Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

As AI becomes more visible as a corporate strategic tool, organizations will have to incorporate issues surrounding AI as part of corporate strategy. Pavankumar Mulgund and Sam Marrazzo help us by providing a framework for developing an AI strategy. The authors discuss the “minimum viable model” approach to the development of the underlying AI/ML models, along with the platform on which these models run and the inevitable tradeoffs. They conclude their piece by examining some best practices for the successful implementation of AI initiatives.

One way of getting an off-course system (or person) back on track is by nudging. This concept can be particularly useful in goal-directed systems. But, to reiterate, errors will occur. In his article, Richard Veryard describes technologically mediated nudging; the possible unintended consequences; and the need to consider the planning, design and testing, and operation of the system for robust and responsible nudging.

Experienced IT practitioners know that errors will occur. A big part of building and managing complex systems is dealing with risk management (which includes identification and mitigation strategies). This is hard enough when documentation and source code exist. But the current state of ML-based AI tends to result in opaque black boxes, which make this activity, um, challenging. David Biros, Madhav Sharma, and Jacob Biros explore the implications for organizations and their processes.

This article takes us to outer space (well, low Earth orbit, actually) to examine the issues around AI (in its ML incarnation) employed in a NASA system to track orbital debris. William Jolitz, the inventor of OpenBSD (open source Berkeley Software Distribution), makes the case for organization-wide awareness and alignment around ML and suggests that, like security, transparency cannot be bolted on later; it must be addressed at a project’s origin.

The contributions in this issue of CBTJ will help us get up to speed with the current state of AI and to think about some of the issues raised when we look beyond systems that appear to work as intended. Our contributors span industry and academia, and their commentary provides a good way to gain an overview of the problem.

Artificial intelligence (AI)-based cybersecurity solutions offer significant advantages with respect to threat detection, response time, and, most important, reduction in false positive alerts.

This Executive Update provides insights into how the cognitive enterprise can proactively protect itself from risks and security incursions by building business-driven safeguards into its underlying DNA.

Aligning strategic objectives and tactical demands is critical to successfully execute your strategy and drive change. Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Brian Cameron explores the ways you can structure your business architecture to effectively facilitate strategy execution in this on-demand webinar. (Not a member? For a limited time, you can watch the webinar on demand.)