Business agility is something that emerges over time through a lot of hard work. Excelling at it requires true agility across all of IT, not just software development, as well as a disciplined organization that can leverage the IT capability. And, because the environment in which your organization operates evolves over time, and your competitors and partners also evolve, business agility proves to be a moving target in practice.

Building AI systems is a huge undertaking. Therefore, most companies should focus on helping employees adjust to the new world of AI, curating the right data and leaving the mechanics of building AI systems to vendors.

Communication is difficult. It turns out that this approach of opening minds to the potential benefits of opposing ideas can be very valuable. Time and again we find that the best approach is at neither end of the scale, but instead at a “sweet spot” that balances the forces and harvests the best aspects of either end of the scale.

CIOs and their teams must make sure the business case for cloud migration is aligned with key business priorities, and that their migration plan addresses a few fundamental key success factors.

Agile leaders empower their workforce. Agile leaders enable teams to take ownership of their work and trust them to get their job done. What we typically find when teams are empowered to figure out how they will accomplish their goals is that they not only deliver, but they collaborate more and enjoy their work more. As a result, productivity rises. Agile leaders establish the vision, build awesome teams, support them, and get out of the way.

What are disruptors doing that we can learn from and shape the EA toward?

Whether AI eventually lives up to all the hype obviously remains to be seen; however, I expect that we are going to witness some innovative and disrupting applications in the not-too-distant future.

This Advisor explores the mechanics behind various decision-making models and examines the boundaries and use cases for each. It discusses the qualitative value that experience or intuition can add to data-driven quantitative analysis, thereby providing the best approach to decision making.

AI’s disruption has yet to be felt in the workplace, but there are waves of changes coming our way that will alter the way we work as well as the type of work we do.

Many EA efforts start with an exercise to create a vision and mission statement for enterprise architecture. These sessions often consume considerable time with a group of people thinking about the definition of EA and discussing details of frameworks and practices. The result is typically called an EA charter. While some of these efforts are useful, others are not. In this Advisor, we consider the value of the EA charter.

We believe that at the heart of the ability to manage an ongoing and multilayered organizational transformation rests a sophisticated enterprise architecture capability with a specific charter to act as a transformation engine connecting strategic intent and execution excellence.

Designing cognitive computing systems (CCSs) requires a strong case for the investment into those systems. Organizations must not only be able to justify the initial investment into developing a CCS, but also think through the investments that will be needed to ensure it can be refined and enhanced over time.

I’ve had the good fortune for decades to work with project managers in companies ranging across many industries. From these experiences, the best project managers I’ve worked with seem to have the following traits.

There is perhaps only one thing more crucial to secure than money: information. The heavy burdens associated with securing the authenticity and history of data are well-known to several sectors.

Establishing business architecture within an organization takes passion, persistence, and patience. Inspired by over a decade and a half of helping organizations to mature their practices — combined with personal mountaineering experiences — this Advisor shares a few lessons for conquering the “business architecture summit” using mountains as metaphor.

In this issue, we examine some of these questions along with the drivers of AI global trends and their impli­cations — now and in the future. Our contributing authors provide insights on key opportunities, strategies, and approaches for realizing AI’s potential and discuss emerging issues and concerns, including how AI may impact jobs and businesses.

Based on responses so far, an ongoing Cutter Consortium survey on the adoption and application of AI technology provides some insight into the issue of enterprise AI adoption trends.

“The purpose of a system is what it does” — referring to “system” as the company as a whole — means that a company’s statements of intent (“we are an innovative, digital native company”), or even its market analysis or the initiatives it has undertaken, are secondary to what a company actually does.

The industry is ripe for transformation in areas including customer service and marketing, claims management and fraud detection, and underwriting.

This Advisor explores one approach that has been particularly effective in making enterprise architects understand the realities of organizational change in their own context.

Digital transformation is commonplace in today’s economy. Digital transformation leaders and enterprise architects have a choice to make in developing their digital backbone. The digital backbone can be an asset in ensuring that digital transformation efforts are carried out in such a way that they are in align­ment with the enterprise and its approach to transformation. 

A strategic approach around big data not only includes the multiple analytical, architectural, project, and technical elements in a synergistic manner, but also pays due attention to the financial and people aspects, resulting in business value.

In this Advisor, we consider what leaders are expected to do within Agile organizations, then see how these duties translate to a set of desired skills and personality traits.

The existence of a digital backbone in an organization means that anyone aspiring and planning to transform different parts of the enterprise will be able to leverage the digital backbone in a consistent and sustainable way, ensuring that each effort connects to and leverages a common platform. 

Even radical approaches to change management, such as business process engineering or Lean, assume there is a desirable endpoint (however temporary) toward which change is directed. However, what if change happens so continuously that no fixed endpoint exists for any initiative, but instead organizations must constantly change, not just to succeed, but even to survive?