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.

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.