This Advisor explores the critical need to assess or evaluate the value of EA through the use of metrics or measures to demonstrate the specific strategic business value that EA brings to a particular organization.

In a recent webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Whynde Kuehn discussed how organizations can leverage business architecture to support the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This Advisor shares the Q&A session that followed.

In a recent webinar, Cutter Senior Consultant Borys Stokalski and Aleksander Solecki explored the processes and practices that support business agility from the perspectives of value innovation and product portfolio management. In this Advisor, we share the Q&A session that followed.

Digital transformation is the hottest trend and spend in technology circles these days. But how can employees possibly transform a business that they don’t fully understand?

In the enterprise architecture (EA) anti-pattern described in this Advisor, the EA team primarily functions to review projects in the architecture review board (ARB). Each IT project is given a series of standards that it is expected to meet, and at various checkpoints in the software development process, the project team submits a document to the ARB for review. Your enterprise architects are there to be, essentially, a “forcing function.” 

While it is impossible to predict the future, the ability to adapt to what we already know is most likely to prompt a solution’s future pivot can make the difference between an elegantly evolving architecture and one that must be thrown away. In our experience, the patterns and techniques discussed in this Advisor are useful for keeping our digital and data architectures open to changes.

The next generation of business and associated business models is being ushered in by blockchain’s versatility in creating and exchanging value. The opportunities are boundless, but first we must transition from our current infrastructure. Today, the data network proto­cols establish the rules of the Internet and facilitate its use. Most of the value these protocols create is absorbed by just a few companies — either by operating and distributing Internet access or governing the appli­cations that make it easier to use. Only recently has blockchain emerged to offer businesses the chance to capture the value that will come from next-generation Internet protocols.

This article is the first in a series of Advisors that will outline some of my lessons from leading Agile transformations. Getting started with Agile involves some organizational preparation; hence, the countdown to enterprise agility is the subject of this Advisor.

We have set out to “demystify digital transformation” through interviews with a cross-section of senior leaders at seven firms in a variety of industries. As we conduct our research, a comprehensive view of how mindsets must evolve to enable this transformation within firms is emerging. One of our most prominent initial observations centers on the digital mindsets of leaders; this mindset determines whether an organization’s digital transformation gains traction or flounders.

Orga­nizational culture change is disruptive, but along with implementing a DevSecOps culture, the integrated security, and the automation, the comfort we crave is just as accessible. Communication and transparency allow DevSecOps and organizational culture change to thrive, facilitating its continued relevance and growth. But how do we measure culture change? In this Advisor, we identify a logical set of seven incremental steps to measure culture change.

Instead of trying random “Agile” or “traditional” planning approaches prescribed by famous industry gurus and institutions, organizations should consciously find their “sweet spots” along the various dimensions of agility. This path will save dollars.

Confidential computing offers a hardware-based solution for protecting data in use, enabling organizations to confidently migrate their sensitive data to cloud platforms by allowing them to maintain complete control of the data and to meet or exceed government and industry regulations for protecting data in cloud environments. This Advisor examines some confidential computing products and applications that organizations have developed by leveraging the technology.

When you watch live video recordings of jazz legend Miles Davis, he walks among the assembled musicians on stage during performances, guiding the focus or center of gravity of the music that they collectively create; he performs leadership. As one’s belonging gets more distributed in networks, relations become key to achieving collective creativity. Leaders are challenged to develop within their teams the capability to act and respond as one entity greater than the sum of their parts — to sound with one voice.

The challenge of being open to innovation is in breaking out of familiar patterns. A lot of what we do is guided by patterns. These patterns help us in a stable context but get in the way in a dynamic or complex context and hinder innovation. The first step in dealing with suboptimal patterns is to be aware that they are hard to see.

This Advisor looks at “wave alignment,” a process used to accomplish the goals of Agile enterprise architecture (EA). Wave alignment is an addition to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), although the principles can be applied to any Agile development organization of size.

We believe that at the heart of the ability to manage an ongoing and multilayered organizational transformation rests a sophisticated enterprise architecture capability with a specific charter to act as a transformation engine connecting strategic intent and execution excellence.

Confidential computing is a promising technology that seeks to solve one of the remaining impediments to greater cloud computing adoption and data security in general: how to protect data during processing. It also offers exciting possibilities for organizations to develop new collaborative applications.

In a recent webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Barry M. O’Reilly introduced a new way to model systems in complex environments — residuality theory. In this Advisor, we share some questions asked at the end of the webinar about using residue as an alternative building block that enables software systems designers to consider the entire environment and its complex interdependencies without slowing down the design process, delivering benefits to both architecture and risk management practices.

Do you need a forecast of your cloud spend? In this Advisor, I investigate five cloud spend forecast methods, with their pros and cons, to help you make a choice.

An enterprise architecture (EA) practice can be best viewed and analyzed in terms of three distinct EA-related processes: (1) strategic planning, (2) initiative delivery, and (3) tech­nology optimization. This Advisor takes a closer look at the first process: strategic planning. 

Risk is not just about what we do; it is also inherent in what we don’t do. Standing still while the world moves can be as dangerous as moving out of step with real events. Architecture, too, like everything else, has risk, and it is probabilistic in nature.

During the past year, the application of technology to well-bounded problems proved its strengths in the impressively rapid R&D that delivered multiple vaccines in a previously unheard of time frame. The challenging transition from R&D and production to distribution has, however, once again proven that project and change management issues are often more challenging than product development.

It is clear to all that COVID-19 has dealt a devastating blow to the economy. The aviation industry, in particular, faces a new reality. While aviation, pre-crisis, was thriving from the waves of globalization and travel commoditization, it was already facing threats such as environmental pressures, unbalanced profit sharing along the value chain, and multiple constraints on operational and business agility. Thus, the recovery phase will be extremely challenging, and we believe future growth will involve nothing less than reinvention of the industry, something that is true of many industries post-pandemic.

I recently received an email from a colleague seeking advice by way of suggestions for his focus for 2021. In this Advisor, I share a glimpse into our correspondence as well as my thoughts on aligning value stream priorities.