Given the heightened cybersecurity environment currently faced by organizations, what should you as the CSO provide in response to a board request for assurance that the company is perform­ing its fiduciary duty? Moreover, what information should you provide to assure the board that it is appropriately protecting the company? The answer is confidence — along with the five-section standard presentation template presented in this Advisor. 

In this next-generation world of cloud computing, where the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, edge computing, and cloud federation are enabling the vast deployment of innovative and resilient solutions, we must begin thinking more clearly about geo-jurisdictions. In this Advisor, we review three examples of how geo-jurisdiction policies and legislation can lead to dysfunctional businesses and economies.

The way we do business is transforming. It’s being pushed and pulled by many factors, most notably by a younger workforce demanding new interfaces and services necessary to perform jobs their way. At the heart of every digital transformation project is an immutable pain wrapped in competing motivations: doing more, doing it faster, and avoiding missed opportunities. How can we reconcile these motivations in our day-to-day business? When we discuss the concept of “a culture transformed,” we can draw many parallels against the way a society votes and spends, but that’s out of scope. What is not out of reach is your influence over your teams and whether you can embrace the change that is upon us all. It’s up to you to set the tone of the conversation within the organization: robots aren’t here to steal our livelihoods; they’re here to make us more productive and lighten the load, right?

Disruptive changes within a company can result either in a spectacular rise if done right or an abrupt decline if not handled well. People are at the center of every change. If employees do not connect with their organization, do not see the need for change, do not buy in to the leadership’s vision, or are not motivated, any change will fail. For employees to see value beyond the defined work parameters, they need to feel connected to the company. Connection, respect, and trust will help a company maintain employee support for the changes that a company wants to implement. In this Advisor, we discuss in brief two such initiatives that brought about drastic increases in employee support and participation.

Capability assessments are a topic of high interest and frequent discussion among business architecture practitioners and leaders but are not executed in practice as often as one would think. This is typically because people do not know where to start or become quickly overwhelmed by the potential options and detail. 

Given an established enterprise with its decades-old IT department, processes, and practices versus the accelerating marketplace — missing out on modern IT practices and being too rigid to react to market trends, and even putting innovation on half-yearly cycles — the hiring of a talented Agile architect can bridge the gap and lead the recently established digital pillar of the company. In this Advisor, we explore the common challenges the architect faces via the story of a day and propose building a “non-blocking” architecture governance practice for Agile development teams.

There is a lot of talk about how AI offers the possibility to transform how organizations operate. I am guilty of throwing around this type of statement myself. Of course, this brings up the all-important question: to what extent is AI currently transforming how organizations operate? Fortunately, the latest results from our ongoing survey examining the adoption and application of AI technology in the enterprise offer some insight into this question.

In this Advisor, we explore the benefits of a promising breakthrough growth model that we have successfully applied in both B2C and B2B businesses. This model delivers major benefits in terms of speed, cost, and likelihood of success. It involves radical collaboration across the innovation ecosystem and covers the entire innovation process from idea to commercialization, including the strategic, commercial, operational, and technical aspects. We call this the Breakthrough Incubator (BI) model. The BI model enables accelerated creation of a new business proposition with new products/services externally — before transitioning it back into the parent organization, thereby overcoming many of the prototype scale-up barriers. In essence, this is the “build, operate, transfer” philosophy applied specifically to innovation and product development.

Recently, the Cutter Consortium editor who facilitates this Advisor series sent me a set of questions frequently asked about Agile transitions. Among the ones I found most intriguing wasn’t really a question but merely a statement, claiming: “Misunderstanding on the part of teams that Agile allows for less discipline, leading to less precise delivery schedules.” There are several elements of this statement that I encounter frequently, so I decided to use it as a basis for this article.

Big data, the IoT, and the cloud are technological innovations that need to demonstrate corresponding business value. While the aforementioned technologies have distinct identities of their own, they are also interdependent. Innovating with these technologies at a business level demands a multidisciplinary, holistic approach that also incorporates an understanding of how to manage risks. In this Advisor, we discuss challenges that arise in real-life scenarios due to lack of interoperability and some practical standards in the IoT and cloud space.

Starting from a data warehouse just makes sense. Of course, the architectural thinking and technology offer valuable intellectual capital to IT. But the real value comes from the decades of experience in information/data governance and management, as well as the interpersonal and organizational skills that data warehousing imple­menters have gathered. As you will see from the articles in this issue, the contributors are on the same path.

