There are a multitude of innovative applications across industries where RPA solutions are improving the quality of repeated tasks and releasing resources. In this Advisor, I share a sampling of a few interesting case studies and examples of RPA in action.

Large, non-software companies introducing Agile to their organizations tend to suffer from a cognitive dissonance of sorts: we would like to have the same look and feel across the entire company, delivering stellar-quality products, yet we want to enable high-performing, self-organizing, self-managed, and self-empowered teams to deliver (or demo) at the end of each sprint. This Executive Update summarizes five key scenarios in which this cognitive dissonance becomes especially evident for large companies, particularly with non-software teams.

From the moment a work crew from STS Construction (STS) showed up at my house until the whole project was finished almost a year later, I witnessed and participated in some of the best Scrum I have seen. Even though STS had never heard of Scrum and would not have known what the term meant, the company had come up with a way of working that was Scrum. Not only was I impressed by the tactical scrum onsite, but when I learned how STS did its project management and scheduling, I was equally impressed by its strategic scrum working habits. This Executive Update discusses the primary Scrum patterns and practices I saw in STS’s work that helped make our home remodel a success. (Not a client? For a limited time, you can download your complimentary copy here.)

In the post-Agile world, the Agile mindset is so natural that people don’t even need to reference it anymore; they look at the larger picture. Where should we be directing our energy, and will we get there? In the fifth piece, Gabrielle Benefield and Kubair Shirazee tell the story of using the Mobius framework, with its double-loop learning and ultra-rapid feedback, to help small business owners in Pakistan and perhaps stop the spread of radicalization and extremism.

Abby Oulton describes how teachers and students at a self-directed learning school in New York started adopting Agile ideas to run their classrooms and how that idea spread to schools in several countries.

Co-creating value-added services requires new technical capabilities, mostly enabled by new digital technologies. Thus, interconnectivity, scalability, modularity, and interoperability are key building blocks of platforms and, consequently, need to be viewed as new design imperatives aiming at the effective reuse and integration of technical functions (e.g., authorization or display functionalities). Reuse and integration especially require new capabilities. In this context, the inside-out and outside-in openness of platforms play a key role and become a strategic mandate.

Most organizations do not begin creating and leveraging business architecture until they have reached a certain size and start to encounter challenges such as poor customer experience, complexity within the business and technology environment, or ineffective strategy execution. However, if organizations instead employed business architecture from the very beginning — even in a very lightweight manner — they could likely avoid these challenges as they scale.

This article looks at the fintech “arms race,” reporting country rankings in several foundational areas. It explores the areas of AI, blockchain, and cryptocurrency, and how countries are faring in the fintech arms race as measured by their investments in, and adoption of, these three fintech baskets.