This Advisor proposes a five-“I” framework for carrying out a discovery process to uncover opportunities for innovation and continuous improvement in business applications. Application development and support teams can use this framework for running continuous improvements using collaborating innovation and proactively address the evolving needs of business.

Agility, the ability to change direction fast when change is needed, is not something achieved by training your teams in a base set of practices. That might improve efficiency, but it doesn’t, of itself, give the ability to change direction rapidly. If you need agility, you need people who understand; who understand what is appropriate in the new context, and who can switch to doing that very rapidly.

In this Advisor, we provide an overview of our view on the role of the enterprise architect as a catalyst in enabling business transformation, driving innovation, and managing the innovation lifecycle.

Business process reengineering (BPR), along with a suite of digital technologies, can harness the insights of improved analytics.

The healthcare industry is wide open for applying blockchain technology, and we are seeing many projects and commercial efforts underway that center around healthcare data sharing, data protection, regulatory compliance, and process and transaction optimization.

One can argue that Agile methods do not pay off without trust to oil the wheels.

The main threat for banks does not come from outside but from within. It is not the fintech companies that are the biggest danger. On the contrary, they offer many new and fresh ways of working that traditional banks would never have thought of. The biggest danger for banks is their difficulty in quickly adapting to this changing landscape, opening up, and determining whom to collaborate with, acquire, ignore, or compete against.

The legal community comprises many entities, including professionals, bar associations, bar councils, public bodies, clients, security funds, judicial systems, banks, and more. This represents a true legal ecosystem, with an environment that generates big data traffic every day. There are issues related to privacy and data protection in this environment that can be addressed by software management systems, specifically a privacy management system (PMS).

Faced with a cross-section of seemingly disparate business and technology demands, one would logically ask how a business can concurrently execute a multiheaded set of strategies against operating models that are at best opaque and at worst driving companies out of business. The answer requires breaking down a business to its basic building blocks, which in turn provides a common lens through which to view and align business objectives, initiatives, and related investments.

This Advisor explores a near-term orientation to project leadership; one that helps connect the future to the present by building out from the central rule of "Invest in Yourself" (for personal proficiency) with two additional rules: "Engage Today's Talent" (for talent manager) and "Make Things Happen" (for executor).

One of the greatest growing risks for legacy systems is not the applications themselves, but rather finding people with the skills necessary to continue to develop, maintain, and operate them.

In an Agile environment, we are faced with the dynamic evolution of a finite boundary of integrated scope, cost, time, and resources; this finiteness — essential for business management and decisions — is the cradle for project management techniques, tools, methods, and frameworks. The earned value management (EVM) method was first developed to help with managing complex R&D projects mostly characterized by an unstable, volatile, and evolving scope. It is therefore no surprise that EVM applies to Agile projects. (Register for the complimentary How to Use EVM for Agile Projects webinar series now.)

If the right measures are put in place, following the digital trace enables transparency, traceability, and objective insight.

The ease of obtaining, copying, and implementing digital assets means that there is potential for rapid changes in nearly all disruptive business models. This ability to change rapidly is reflected in the enterprise architecture itself, which tends to be relatively simple, modular, and responsive.

For those managing the business outcomes of deploying software systems, it is appropriate to have a balanced view of positive (software quality) and negative (software risk) outcomes in order to deploy typical business risk management analyses in an optimal manner.

Blockchain technology is gaining momentum as a way to build digital rights management (DRM) systems.

To prepare for a recent talk on work-in-process (WIP) limits, I looked into the history of Henry Ford. Ford was one of the most influential pioneers of what we today call “Lean” or “Kanban.” He was the pioneer of almost all of our current industry thinking and was an original thought leader in how modern practitioners put to use Agile software development. What struck me most about Ford was how he exemplified the thinking processes behind the Theory of Constraints (TOC) in most of his actions.

For most insurance companies, now is the time to begin experimenting with AI, learning about what it can do and what will be involved in supporting and maintaining AI-based apps. 

Business architecture provides a basis for defining the target-state IT architecture necessary to move the business toward a cognitive enterprise. 

What is the correlation between the business or operating model and the enterprise architecture? What are the pros and cons of the various enterprise patterns that are a response to these changes? The authors in this issue of CBTJ offer practical answers, ideas, and advice to help you and your EA practice respond to the immediate digital challenge. However, enterprise architecture should also consider the larger future.

Innovative applications that embrace new technologies are fraught with risks, which require innovative approaches for their handling. This Advisor explores some of the risks and challenges in applying the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud in the business space and discusses challenges that arise due to lack of interoperability and some practical standards in the IoT and cloud space.

Change does not happen overnight. The obvious differences between digital leadership qualities and ways of working and traditional process-oriented cultures can lead to a number of conflicts. Digital leaders have to deal with these conflicts to be successful in their journey, making tradeoffs that are likely to yield the most value. This Advisor highlights some of the key implicit conflicts and possible tradeoffs that digital leadership can consider.

Mutual respect is one of the core attributes an Agile organization needs to develop. It is the foundation to establishing a common vision between management and staff.

An organization with an established business architecture practice can greatly accelerate and improve the results of its digital transformation — because of the enterprise framework and the cohesive strategy execution approach that are inherent to business architecture.

The single most important process change that you can make in “climbing the ladder” from a tactical EA program to a strategic one is to connect business architecture with the PMO.