downloads per day.

As we continue to redefine and reorient data center toward virtualized cloud architectures on commodity servers, we will begin to see further development of the cloud concept and greater accommodation of hardware catering to special purposes.

Here, we examine techniques used by EA teams to support fifth-generation EA.

Aldous Huxley, author of the classic novel Brave New World, once said, "There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception."

Humans have always exploited data to achieve social, cultural, and technological advances. In this digitized world, there is an obvious need to harness and manage this data more efficiently and effectively. In this Executive Update, we discuss cloud computing, Big Data, the Internet of Things (specifically, mobile applications), and analytics, as well as recent revolutionary developments occurring as a result of the amalgamation of these four technologies.

An earlier Executive Update of mine described enterprise architecture using an approach similar to the various epochs in building architecture as a way to depict the different styles of EA through the years.1 This historical perspective revealed five

IT appliances are undergoing a metamorphosis in response to a variety of pressures within the data center. This is particularly evident in the area of analytics and Big Data, which have been the crucible of appliance development.

In the first two Executive Updates in this series,1 we discussed the importance of using a root question for your metrics and of "staying out of the kitchen." Recall I asked you to think in the abstract rather than going to the data level and to focus on the customer's viewpoint and avoid playing with efficiency measures.

enterprises are now exploring techniques in all areas for extending communication and collaboration in the complex, task-oriented agile world, from rules and processes up to communications technologies and supporting software. Consequently, there has been a flux in a variety of experiments in creating shared virtual spaces for improving team communication and the ability to work together on complex projects over a distance.

Natural resources are precious and in limited supply. Business environments are inherently complex and unpredictable. As we face these and other constraints on our ability to manage change, is it possible to produce sustainable enterprise architectures? In this Executive Update, we examine the relevance of sustainability for enterprise architecture.

Natural resources are precious and in limited supply. Business environments are inherently complex and unpredictable. As we face these and other constraints on our ability to manage change, is it possible to produce sustainable enterprise architectures? In this Executive Update, we examine the relevance of sustainability for enterprise architecture.

The API Economy has become a hot topic across different industries. Experts commonly present it as a new and evolved way of doing business in today's world of the Internet, social networking, and mobile apps. However, most of the publicly available sources on this topic are informal (i.e., blog posts or Web articles) and are primarily aimed at nontechnical people.

In October and November 2012, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey that asked 69 end-user organizations worldwide about their use of mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, in order to provide their employees and partners with the ability to interact with business operations, ranging from basic email to CRM and BI while "on the go." Our goal was to determine the

The API Economy has become a hot topic across different industries. Experts commonly present it as a new and evolved way of doing business in today's world of the Internet, social networking, and mobile apps. However, most of the publicly available sources on this topic are informal (i.e., blog posts or Web articles) and are primarily aimed at nontechnical people.

During the past decade we have seen a great deal of pressure placed on environmental issues. There have been more restrictive emission norms, a somewhat sense of being forced to use renewable sources of energy, the emergence of passive buildings, and even green IT. Although car and building industries present signs of real change in this area, IT industry endeavors raise some concerns on whether or not IT is truly "going green." And these are not about lack of true undertakings, but rather about two trends in applied IT covering the whole stack -- from hardware to applications.

This is the second Executive Update in a three-part series exploring an exciting and rapidly maturing technological trend: the layering of interactive information over the physical world in real time -- aka augmented reality (AR).

One of my friends wanted help in growing her business. As a local restaurant owner, she had received many accolades and encouragement to expand. Being a wise (and cautious) leader, she wanted first to see if the compliments she was receiving were warranted and whether her "product" was truly worthy of expansion. She didn't want to trust that her friends and family weren't just being nice. Rather, she wanted to measure the quality of her restaurant.