Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

Our company’s Agile journey across a 2,000+-person product development unit in 10 locations in Sweden, Poland, and China, resulted in a quadrupling of value throughput; a doubling of speed; a tenfold increase in quality; and happier, more engaged people who are, ultimately, more innovative. The company made major shifts in a few areas. In this Advisor, we explore its shift from resource efficiency to flow efficiency.

People’s increased mobility, facilitated by air travel, has resulted in the increased spread of contagion across geopolitical boundaries. A growing awareness that bioterrorism agents could spread in the same way has raised the level of concern even more. Many practitioners and researchers agree that contact tracing, which is the identification and locating of people who may have been in contact with an infected person, represents an important factor in mitigating the spread of a pandemic.

Encouraging and developing data-based decision support is an organization-wide effort and requires many resources, including people, money, and technologies. Building an effective decision support capability can help improve decision making, but meeting that goal is a challenging task. So how can senior managers increase the chances of the successful implementation of an enterprise-wide data-based decision support, analytics, or BI project? The answers to the five pivotal questions explored in this Advisor provide some insight.

Financial institutions have digitally transformed their business processes and products, creating vast sources of structured and unstructured data. AI offers the means to complete this transformation in radical ways — across the front, middle, and back offices, while also addressing the big data problem. In addition, AI is also shaping the fintech and regulation (“regtech”) landscapes, particularly in addressing what has become known as “Big Regulation.” However, AI’s promise must be balanced with current limitations to the application of enabling technologies like machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). This Advisor looks at the promise, potential, and limitations of AI in the financial industry.

The “Recordkeeping for Timely Deposit Insurance Determination” rule from the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), or FDIC 370, seems simple but, as we explore in this Executive Update,  it presents several challenges for covered institutions (CIs).

Being able to show that your organization actively considers and cares about its impact on the world is sure to become one of the most important levers for talent and investment attraction and retention. Expectations now go beyond having great-sounding values on your website; people want to practice those values every day and be proud of what they are creating. Investors want to know that they can count on pro­active mitigation. Users want to see those values in the products they use. Consequence scanning requires that participants know what the product or service is intended to do, be able to determine whether the potential consequences of the product or service are positive or negative, and know what their organization considers positive.

Ninety-two percent of executives say agility is critical for the future of their business, yet only 4% of their transformation efforts are delivering agility. The leading causes for this gap are an entrenched legacy culture and general resistance to change. Responding to these challenges and delivering business agility may require more than Agile practices. As we explore in this Executive Update, many organizations are discovering “solution focus” to be the missing piece of their transformation puzzle.

Leveraging visuals is particularly important for a business architecture practice. Visuals matter, and for a business architecture practice to be effective, it must connect with people on a human level and in ways that build true under­stand­ing. Graphic recording is the visual live capture of content for an event or meeting, which acts as a visual record of the session. With this technique, there is little to no interaction between the graphic recorder and the speaker and participants. Graphic facilitation also includes visual live capture of the content for an event or meeting, but the graphic facilitator serves as a guide throughout the entire meeting process. These visual techniques bring people together to co-create around a specific topic, challenge, or opportunity. They allow people to “see” their thinking and shape concepts together.