With the deployment of next-generation mobile networks, IoT and edge, and fog and cloud computing, the tech world is undergoing the largest-ever overhaul of its information service infrastructure. In this connected-everything/data-everywhere model, the benefits are numerous, but so are the challenges to system security. The OpenFog Reference Architecture for fog computing has emerged as a highly credible paradigm for architecting compute-intensive solutions for networks and applications that utilize IoT, 5G technologies, and AI. This Advisor describes three distinct aspects of an approach to node-centric security in an open, interoperable fog computing environment that are critical to understanding how fog bridges gaps in the continuum between the cloud and things.

One of the first questions I often hear when explaining Agile methods is, “Who is the product owner?” Answering this question is not so simple. There is a lot of context that you have to set in order to explain the role. When rushed, the short answer is “the person on the Agile team who calls the shots relative to development priorities by acting as the voice of the customer.” This is often followed up with “of course, you know that Agile teams are self-organizing and do not have a project manager?” Then, when greeted with frowns and surprised looks, you add, “instead, the teams elect their own spokesperson.” In this Advisor, we take a look at who the fills the role of product owner as well as their roles and responsibilities.

The grocery retail industry thus far has been resistant to disruption, unlike other retail categories. Not much has changed in the way we interact with grocery purchases over the last few decades: we head to our neighborhood supermarket, pull out a shopping cart, pick out the week’s requirements, pay the cashier, and head home. Of course, we may pick up more organic products, and instead of transacting in cash we may use Apple Pay, but not counting luxury services, the shopping experience hasn’t fundamentally changed for the masses. There hasn’t been much need for retailers to innovate. Everyone needs groceries, and today’s grocers are able to meet those demands, with or without innovation. Developing countries with high-density pockets of human population, however, tell a different story.

Governance is about what decisions need to be made, who gets to make them, how they are made, and the supporting management processes, structures, information, and tools to ensure that decisions are effectively implemented, complied with, and achieving the desired levels of performance. This requires that the accountabilities and responsibilities be well understood and clearly and unambiguously assigned, the reward system be aligned, and relevant performance metrics be in place.

There are major differences in approach and philosophy between the project and Agile “no project” management factions. However, organizations can use both tactics in harmony. Congruence can be achieved when an effective program/product management infrastructure is put into place and it is architected with Agile methods in mind. Such an infrastructure melds the two approaches and philosophies so that teams can work in such a way that both flexibility and control can be exerted as development proceeds and software products are released. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving into public sector agencies — at both the state and federal levels — for use in such general applications as compliance, records management, community development, and finance, among others. Governments are also applying, or researching the use of, AI for other applications, including optimizing access to services and analyzing and predicting the likelihood of environmental disasters. This Advisor provides some examples of some of the many government research efforts underway that are intended to advance AI’s capabilities beyond its current limitations.

In this, the final Advisor in a four-part series, we explore the third lens of organizational behavior — capability: We “have the ability” to do it. We also examine the importance of language and its impact on culture in the digital transformation transformation.

Compared to software, industrial delivery takes longer, is more complex, and requires a broader set of skills. This series on industrial Agile opens with an overview of a framework for industrial agility, and considers these questions:

What is new in industry when Agile principles are applied?

How do the different frameworks of Lean, Agile, Scrum, and Six Sigma fit together?

Systematic, repeated breakthrough innovation often poses a challenge to large companies because it is inherently risky and frequently requires competencies and approaches that divert from the mainstream of the organization. In many large companies, internal bureaucracy and red tape tend to stifle the required creativity, and internal R&D teams may struggle to think sufficiently “outside the box.” Creating a stand-alone, semi-independent breakthrough team focused on step-out/adjacent opportunities or grand challenges is a common first step that companies take to address these barriers.

In this Advisor, the authors explore how two fundamentally different paradigms — Agile architecture and architectural agility — can reinforce one another. Based on a real-world case study from a US technology company, the authors describe how one organization has combined architecture with Agile thinking and methods to break through the anti-patterns and improve its results.

An awareness of granularity and context in analytics is vital for creating value to the business. In this Advisor, I focus on understanding the degree of granularity of analysis and how organizations can incorporate granularity in their analytical solutions.

In this Advisor, we examine the organizational behavior lens called pathway: We know “how” we need to do it. We also explore the importance of applying Agile to manage day-to-day activities, and transition states to manage the longer term and ensure delivery of the broader transformation objective.

There are more people who work on improving organizational agility than people who know why this should be required. How can you work on something when you do not know why you should do it? So, before working on transforming our organizations to become more agile, maybe we should discuss the business environment and make sure everybody in the organization sees the same one. Then we should look at our internal organizational environment and make sure everyone has the same expectations and the same perceptions of it.

In this Advisor, we propose that by architecting for antifragility, businesses can gain real agility and deliver systems with a higher level of quality.