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.
Take the Time with Your Data Architecture
Organizations should focus their attention not on integrating, storing, or even analyzing data, but on the effective use of time.
Positioning Analytics: A Big Data Strategy Question
Analytics can be performed at various points in the deployment of a solution. Certainly, there are situations where “localized” analytics may be more appropriate than analytics performed in the cloud, and still others where analytics on the organization’s network might be more appropriate. The location of analytics can also determine where and when to integrate data into the analytical solution.
How to Design Your Lean/Agile Organization
In this Advisor, we present a sample of core thinking — a set of practices needed to build a Lean/Agile organization — grouped under three different categories: (1) foundational thinking, (2) designing, and (3) redesigning.
Why Blockchain Makes a Difference for Ecosystems
With the arrival of private blockchain platforms that integrate nonfunctional requirements arising from typical market conditions (i.e., privacy, confidentiality, controlled access), the barriers to creation of a digital economy become less significant and easier to overcome.
Reference Models for the IoT
This Advisor describes several EA techniques in an IoT context.
Impacts of Agile-at-Scale
Agile-at-scale relates to scaling Agile methods for software development use enterprise-wide or on large software development efforts. Scaling has been key as organizations try to tap the benefits of Agile methods to deliver their software products quicker, more cheaply, and with higher quality.
AI Seeing Broad Applications in the IoT Domain
In this Advisor, I describe some important AI developments we are seeing with the IoT.
AI Revolutionizing the Insurance Industry
The Internet offered wide access, and the smartphone offered direct and personalized access to the insurance customer. What can AI offer?
Agile Transformation: It Is Not One-Size-Fits-All
Can the same path to Agile transformation work for every organization? Does every organization need to go through the same number of steps? Do the organization’s culture, technological landscape, and customer needs necessitate a customized model of such a transformation? In this Advisor, we identify the five elements of design thinking as key principles that every Agile transformation should follow.
Navigating the Digital Landscape: Getting Things Done and Reaping the Rewards
We have developed a simple yet powerful framework to help business leaders navigate the digital landscape based on four business-focused questions that are at the core of effective governance of digital. We call these questions the four “ares.” In our previous Advisor, we discussed the first two of the “ares”: Are we doing the right things? and Are we doing them the right way? This Advisor explores the two that remain.
Setting the Tone for Cultural Transformation
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.
Fog: Highly Secure Next-Generation Architecture
In this Advisor, we examine how fog architecture addresses cybersecurity for next-generation networks.
A New Perspective on Agile Development Frameworks
In this Advisor, I introduce an Agile development framework (ADF); not a mainstream Agile offering like Scrum, but rather something I tend to carry around in my head when trying to think about the various views, products, roles, and tasks that a multidisciplined team can bring to bear for different types of Agile projects.
Customer Interactions in the Times of Digital Transformation: 3 Questions to Consider
Customer expectations are shaped by their interactions with Uber, Amazon, and Apple — where each interaction is intuitive, easy, and instant. In customers’ eyes, the age, size, and complexity of the organization or industry are all irrelevant: all they care about is having a great experience. Traditional organizations have no choice but to step up their game to stay relevant.
Building Business Architecture
Your business architecture knowledgebase should include content for each business architecture domain that you have determined to be applicable for your organization (most or all usually apply). The content for each domain includes names, attributes, and relationships to business architecture domains as well as other domains (e.g., system applications). The knowledgebase can be created and refined over time.
Are Organizations Deriving Measurable Benefits from Their AI Applications?
Artificial intelligence (AI) has reached the point where most major organizations are now investing in the technology. But, a key question I have had for some time now is: to what extent are organizations deriving measurable benefits from the AI applications they have deployed? 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.
Sifting Through Data: Using Fine Granularity for an Agile Business
In this Advisor, I highlight the need to understand the optimal granularity level in analytics to maximize business value. I also point to the need for business owners and strategists to incorporate context in analytics in a balanced manner in ascertaining the granularity levels. Granularity levels can vary dynamically depending on the needs of the business. Due consideration to such dynamicity ensures that time, cost, and corresponding use of resourcing in undertaking analytics are all utilized to provide maximum value to the business.
Understanding the API Spectrum
APIs are bringing about new opportunities by creating new channels for partnerships, promoting brands, and experimenting with customer-influenced innovative solutions and alternate business models. In this Advisor, I explore the spectrum of APIs. Knowing the spectrum of APIs and how they work helps formulate and guide API and software strategy, aids in decision making on interfacing architecture, and helps assess readiness from business, technical, compliance, and risk perspectives.
In Business Process Analytics, Prescriptive Rises to the Top
Traditional analytics is generally restricted to merely providing a better understanding of historical data or predicting future business outcomes. Consequently, the potential of traditional analytical processes is limited as they only offer insights and patterns based on data provided but they lack the ability to offer or make business recommendations. Prescriptive analytics, however, is substantially different and more powerful because it allows businesses to not only make predictions but also suggests an optimal solution.
Emerging Architecture in the Era of Things
This Advisor considers the impact of the Internet of Things (IoT) on traditional business and technology architectures and introduces the role of EA as an effective methodology for developing and implementing IoT strategies.
Service Leadership by Example
Actions, words, and intent should echo and support the foundation of your principles. Guided by your moral compass, work to establish an IT organizational culture based on what’s important to your customers and to you. In leading your IT service and support organization, establish trust and confidence in your service delivery with your business customers.
Using Agile Leadership Models to Delight the Customer
Empowering the people who face the customer to drive business decisions is a hallmark of the Agile organization. Agile leadership, explored in this Advisor, replaces command and control in the Agile organization.
The Challenge of this “Thing” Called Customer Experience
The new frontier for competition is the entire customer experience (CX) — from thinking about a purchase to the renewal (of a service) or replacement (of a product).
Organizational Advantage with NLP
Natural language processing (NLP) is an enabling technology employing neural nets, rules-based systems, statistics, and various linguistic analysis techniques to analyze and uncover meaning within data, typically in free-form (i.e., unstructured) formats.
A Risk Management Approach to Digital Disruption
The best response to digital disruption from the EA team is to examine the disruption, understand the implications in terms of the components and configuration of the architecture (i.e., translate them into architectural thinking), and present options for responding as potential changes to the architecture. The important thing is to present these options as clearly as possible so that stakeholders can make architecturally informed decisions.