Advisors provide a continuous flow of information on the topics covered by each practice, including consultant insights and reports from the front lines, analyses of trends, and breaking new ideas. Advisors are delivered directly to your email inbox, and are also available in the resource library.
Trust in Me? Misinformation in Decentralized Social Media
Panagiotis Monachelis, Panagiotis Kasnesis, Charalampos Patrikakis, Xing Liang, Ryan Heartfield, George Loukas, Nelson Escravana, Soulla Louca
A primary motivation of decentralized social media is censorship resistance, often achieved through anonymity. But anonymity comes with a price. Checking the reliability and trustworthiness of information is much harder with anonymous information. In this Advisor, we present a brief overview of two main underlying technologies that help in decentralization while still providing a degree of trust between networked entities: (1) P2P social networks and (2) blockchain technology.
Is a Long-Term WFH Strategy Really Necessary?
Mark Lee
Even those who recognize the advantages of a cloud-based remote access platform over a VPN might argue that the current WFH solution is a temporary anomaly. In that case, why not just muddle through with a VPN until things get back to normal?
Engaging Enterprise Architects in Acquisitions
Stefan Henningsson, Gustav Toppenberg
We have typically found in the acquisition process that EA is primarily a technical capability and engaged in a constrained fashion. In most firms, the EA team does not possess the necessary critical business knowledge and, therefore, is not able to contribute to the acquisition process through direct engagement. At some pioneering firms, however, the reformation of EA has explicitly aimed to build a business strategy competence in the EA team by giving enterprise architect roles the responsibility for business and operations architectures.
How Do You Feel About That? Emotion Recognition in Speech Applications
Curt Hall
An important trend is the development of emotion recognition technology for speech-based systems with the goal of optimized customer engagement while providing an enhanced customer experience.
A Paradigm Shift in Healthcare, Part II
Vikas Kharbanda, Samir Imran, Regien Sumo, Nitin Kenkere, Louay Saleh
A new wave of innovation within healthcare is driving the need for more advanced, robust, and scalable hospital information systems (HIS). Healthcare providers — hospitals, in particular — are starting to reorient their investments in core technologies and how technology vendors are adapting their solutions and services to meet these needs. Here in Part II of this two-part series of Advisors, we look at three challenges of digitalization as well as eight key trends changing the HIS solution space.
Off the Top of Your Head: Tackling Cognitive Issues in Estimation
Vince Kellen
Despite research limitations, the psychological basis for estimation biases is much clearer now than several decades ago, and these insights can have a positive impact on the practice of project management.
Digital Success Through Strong EA
Stefan Henningsson, Gustav Toppenberg
Leaders peering over the edge of the horizon of their own and adjacent industries might wonder, “What are companies that have achieved digital success doing differently?” 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.
Evolving Your API Platform
James Higginbotham
Enterprises are expanding their API programs to include the broader concerns of enterprise architecture. In this Advisor, we describe some next steps for evolving your API platform.
The Cybersecurity Management Cycle
Feng Xu, Xin Luo
To mitigate cybersecurity threats, it is essential to understand the cycle of information security governance and control: preparation, prevention, detection, response, and learning. This information security management cycle provides important guidance to organizations dealing with security incidents. However, in the context of Industry 4.0, these five tasks present different challenges. This Advisor explores the challenges of cybersecurity management.
A Paradigm Shift in Healthcare, Part I
Vikas Kharbanda, Samir Imran, Regien Sumo, Nitin Kenkere, Louay Saleh
In this two-part Advisor series, we illustrate how healthcare providers — hospitals, in particular — are starting to reorient their investments in core technologies and how technology vendors are adapting their solutions and services to meet these needs. Here in Part I, we focus on the key features of this paradigm shift.
Project to Product: Fact or Fiction?
Jon Ward
What are the ramifications of moving from a project orientation to a process or product orientation? First, an organization needs to establish an efficient means of production. It must create a funding model and a value stream equipped and staffed with people able to deliver its software requirements. Then the organization must manage the flow of work into that development value stream. The concept of flow is critical to value stream performance. Lean manufacturing principles have established that an overloaded value stream slows down the rate of delivery, increases costs, and decreases quality.
Crisis Alert! Strategies for Today & Beyond — An Introduction
Steve Andriole
This issue of CBTJ discusses various aspects of corporate crisis management and how business technology can help companies deal with crises of all kinds, but especially those that change everything. Remember that corporate crisis planning and management is a continuous activity that must be acknowledged and well-funded.
