Looking at the current news, we can see VUCA — volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity — unfolding in real time. Amid this chaos and uncertainty, people are suffering from ambiguity and are having a hard time making judgments about the truthfulness of information, especially whom to believe. This Advisor provides some insight into our VUCA world and some of the skills and abilities people have at their disposal.

Unleashing the numerous benefits of customer excellence and achieving tangible improvements require an end-to-end, eight-step approach that addresses multiple dimensions across the customer journey.

Defining, designing, implementing, and managing cross-organization collaborations and ecosystems requires a new mindset, solid architecture, and effective end-to-end execution of business direction. Business architecture and business architects are perfectly suited to help with all three.

In this Advisor, I provide an update on the various types of IT solutions that are currently available for monitoring and enforcing social distancing practices in the workplace, and for helping companies conduct automated contact tracing of employees. These tools provide social distancing and contact tracing for companies seeking to reopen for business post quarantine for COVID-19.

A critical factor for the past failure of many Agile initiatives is that leaders are disengaged from their strategies. They’re not taking responsibility for the deep learning, mindset shift, personal role shift, and cultural shifts required of them in a transformation of this magnitude. The failure is not specifically about Agile. Indeed, any signi­ficant change initiative needs this sort of leadership engagement, where the leaders must go first in leading, or showing the way.

Business architecture is a critical — and typically missing — bridge between strategy and execution. Organizations should leverage it to translate strategies and other business direction and collectively architect, prioritize, and plan actions to be taken from a business-driven, enterprise-wide perspective. Indeed, business architecture and business architects contribute unique value across the strategy execution lifecycle, as well as connect other teams and help them be more effective.

Data architects need to strike the right balance between addressing data stakeholder pain points and gathering information to build and enhance the data architecture. The triad of people, process, and systems (technology) transforming cohesively are the ingredients for the secret sauce that can provide a practical way of managing the enterprise data architecture. In this Advisor, we examine these influences on data architecture.

In this Advisor, Adrian Jones stresses the importance of context-setting infor­mation by pointing out the increased vulnerability to which we are exposing ourselves. We produce and use more and more data. In the backs of our minds, we know that data governance is of growing importance, but we don’t act in the right way on this knowledge.

The most critical element of a digital shift is the identification of a clear need or opportunity that digital technology can address. Successful enterprises continually examine their marketplaces along with how those marketplaces are changing. They also look at both their processes — and how to carry them out better, faster, and cheaper — and new technologies that could open up hitherto infeasible opportunities. 

Collaboration is a key factor in solving many complex problems, including the one we currently face. In fact, collaboration is a new paradigm that is increasingly finding its way into many traditional practices, including the modern corporation, where it has been introduced via horizontal organizations. Horizontal organizations are based on collaboration and trust as their default strategy. This kind of organization increases employee satisfaction and builds higher profits. In this Advisor, we examine how practices such as an open-book management policy (OBM), consent decision making, and a bold profit-sharing policy lead to greater profit and, ultimately, real customer satisfaction.

The time-honored approach to quantifying markets is to work outward from a specific technology or tool to a targeted customer who will potentially use the technology in myriad ways. These potential markets with applicable benefit from the technology are then tabulated into initial total addressable markets (TAMs). In turn, the TAMs help justify strategic investment in an organization or the investment round in a startup.

The job of the IT strategy isn’t to align to the business strategy. It’s to give the business people who create it as many options to change tack as possible. It’s a provider of IT capability in support of strategic business capabilities. Supporting, enabling, and aligning with core business capabilities equals competitive advantage when the business strategy is a good one.

We are now well into the depths of dealing with the current situation. In assessing performance in the face of uncertainty, have you identified and inventoried the capabilities, including ones that you barely knew existed within the depths of your enterprise? Can you use this learning to build a more Covidian architecture that will withstand future assaults that could be worse than the one we have been going through?

Vendors are now offering IT solutions designed specifically to help businesses enforce social distancing practices and support automated contact tracing in the workplace.

The introduction of Agile practices changed how product development was organized, managed, and executed with the objectives of enhancing customer satisfaction, improving customer/market responsiveness and developer morale, and cutting out impediments to delivery. Indeed, “Agile” has been clearly popularized in much of the product development world. But strong and steady signals are emerging that those objectives are not being met. What happened?

Unfortunately, most digital transformation initiatives fail not because they lack capabilities or intelligent, talented people but because they lack precise objectives, digital leadership, and an innovative mindset. Goals — such as what the target business outcomes are — must be clearly defined because a digital transformation journey on its own is already a very complicated endeavor. Digital architecture is what simplifies the journey and makes sense of it. It is vital to begin with a clear objective in order to create the right architecture.

With the dawn of the 21st century, we have begun to observe a more inclusive digital shift in value creation, with the transformation of business as well as societal systems due to an emerging phenomenon: a new computing paradigm that has introduced myriad Web and mobile-based applications aiming to fulfill society’s primary and secondary human needs. None­theless, many attempts to develop social computing applications to facilitate value creation have failed. We have created a human needs fulfillment (HNF) model that enables an optimum fulfillment of human needs, resulting in value creation.

Rapid and unprecedented changes to the unemployment laws have created both a tidal wave of transactions that need to be processed, and significant changes to the programmed business processes that execute those transactions. Those business processes are entombed in old COBOL code on old mainframe systems. People are starting to panic about needing COBOL programmers. Yes, but.…

In this Advisor, Rich Huebner shares some of his thoughts about how the COVID-19 pandemic is going to fundamentally change the education industry, in particular, and offers some lessons learned for other industries as well.

Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and big data are expected to have a huge impact on how we live and what we choose to do. Most categories involving these technologies focus on specific lifestyle items like shopping, dining, movies, and so forth. But such customer-centric categories lack specificity from the investor’s eye. In this Advisor, we redrew the categories on which AI/ML and big data startups should focus.

Enterprises must move away from the old model of centralized decision making to a model of public self-governance. Away from monarchy and toward democracy, giving teams the knowledge and authority to make decisions in the open.

As a result of the pandemic, we are witnessing increasing interest by organizations for utilizing natural language processing and speech recognition solutions targeted at customer engagement and support — particularly in the form of smartbots, intelligent assistants, conversational computing, and other applications designed to automate customer requests and assist human agents with contact/call center operations. In this Advisor, we examine some of the types of NLP and speech solutions available to organizations and consider some of the issues to keep in mind when it comes to employing such offerings.

As of this writing, we have no firm idea of the human and economic toll to expect from the COVID-19 pandemic or how long painful countermeasures will be necessary. A crisis? For sure. Let’s not waste it; let’s learn from it. Our forced adaptation to a totally unfamiliar world can and should cause us to critically examine assumptions about how we live and work and conduct business. There is a broad spectrum of possibilities, but this Advisor focuses on where IT plays a major role.

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the risk landscape for businesses around the globe. Enterprises are learning firsthand whether the business resilience and business continuity plans they put in place are proving successful or not. In light of this crisis, it’s crucial now more than ever to reevaluate your risk management process and ensure you are well prepared for what may lie ahead. As an executive, this involves adapting your leadership and facing the current crisis head-on with a proactive approach to risk management.