Digitalization may be defined as using IT to improve the performance of people in organizations. These improvements may take place, for example, in business operations, the customer interface, employee experience, informed decision making, or in the form of new business models, products, and services. The digitalization of business operations involves improved business processes, cost savings, and faster lead times.

The business value of blockchain technologies emerges in the form of business metrics, such as transaction efficiency, cost savings, and reduction of fraudulent activities, among others. In this Advisor, we explore some of the main drivers of value and potential applications beyond cryptocurrencies.

In the Cutter Consortium on-demand webinar “4 Key Questions: What You Need to Consider for Successful Digital Transformation,” Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Johan Treutiger addresses four key questions over four key transformational areas your organization should consider to successfully achieve a digital transformation. In this Advisor, we share four questions asked at the end of the webinar that may help you in your transformation efforts.

Hospitals, government agencies, and other organizations are struggling with process management and information processing issues that have been compounded by the novel coronavirus pandemic. They are turning to RPA and AI-based solutions — including smartbots and intelligent virtual assistants — to attempt to mitigate such concerns. From a market perspective, industry providers are moving rapidly to meet their needs, including offering solutions that hospitals and other organizations responding to the contagion can license for free. This Advisor explores some of the trends we are seeing to address these concerns.

Although the technology for remote working (collaborative) has been around for 30 years, the adoption rate has been slow but steady. Now, all of a sudden, the adoption rate has shot up to almost 100%, as just about all nonessential industries are working remotely to help flatten the COVID-19 infection curve. This rapid adoption of remote working technologies has had a number of challenges.

COVID-19 is spreading at fast speed, and time is of the essence to share, coordinate, and take actions to mitigate pandemic propagation. Current centralized database solutions solve part of the problem, but require an overarching and time-consuming coordination between multiple government and health authorities, including the entire chain of decision makers to collect test data, analyze/diagnostic, register, monitor, and enforce regulations and policies to isolate and monitor COVID-19 cases. Blockchain DLT technology solves the coordination challenges of broken healthcare centralized data lake silos, creating an open, trusted, immutable, and decentralized data architecture framework to speed up a multi-party, end-to-end COVID-19 data-sharing coordination process, while preserving patients’ data privacy.

COVID-19 has already had a massive impact on all our lives and is on track to continue doing so for some time. In this situation, technology is playing an increasing role in moving life and business forward. This will all have long-term, and potentially positive, impacts on society and how we run our lives.

A project can reconfigure the arrangement of distributed resources, human or otherwise, at any point in the lifecycle of the project, especially with the help of enterprise architecture (EA) to substantially rethink project technology and even organizational approaches. Projects can and should reinvent themselves.

We all are now experiencing a major unprecedented and unexpected crisis caused by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The situation we’re facing now is unseen previously, unanticipated, and unimaginable. Any help that we can enlist to emerge from this unprecedented crisis — and other potential crises we may encounter in the future — is worth pursuing. In this Advisor, let’s explore how autonomous technology can be employed in key areas to control and manage emergencies we face now.

Just as my trainer says in the gym, “Use it or lose it!” the same can be true of enterprise agility in the digital era. What are the organizational exercises — the squats and the pushups for an enterprise — that make a difference? Some of these, like adopting a new exercise regime, could be quite radical. Choosing new ways of working, changing organizational precepts, and focusing on continuous improvement could be some of the fundamental changes.

I don’t have to tell you about the impact of the coronavirus — you are feeling it. While we are all negatively affected personally, businesses are experiencing a spectrum of effects. Some are seeing an explosion of their e-commerce activities. Others are watching their business collapse as activities at all points in their supply chain slow down. Much has been written about dealing with explosive growth, so let’s focus on the downside case. This is where organizations show their true character.

This Advisor explores two key ways in which the concept of business design can help bolster artificial intelligence (AI): by improving the customer experience and by identifying and protecting the data that powers AI.