In my last Advisor, “Using Heat Maps to Better Drive the Rationalization of Your IT Landscape,” I introduced the use of business capability heat maps to better focus on business areas that require attention. This Advisor further illustrates the approach and offers next steps in sharing your organization’s evolution with stakeholders.

A “next normal” is undoubtedly going to emerge once the COVID-19 pandemic slows down or resolves. But while the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted the economy and work routines, it also provides opportunities for organizations to implement continuous learning and make progress toward upskilling and reskilling employees.

While strategy, risk, and metrics coexist tangentially in many organizations, the nexus of the three reflects the degree to which management thinks and acts proactively.

Businesses have traditionally organized themselves to ensure optimal effectiveness in each of their business functions. In today’s business climate, however, shorter product lifecycles, demand for customization, rising consumer expectations, and the growth of automation and data challenge this model. This Advisor describes the building blocks of generic capabilities and describes three categories of capability-based players seeking competitive advantage.

The chief scientific officer — or CSO — plays a key role in research and technology organizations (RTOs), ensuring scientific leadership, setting medium- to long-term strategy, and influencing scientific investment, among other roles. In a recent study, Arthur D. Little (ADL) set out to understand the full scope of the CSO position in RTOs across the globe.

If you believe the undisputed research about diversity, equity, and inclusion improving outcomes, then ensure your behaviors match. If you value the importance of living in alignment with your values, then show the proof.

Heat mapping allows for high variability. It is a very universal approach to produce easy-to-read material that helps prepare decisions (e.g., for capability-based IT planning and IT rationalization). Heat maps may also show “hot spots” in the IT landscape and help communicate them.

Interest among organizations for developing detailed plans and strategies for adopting and disseminating intelligent process automation (IPA) technologies and practices is very high, pointing to accelerated adoption of IPA over the next 12-24 months.

Despite a lack of solid evidence, most stakeholders agree that the health economics of mHealth look compelling. If, however, mHealth implementation expands post-pandemic as an integral part of established healthcare over the long term, the question then becomes who should pay for mHealth. The answer relies primarily on two parameters: who benefits economically from mHealth and who bears the risks of healthcare costs.

How well is your company dealing with the pandemic? As the pandemic crisis deepened and all your business plans were invalidated rapidly, you probably tried to experiment and innovate at high speed. Experimenting can easily be done as an undirected action if there is no reflection happening. Only reflection allows us to come up with experiments that are based on an hypothesis (drawn from both experience and theory). Then we can innovate — by understanding how to measure the experiments in order to (in-)validate our hypothesis.

This issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal dives deeper and looks at diversity, equity, and inclusion from different angles with the help of seven stellar voices who lend their expertise to educate, examine, enumerate, and offer solutions.

Organizational transformations come in many forms, including divestures, joint ventures, taking a business public or private, and general market reorientations. Here, we explain EA in relation to one type of strategic transformation: acquisitions. Acquisitions are one way that businesses seeking to digitize use to accelerate the journey to their destination and, in our experience, to specifically complement their innovation-management pipeline.

Cutter Consortium has been conducting a survey examining how organizations are adopting or planning to adopt intelligent process automation. According to our initial findings, approximately one-fifth of surveyed organizations are currently using IPA platforms and technologies, while another 20% plan to do so sometime within the next 12 months.

Since coming into prominence within financial services applications via technologies like cryptocurrencies and digital asset exchange, the race to find breakthrough applications in blockchain in other industries has been intense. However, despite major investments in knowledge, PoCs, and pilots, the results and value generated from these efforts remain modest, and it remains unclear whether blockchain technology really is the silver bullet that companies have hoped for. This is particularly true in the transport industry, identified early on as a promising area for blockchain applications due to its large number of independent but linked players, decentralized nature, and need to deal with issues like verifying authenticity and improving traceability and transparency, all while reducing transaction costs. In this Advisor, we share four cornerstones for executives in transport and many other industries to follow.

Examine today’s low-code/no-code (LC/NC) solu­tions — declarative development options with relatively low learning curves that provide a company’s workforce with the tools needed to easily create software to grow and transform the business.

If your enterprise architecture (EA) program is not engaged in digital transformation, I offer some advice that comes from successful cases where an EA program overcame the situation that had it sidelined and was brought in to an already running digital transformation.

The architecture of architecture itself is multi-layered, just as architecture layers the things it represents in the real world in ways that we can understand and deal with. Some parts of architecture are easier to work with than others. This Advisor points to the need for a deeper understanding of the muddled middle of architecture.

A decade ago, social media was broadly perceived as driving innovation, enabling social inclusion, and — in some loosely defined sense — as a force for good. In 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become something of a pariah, at least in the eyes of those who propose or long for rational, balanced, and successful campaigns to manage and control the disease. What went wrong?

Today, people across the globe are sharing the experience that the world is a very different place than it was just a few months ago. In this Advisor, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant and Ivey Business School Professor Laurel Austin discusses some of what we know about risk taking and risk prevention behaviors. In particular she considers the question of why people take risks that experts advise against. She discussed this a few months ago in her Cutter Consortium webinar, “Risk in the Time of Coronavirus,” which is available on the Cutter website.

Value stream mapping is a team event. Identification of wasteful handoffs inspires team members to consciously improve communication and collaboration, which positively impacts the quality culture.

In this Advisor, we look at ADL’s COVID-19 Prediction Dashboard, which can enhance the ability of pharma companies to manage clinical trials effectively, during the pandemic and beyond.

The use of business capability maps and an associated application landscape with functionalities are a great tool to identify what may be rationalized, consolidated, modernized, replaced, and retired. Starting with a baseline application landscape and related infrastructure, you will end up with a target application landscape and associated roadmaps.

This Advisor provides a glimpse into the mHealth market and select innovations and benefits of mHealth adoption in clini­cal trials.

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.