Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

There’s a balance to strike in architecture, no matter what methodology you use to create your software. In Agile contexts, that balance is often lost. And it usually leans to less over more. I think the most important acknowledgement or statement that we should all agree to early on in any architectural discussion is that we don’t know. Out of this level of openness and honesty comes the need for prototyping, discovery, and learning. It’s hard to do that if we don’t look each other in the eyes and say, “We don’t know, let’s find out.”

The main value of being increasingly agile is to allow the organization to realize its potential visions more quickly, with less investment, and with greater chances of success. To realize those visions, one must have abilities — both non-digital and digital. Digital abilities are information systems–enabling abil­ities that allow for agility. In this Advisor, we define digital abilities through a partial list of key abilities in the form of technologies, attitudes, and approaches we should adopt to become agile.

Despite general agreement among researchers and academics of the need for board-level involvement in IT governance, it appears that in practice this is more the exception than the rule. Given the prevalence of this issue, we have sought to answer the question, “What is the state of the art of the research domain of board-level IT governance?” In this Advisor, we share a few of our findings on the various determinants, theories, and outcomes surrounding board-level IT governance.

An architecture is often thought of as one uniform thing that underlies an enterprise. However, if an enterprise itself is not uniform, is it reasonable to think of its underpinnings as being consistent everywhere? Would we not expect an ideal architecture to mold itself around the curves and ragged edges of the real outlines of the enterprise, guiding it, and being guided by it? This Advisor suggests a three-dimensional framework intended to help in grasping the critical spatial dimensions of enterprises, and to assist in seeing the lines and jagged edges of a specific enterprise, along those dimensions. Architecture needs a ground to stand on – that ground is the enterprise architecture. It behooves architects to grasp what lies beneath their feet.

In this Executive Update, we explore why organizations need data democratization and how they can achieve it.

We hope the insight provided in this issue gives you an enlightened perspective on the current and future cloud computing market and the guidance required to make well-informed decisions on the strategies and technologies that will provide your organization a competitive edge.

This article tries to take a very pragmatic viewpoint about cloud computing: what are the things we have learned? What do most reasonable analysts and users now agree on, as opposed to questions to which the jury is still out? What should you spend time worrying about, and what should you consider settled, for good or for bad? Finally, with various lessons learned, what should you educate your managers or clients about, so they don’t waste their time or yours?

A truly successful digitization project will change a company to its core. Thus, product-to-service transformation is probably the best example of the pervasiveness of digital technologies.