Digital architecture involves internal stakeholders shifting paradigms from thinking of solutions from within to fully incorporating external stakeholders (customers) in the solution design process. Different organizations leverage various approaches to achieve this paradigm shift, but one of the main drivers of digital architecture is customer centricity. This Advisor highlights this driver as well as some of the other most critical ones.

This issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal (CBTJ) continues the conversation we began in our last CBTJ and focuses on blockchain technology adoption beyond cryptocurrencies and financial services. The authors explore areas such as energy and utilities and government and present real examples of successful DLT implementations. They share their practical experiences in overcoming and addressing some of the known issues with blockchain projects.

In the era of open source projects, which enable deep analysis of code, it is doubtful that we can maintain privacy through the ages. Publicly accessible code facilitates consistent improvements and debugging through the regular scrutiny of accessible data. At the same time, it also increases the possibility of finalizing an attack on the network, causing losses and a reduction in trust. As a result, several companies now focus on analyzing blockchains.

Digital competitors have raised the bar and are forcing incumbents from virtually every industry into huge transformation programs. To win this race for digitalization, incumbents are investing vast amounts of resources into multi-year programs that require them to change the engine with the train still rolling. This requires executive teams to manage many challenges and produce multiple results that are either different than expected or diluted.

How should project teams corral the natural but emotional forces exerting pressure on project decision making and processes?

Mike Rosen’s webinar “Architecture for Digital Business” explored how to support your business transformation by taking an architectural approach to strategy. Here are four questions we asked Mike at the end of the webinar that you may also be considering.

Transformation of a company and managing through change are inherently difficult. The inclusion of a digital component in this transformation effort makes the work that much more challenging, even for the sharpest and most visionary of executives. Companies undertaking digital transformation, in our opinion and based on our experience, face four major challenges that we believe design thinking tools can help overcome. In this Advisor, we explore two of these challenges and explain how design thinking can provide solutions.

Organizations should view customer analytics as a way to help align the enterprise and make it function from the same set of metrics to provide the much-talked-about but often difficult-to-achieve “single view” of the customer. This view serves as the basis for making decisions about how best to interact with your customers; in effect driving all aspects of the customer lifecycle — from acquisition, retention, and growth to maintaining loyalty and measuring ROI across the organization.

AI strategy, at its core, must address vital questions, such as the following: How can AI deliver better value to customers? How can it help companies increase revenues, enhance efficiency, and reduce human errors? How can AI capabilities be integrated into the existing organizational processes to develop a distinct competitive advantage? To address those questions, AI strategy must closely align with a company’s business objectives, ensuring synergy between the corporate strategy and the AI strategy.

In a recent on-demand webinar, “Using AI to Improve Agile Teams,” Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Jon Ward described a team that was able to cut time-to-market in half and reduce the cost to deliver by 60% by using Agile with artificial intelligence (AI). He addressed how AI could be used to further enhance a team’s productivity, where AI might inhibit it, and outlined where AI can be used to improve your productivity. This Advisor shares some of the questions Jon responded to at the end of the webinar, which you may also be considering.

How does an architect see things that may be dark otherwise? There are many examples where seeing things differently make things different, sometimes with extraordinary, decades-long impact.

This issue of CBTJ will help you understand that a data architecture should be much more than merely a technology roadmap. To be of any value to people in an organization, the architecture should guide the people in an organization to an understanding of how to organize for ever-changing information requirements.

The data scientist role is perhaps the most important of all roles in the adoption of big data–based decision making.

Clearly, blockchain will have an impact on technology and the ways we conduct business and how governments and not-for-profits provide services. But until we alleviate several clear barriers, progress will be slow. We discuss a handful of those barriers in this Advisor, including lack of interoperability, lack of mature toolsets, and lack of qualified personnel.

In this Advisor, we consider the four types of blockchain and explore some financial services where blockchain can be used effectively to enhance customer experience and increase the efficiency of those services.

Architecture should play a key role in creating the strategy for a digital business. But strategy alone is not enough, so architecture must go deeper by focusing on three pillars: (1) accelerated change, (2) decentralized decisions, and (3) public self-governance.

According to a recent Cutter Consortium survey, approximately a quarter of organizations are looking into using smartbots and intelligent assistants for their customer experience initiatives. Intelligent agents and smartbots enable customers to conduct common interactions in a conversational manner via speech and natural language speech or text-powered interfaces.

Robotics has benefited considerably over the past two years from advances in AI, with the biggest stemming from developments around deep learning neural net architectures and machine vision systems. Consequently, today we are seeing robots employing advanced autonomous navigation and intelligent object recognition capabilities — including image-sensing functions utilizing advanced pattern matching, shape detection, and face-tracking and analysis.

When using Agile methods, the integration and testing effort is performed continuously since capability is built up and delivered in short iterations. In order to implement continuous integration and testing concepts, consider the seven Agile approaches examined in this Advisor.

Working with blockchain over the past few years has made me realize the broad possibilities of distributed networks. Certainly, one could say that blockchain is “just” a distributed database; however, emerging adoption reinforces the potential underneath. There are myriad ways to adopt this technology, including in transferring funds, managing supply chains, handling tax evasion, and performing targeted analyses of data already recorded on the blockchain.

A capability architecture defines what we are and do at any given time, whereas process, information, platform, and other architectures describe how we accomplish what we are or perform what we do at any given time. As we improve or mature, what we do and/or how we do it changes over time, meaning that both our capabilities and the enabling architectures evolve.

As we explore in this issue of Cutter Business Techology Journal, blockchain is a smart but still small baby only just beginning the process of becoming an adult. The next two to three years will be important in terms of implementing proper regulations and standards to enable wider adoption of blockchain and to establish the technology on a solid legal foundation.

Today we are seeing a growing interest in the customer-centric business model among organizations that have come to see such models as a practical way to support a standard customer experience across all their various channels and brands.

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we’ve compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Business Agility & Software Engineering Excellence practice for today’s Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members. Your questions and comments not only make it possible to create lists like this, they help focus Cutter’s Senior Consultants’ research on the areas that are most important to organizations like yours. So please keep your feedback coming.

We’ve compiled the five most intriguing articles published by Business Technology & Digital Transformation Strategies in 2019 for today’s Advisor.