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.
Lifelong Learning for the Business Architecture Professional
There is no single career path for the business architecture professional today. Today’s business architecture professional requires educational career options that provide the flexibility needed to enable multiple career paths and choices.
Big Tech in Fintech: Blockchain, Digital Currencies, and New Financial Services on the Horizon
It’s always interesting to examine what the big tech giants are doing because their efforts can have a significant impact on consumer expectations and trends and may serve as a wake-up call for other industries. This is certainly the case when it comes to big tech projects in fintech. And nowhere is this more apparent today than when it comes to big tech developments centering around the use of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies as a payment platform and for creating new financial services offerings.
Making It in Agile HR: Leadership, System Coaching, and Large Group Facilitation
The more organizations shift toward Agile, the more they need to redesign how they work with employees, how they search for new employees, and how they nurture employees’ development and careers. This Advisor describes the fundamental shift HR needs to make to support agility. Indeed, in an Agile organization, HR must shift its focus to the overall employee experience, choosing an employee-centric approach over the governance role that traditional HR departments often hold.
6 Key Steps to a Design Thinking Mindset
For decades, designers have used design thinking to develop products or services, but only in the last decade has the wider business community applied the approach. In this Advisor, we describe three overarching themes in the design thinking process and further break these down into six key steps to follow on your design thinking journey.
An Architect's Guide to Dissent Strategy
Choosing a dissent strategy is difficult and the strategy chosen will vary from organization to organization. This Advisor helps software architects craft an effective dissent strategy.
Building a Lightweight Architecture Repository
This Advisor describes one way of establishing a non-blocking architecture governance practice for Agile development teams.
Ongoing Challenges for Decision Support
Effective decision support requires ongoing innovation and refinement. As decisions become more complex and as data increases in quantity and variety, systems must undergo refinement and enhancement. Consequently, decision support requires a continuous and iterative design and development process.
Analog Me
Recently, I have had dreams of waking up in the middle of the woods in central Canada with no cellular signal, no Wi-Fi, no computers, no cell phone, nothing. And I am happy. Very happy.
Up to the Challenge? Business Ethics in Industry 4.0
In today’s competitive business environment, ethical issues arise frequently. Business partners may not respect contracts, or competitors may attempt to steal business secrets. With Industry 4.0, the situation becomes much more complex. In this Advisor, we explore some of these issues that may arise.
Top 2 Desired Benefits of CX Practices
This Advisor looks at the top two benefits that organizations are interested in achieving with their customer experience efforts.
A Design Thinking Approach to Smart Automation
An understanding of the interplay of human users with automation, the underlying system actors (business applications, data, etc.), the business process, and the overall value chain is complex. What better way to keep human users at the center of automation design than the use of design thinking? Design thinking has already been established as the best way to create solutions for wicked problems that cannot be solved by reasoning alone. By adapting design thinking for smart automation, we can analyze the problem space better and incrementally improve on the solution, moving toward success while considering human factors. The design thinking process has five stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Let’s investigate how we can adapt it for smart automation initiatives.
Transparency and Fairness in AI Systems, Part II: The Quest for Explainable and Unbiased AI
This Advisor focuses on the quest for explainable AI and examines some current tools and techniques for addressing transparency and fairness in machine learning applications.
A Crisis of Perception? Viewing the Skills Crisis Anew
Instead of seeking expertise from the beginning, accepting emergence of expertise over time may be the best way to combat a crisis that possibly exists more in our perception than in reality.
Increasing Transparency in Opaque Organizations
Despite society’s push for transparency, when we move the discussion of transparency outside the public sphere to the domain of individual corporations, there does not appear to be a common understanding of what transparency means, whether it’s actually needed, or if it has any benefits at all.
Current Trends in the API Space
In this Advisor, we examine some current trends in the API space, including API platforms and moving beyond REST-based APIs.
Measuring EA’s Value in the Digital Enterprise
Organizations that hope to survive in the digital age must utilize a systematic and solid corporate performance management process. A crucial part of that performance management process is metrics.
Advancing Digital Transformation in Regulated Industries
In this Advisor, we look at how some specific Industry 4.0 technologies can create advances within regulated industries.
Defining the Skills Shortage in Industry 4.0
As companies move toward solving more of their critical everyday needs with advanced technology, almost all report suffering from a shortage of skills to handle wave after wave of new technologies. This Advisor explores the skills shortage in Industry 4.0.
Organizational Transformation: From Scattered Experiences to Continuous Innovation
By creating a shared direction, a common purpose around the need to improve, and learning how to scale our innovation efforts, our company made the leap from scattered experiences to a culture of continuous innovation.
3 Goals of the Cognitive Enterprise Vision
Cognitive enterprise scenarios span business ecosystems, extending into partner and customer domains. Generally, the cognitive enterprise is a sense-and-respond, adaptive organization that can execute quickly, learning as it evolves. The cognitive enterprise represents a holistic vision for organizations through which they may view other near- and long-term strategies.
Architecture Enlivens Digital (And Other) Enterprise Frames
There is a symbiotic relationship between the picture frames arising from such words and the pictures painted by enterprise architects. That is the theme of this Advisor: architects can make enterprise frames come to life, and the frames can breathe life into architecture.
Transparency and Fairness in AI Systems, Part I: The Problem
Transparency and fairness are major concerns for end-user organizations, commercial developers, AI researchers, and government agencies seeking to apply AI technology.
An Architecture for Connected Health
This Advisor proposes an architecture for the delivery of a connected health service that may pave the way for future connected health systems.
How to Build Your Performance Capabilities from the Inside Out
We’re all familiar with the analogy of peeling an onion to find out what’s going on in the center. If what we want is to create and sustain a high-performance operation, then we already know what’s at the center. We just have to figure out what’s required to get there.
An Agile Twist to Product Development
When applying an Agile approach to product development, the key Agile principles remain the same. However, as we explore in this Advisor, certain elements take on a different twist.