Connecting People to the Data
Martijn ten Napel
Data is not a resource. Data is the breadcrumb trail of human activities. Like a true breadcrumb trail, it indicates the activity but never fully describes it. Data doesn’t fall out of the sky like manna from heaven; it cannot be mined like cobalt, either. Data is a residue of activity, and when you think about data in this way, you can envision a data management practice where you start to fully focus on the activities that bring you value and, therefore, the data you need to collect.
Better Transparency and Fairness in AI Systems
Curt Hall
Neural-symbolic artificial intelligence (AI) combines the pattern-recognition and pattern-matching capabilities of neural networks with the symbolic-reasoning functionality and transparency features of rule-based and knowledge-based systems (KBSs). One of the main goals of neural-symbolic AI is the development of hybrid AI systems that are more explainable and transparent in their reasoning.
Capturing the AI-Powered RPA Opportunity: A CSP Example
Agron Lasku, Louise Sjöholm, Tor Berglund
Robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) are complementary – when implemented together they enlarge the scale of value that can be created. In this Advisor, we share some practical insight into how communication service providers (CSPs) and other organizations can embark on the AI-powered RPA opportunity.
Why Does Agile Fail?
Matt Ganis, Michael Ackerbauer, Nicholas Cariello
There are a variety of circumstances that can cause Agile methodologies to struggle to gain a firm foothold in many organizations. We believe the most prevalent issue surrounding adoption (or lack thereof) is the misunderstanding of many Agile practices and techniques, a key component of which is the lack of understanding of the underlying reason why it is necessary to perform certain practices.
Adapting Organizational Structures to Drive Digital Transformation
Jonas Andrén, Lokesh Dadhich, Johan Treutiger
This Advisor explores a key question regarding digital transformation among analog-native companies: how can these businesses adapt their organizational structures to accelerate the transformation and build digital maturity?
5 Steps to an Effective BA Process
Brian Cameron
Leading organizations leverage BA not only to articulate and detail their business strategy, but also to create guidance that drives business and IT execution toward that future-state vision. Business architects can succeed only if they support BA in conjunction and in collaboration with, and maybe integrated with, other closely related disciplines, including business analysis, strategic planning, and portfolio management.
Raising the Bar: A Proposal for Improving Virtual Trust
David Tayouri
While the current level of trust may be satisfactory for some uses, we must secure a higher level of trust when accessing personal sensitive data. Establishing a trusted Web layer, in which users are uniquely identified and thoroughly authenticated, reduces the lack of trust issue.
First Change the Culture: Managing Organizational Risk
Jim Highsmith
Effective risk management begins with a culture in which reality isn’t overwhelmed by hubris. No project manager can be a good risk manager in a political environment in which executives are so gung ho that it blinds them from the reality. Effective risk management requires that executives and project managers make hard tradeoff decisions as the speculative hypotheses we call plans are smashed against the reality of the rough-and-tumble business world.
Cross-Functional Teams: Closing the Gap Between Business and IT
Jonas Fagerlund
Several fundamental Agile principles drive behaviors that can improve an organization’s ability to make use of its data. One of the Agile behaviors that is key in identifying and analyzing data, and eventually for designing a solution, is the use of cross-functional teams.
Tackling Digital Transformation? Go the Whole Way!
Jutta Eckstein, John Buck
Digital transformation needs to address the whole company as part of the larger strategy. Transforming the digital aspects of your company means transforming the whole company.
Centering Architecture Decisions: The Architectural Spirit Level
Balaji Prasad
There is a space within which we operate. There is also a time window through which we peer into the world. There may be a broader universe that contains more of space and more of time, but that would be of little concern to us because the only universe that realistically matters is the little piece of it that we have carved out for ourselves, out of the vast spaces and time horizons of the broader one. And therein lies the architect’s challenge: Where are we operating in the space-time continuum? And are we sure that this is where we would like to be? This Advisor introduces an architectural tool that helps the enterprise center itself.
Intelligent Process Automation Is at the Ready
Curt Hall
According to Cutter Consortium research, organizations are using NLP and advanced imaging to add conversational computing and intelligent document processing capabilities to RPA platforms — enhancing their RPA deployments with more advanced process automation capabilities.
The Quest for Digital Equilibrium: A Case Study
Fabian Sempf, Fabian Doemer, Volker Pfirsching
A major player in the transportation and logistics industry recently conducted a digital shift over an extended period. The program was initiated by the IT department, with the clear goal of making the organization more digital and finding its digital equilibrium. This introduces a key question: is the IT department really the best place to start when it comes to digitalization?