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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

This Advisor describes one way of establishing a non-blocking architecture governance practice for Agile development teams. 

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.

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.

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.

This Advisor looks at the top two benefits that organizations are interested in achieving with their customer experience efforts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this Advisor, we examine some current trends in the API space, including API platforms and moving beyond REST-based APIs.

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.

In this Advisor, we look at how some specific Industry 4.0 technologies can create advances within regulated industries.

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.

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.

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.

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 are major concerns for end-user organizations, commercial developers, AI researchers, and government agencies seeking to apply AI technology.

This Advisor proposes an architecture for the delivery of a connected health service that may pave the way for future connected health systems.

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.

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.