This month's issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal (CBTJ) examines the new face of automation and explores novel ways to address the various issues and challenges encountered.

In my coaching, it is incredible how much pushback I receive on the idea of demoing your architecture. It seems Agile teams are comfortable demoing end-user functionality, but incredibly uncomfortable when you ask them to demo architectural elements.

Although many organizations’ IT departments have begun to focus on quickly adopting emerging technol­ogies, many of those organizations struggle to balance the need to deploy new technology with speed and agility while maintaining compliance with their organization’s traditional risk management frameworks. This struggle is why organizations adopting BaaS must shift from letter of the law (“box-checking compliance”) to spirit of the law (principles-based compliance) risk management (i.e., to risk-based methodologies whose foundational risk mitigation principles align with desired business outcomes).

Increased communication among team members leads to a culture of transparency. Transparency is about making shared assumptions explicit. The more transparent teams and stakeholders are with one another, the more the organization understands priorities, and the sooner critical feedback loops get closed.

In this Advisor, I adapt the term “directional selection” to a business use to indicate the natural shift an organization goes through when one way of achieving a business goal has a better economic outcome, or directional selection, than any other alternative. Indeed, directional selection in complex, large organizations is the force behind the many changes required to increase an organization’s fitness. 

There are two types of data involving COVID-19: primary data and secondary data. As we explore in this Advisor, primary data relates directly to the pandemic and measures outcomes.

As data becomes an increasingly large factor in every¬day living — overcoming organizations with a tsunami of new information — how can we cope with all this data alongside our legacy transactional data and make sense of it all?

In response to the coronavirus pandemic, facial recognition vendors are developing new algorithms and employing multiple biometric technologies to enable their products to identify people wearing masks.

Showing the Agile Manifesto to teams, managers, and stakeholders and discussing it in a two-hour Agile introduction session serves no practical purpose. We need instead to center mindset-based actions on the human aspect in order to achieve sustainability and generate better, high-quality value with a positive economic outcome for customers and the business. That healthy balance comes naturally from directional selection, which merges mindset, the human aspect, collaboration frameworks, and methods together.

A digital company uses digitalization to increase its value. Achieving this requires a holistic approach, which covers the business model, processes and organization, digital enablers (e.g., data and technology), and employee skills and company culture. Finding out which initiatives add value and contribute to company goals is key to finding the digital equilibrium.

As we fight through current issues and eventually come out on the other side to whatever will be the “new normal,” a word has increasingly made its way into the daily discourse of business and technology leaders, as well as of politicians (at least those who know how to spell it): trustworthiness. Some things are noticed only when we miss them; trustworthiness is one of those. It is interesting to delve into how we got to this situation; the role that information technology has been playing in the erosion of trustworthiness; and how it, like many double-edged tools, might help solve the very problems it has helped create.

In this Advisor, we consider two scenarios — investment planning and digital transformation — where using a capability model as a foundation for delivering information can be valuable.

In this last article of the data lakehouse series, the author polishes his crystal ball and shares his opinions on the likely direction of the data architecture considerations around warehouses, lakes, and any other forthcoming popular memes.

Although organizations at the forefront of digital transformation have successfully deployed the combi­nation of design thinking, Lean Startup, and Agile methods and immensely benefitted from them, most technology organizations and their leaders still do not appreciate how the three complement each other.

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.