Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Here in Part XI of this Executive Update series, we look at how responding organizations view the success of their AI application development efforts to date, including whether they are deriving any benefits from their deployed AI applications and whether such applications are, in fact, actually changing how their organizations operate. 

Although some jobs will disappear during the AI transformation, AI was not created to eliminate jobs but to automate mundane or time-consuming tasks. This will complement and empower humans to be more effective and efficient at jobs that require human insights and judgment. Organizations that fail to pay attention to the AI digital transformation are putting themselves at risk. Employees need to understand this reality and view this required personal transformation as an opportunity to grow and tackle new opportunities. Today it is no longer a matter of what you know, but how fast you can learn and adapt.

One of the techniques people in the Agile community argue for is retrospectives. A retrospective refers to a meeting held at the end of an iteration where teammates reflect on what they experienced and recommend improvements. It is an important tool because it allows the team to take advantage of their lessons learned. The bottom line is that organizations need to put processes in place to facilitate sharing. Besides being easy to use, developers need to be motivated to use these processes, or else the databases that are provided will remain unused.

Though robotic process automation (RPA) implementations mimic humans and replace human effort, they cannot, as of yet, replace humans’ emotional ability. By freeing humans from repetitive tasks, RPA will allow humans to focus on better understanding customer needs in different situations and better connection with customers. Humans can then perform tasks that require uniquely human strengths like emotional intelligence and judgment, enabling better interaction with customers.

Nowadays, there is a huge popular demand for Agile as a means to enable change and accelerate value. Popularity, however, is something other than reality; for most companies, the introduction of Agile requires a significant mindset shift. This almost always meets resistance from several directions in the organization. In addition, Agile adoption is often accompanied by some element of inefficiency and chaos if left unguided. The authors of this Advisor describe some specific ways organizations have combined architecture with Agile thinking and methods to improve their results.

Fintech firms are bringing to market a variety of technologies to introduce new products and compete with existing firms. However, the financial markets have a long history of regulation, meant to protect depositors and stakeholders and maintain the safety and soundness of the financial system. The industry must begin by creating an experimental space (a small market), where technology and its related products can be introduced. This is known as a “sandbox.”

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.

As has been our tradition over the past few years, we have gathered a group of Cutter Consortium experts to weigh in on the strategies, technologies, and business models that will impact business transformation efforts in 2019. We hope the articles in this issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal help you prioritize your business technology objectives and chart your journey forward in today’s digitally competitive world.