What’s happening when we’re reaching the right customers and meeting their strategic needs? That question is the opening gambit in an interesting kind of strategy review. In terms of format, the review is participatory — a workshop, in other words. In terms of approach, it’s outside-in: it starts not with internal capabilities but with the organization’s relationship to the outside world.

Enterprises have every right to expect their CIO to think creatively, not just about how they can effectively use technology themselves, but also how somebody else could use technology to destroy their business.

How can mHealth support the new challenges and opportunities of telehealth? In this issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal, we present some stimulating articles that illustrate the impact now, and the future direction, of mHealth.

How many resilience-rooted architecture principles have you defined and how many of them are honored in your everyday systems development work? The EA practice should evolve with the aim to be more understandable to users, not more complex.

Intelligent process automation continues to generate a lot of interest. And today, IPA is touted as an important technology offering potential benefits for almost every industry. But just how do end-user organizations feel about the prospects for IPA to live up to its expectations?

Business acumen requires insight about the concentric circles of the company, its industry, and broader markets to wisely consider strategy, risk, financial standing, and performance aims in all decisions. Such thinking is not possible, nor is innovation, without a fundamental understanding of a firm’s value chain, its competitive advantage, and business dynamics. Essential to such acumen is the ability to transform increasingly costless and abundant data into information that is actionable for meaningful decisions.

In my analysis, attention to mistakenly followed presumed processes, which ignore inadequate requirements and resulting insufficient budgets/schedules, causes typical risk analyses to miss almost certain repeated budget and schedule overruns. Once you become conscious that the real processes producing your results can differ from what you have been accustomed to presuming, your mind opens to allow awareness of all sorts of previously overlooked risks.

In this Advisor, we look at some of the concerns that organizations believe are hindering their customer experience adoption and implementation plans.

An organization’s business architecture represents the entire scope of what the organization does and the ecosystem in which it operates — at a high level of detail. This makes business architecture uniquely qualified to facilitate collaboration across silos and break them down when appropriate — something that almost no other disciplines or techniques can do. This Advisor shares some examples of why business architecture is so valuable for working across silos.

If the familiar VPNs are not up to the task of supporting the sudden new generation of WFH users, what’s the alternative? Fortunately, there’s a class of products designed specifically for today’s needs: cloud-based remote access software.

The process of residual analysis tests and proves (or disproves) the ability of the system to meet stressors for which it has not been designed. For those obvious stressors normally not included in a risk assessment, the process provides a method for analyzing how these stressors react when they occur in chains and eventually gives a sense of how the system behaves when exposed to stress in general.

Unfortunately, for many decision makers in gov­ernment and industry today, practicing robust risk management is still seen within their organizations’ social context as providing little if any positive upside, but instead possessing potentially large downside conse­quences for them personally and professionally. Many decision makers skeptically view rigorous risk analysis as akin to future blame analysis for something that might go wrong rather than a way to increase career or organization success. Changing this perception is difficult but not impossible.

Customer journey insight allows businesses to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, retain customers, and increase sales. In this Advisor, we make the case for stronger customer involvement, clearer governance, quantification of value, and a sharper focus, as we find these elements are the four main reasons implemen­tations of customer journeys fail.

In the drive to digitize more business processes, the intricacies of how all stakeholders inter­act with data have been underexposed. Though it is understandable that getting a grip on technology and reorganizing your business is hard enough, it is precisely this interaction that will determine your success. If you turn your perspective around, your data architecture will be of more value.

How interested are organizations in extending the capabilities of their RPA platforms and tools with more advanced, AI-based technologies? Fortunately, some initial findings from our ongoing survey on intelligent process automation (IPA) adoption in the enterprise helps shed some light on this question.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to sizable disruptions in international economic activity, impacting all industries, although at different magnitudes. It is now time for decision makers to expand their focus beyond immediate crisis management to actions that will strengthen their competitive play in the medium and long term. Here in Part II of this Advisor series, we take a look at telecom, equipment vendors, and Internet services, in particular.

We buy fire insurance for our homes not because we expect a great return on the investment, but because the modest fee is a hedge against catastrophic loss. In light of the risk lessons learned thus far in 2020, increased investment in risk management going forward seems prudent.

Value stream mapping (VSM) is a Lean manufacturing method used to analyze and manage the flow of materials/information/product to be able to bring a product to a customer. This Advisor proposes an eight-step VSM exercise to help team members all get on the same page.

The promise of the big and complicated framework, method, or architecture is our safety. Conformance to norms leads to acceptability in our modern techno-geocentricity: we are the center, we hold the center, nothing else matters, we know all that needs to be known. But are we at an inflection point? On the one hand, we have a world dominated by increasingly complicated frameworks detailing each and every aspect of a “transformation,” be it agile, digital, or other, along with associated architectures. On the other hand, we can contrast this framework approach with alternatives emerging from complex adaptive systems and complexity science. Unfortunately, those alternatives come with the cognitive load associated with uncertainty and ambiguity, and it is this friction that maintains the status quo.

You might think that a pandemic such as COVID-19 would offer an ideal opportunity to prove the value of data-driven decision making; you would be mistaken.

There are very few success stories of traditional analog-native companies becoming digitally mature enough to compete with the digital-native players. This drives an urgent need for the analog-native companies to adapt strategies, business models, organizational structures, and capabilities to remain competitive in the short term and relevant in the long term. Moreover, to build lasting differentiation and competitive advantage, this adaptation needs to be carried out while simultaneously preserving, enhancing, and expanding the core business.

In a recent webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Gustav Toppenberg and Stefan Henningsson discussed the problem of growth by acquisition and how advances in enterprise architecture practices not only overcome obstacles but also enable value creation. In this Advisor, we share some questions asked at the end of the webinar that may help you to use EA to unlock the value potential of your own acquisitions. 

Even before the coronavirus pandemic hit, automation was deemed an important element of business survival and digital transformation strategies. Now we are constantly informed by vendors, the media, and IT advisory firms that business process automation is more necessary today than ever.

As IS executives, you negotiate constantly — whether it be externally with vendors, contractors, or other partners, or internally with different managers, departments, your project teams, or your direct reports. Some of these negotiations are formal, but most are informal, involving day-to-day interactions at work. These negotiations are consequential, determining your budgets, deliverables, schedules, availability of equipment or services, and other factors that influence your success. Unfortunately, many IS professionals never get exposed to negotiation skills and strategies as part of their education and training.