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.
Innovating the (Architectural) Innovators
Can you afford not to see significant architectural changes occurring in and around your industry? Perhaps changes in other industries may also stimulate thinking along different lines? Do you have people who think about architectural changes and dominant designs? Does your organization cultivate such people and enable them? These are important questions when the ground underneath shifts rapidly, but maybe the most important questions in this Advisor are: Do you know, or do you really know? And, do you have the ability to know the difference enough to act upon it?
All About the Data: Seeking Information Superiority
The key element of competitive advantage lies in access to the data.
Defining IT Failure Down
If we don’t as an IT community start to stop excusing IT failure — or, worse, normalizing it as a success in disguise — then as IT becomes even more embedded into our daily lives with the Internet of Things, we'd better get used to living with very mediocre systems. And we had better not complain when the public decides that the reputations tech workers deserve are lower than those of politicians.
Time for a Change? Manage the Costs
Measuring and calculating the cost of change can affect many of our decisions.
Where In the World Are Rules-Based Expert Systems? On the Path to Cognitive Computing
By the end of the 1980s, most AI researchers had stopped focusing on rules-based approaches and had begun to explore other approaches that seemed to offer better chances for learning and more flexible ways of storing knowledge.
Walk the Talk: Building Conversational Business Applications
This Advisor considers what kind of architecture is required to support conversational interfaces.
7 Challenges Confronting Enterprise Blockchain Initiatives
Blockchain technology continues to capture considerable interest among organizations and the media. But what are the major issues organizations are encountering in their efforts to adopt blockchain? The latest results from our ongoing survey on blockchain adoption identify seven key issues and concerns organizations said are negatively impacting their blockchain efforts.
3 Habits in Support of the First Pillar of Lean Leadership: Respect for People
The values contained in the House of Lean for the 21st Century give us guidance as to the mindset required to succeed, but it takes concrete practices to bring these values to life. Given that leadership is the foundation of Lean, the effective Lean leader needs to form habits that align to the pillars that support the goal. In this Advisor, we explore the habits needed to build a pillar of respect for people and culture.
Wrap Your Head Around the 3 Types of Contemporary Innovation
Since the business context is continuously changing, an organization’s efforts to innovate cannot be based on rigidly defined goals; instead, they must be driven by a set of guidelines for activities that can produce business value.
EA-Enabled Agile at Scale
To successfully support the adoption of Agile and to scale Agile throughout the enterprise, progressive EA leaders must focus on finding ways to provide just-in-time, relevant, and useful input into the process.
Beyond Fintech: New Frontiers — An Introduction
This issue focuses on key topics of interest for financial services organizations, namely equity crowdfunding, legacy systems migration, robo-advisors, test outsourcing, and refining the reconciliation process.
Solving the Puzzle: Streamlining Regulatory Reporting with Semantic Ontologies
For financial institutions, regulatory reporting has become something of a jigsaw puzzle — one that must be cobbled together into a coherent picture from several boxes into which the pieces from different puzzles have been put over time, for an audience that will never appreciate the pain involved in organizing that picture or the time and manpower required to build it.
Google Plays Go, Again
Here comes the automation of innovation. Organizations that move quickly and introduce these systems are going to be well placed to gain insights that will give them serious competitive advantages to their more staid competitors.
Influencing Collaboration
This Advisor identifies four actions we can take to encourage others to contribute and collaborate in a group setting.
Toward Strategic Relevance: Connecting Business Architecture with Enterprise Architecture
For your EA program to “climb the ladder” to strategic relevance, one of the most important investments is in an integrated business architecture practice.
The 3 Vital Performance Dimensions of EVM: Scope, Cost, and Time
In the so-called traditional scenario of “stable requirements,” we can address this need using the earned value management (EVM) method, nowadays globally acknowledged as the most complete and rigorous approach.
To Market, To Market: Blockchain Rising
I predict that within the next three years the market for blockchain solutions will have progressed to the extent that the key infrastructure components will be available, security issues will be identified and mapped out, and experts available in applying the technology to specific applications and industries will start becoming available, thus providing the support for implementing and running blockchain applications on a daily operational basis.
Implementing Design Thinking in Agile
This Advisor presents an overview of improving Agile techniques and practices by using design thinking within the Agile space and describes three techniques from design thinking methodologies that tend to yield benefits to Agile practitioners.
Bitcoin: In the Eye of the Beholder
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are a borderless means for indiscriminate global economic participation. This will make it a significant part of the financial industry.
What Is Driving Cognitive Computing?
Several trends and developments — stemming from advances in IT and rising consumer/social expectations — are driving the application of cognitive computing for commercial and enterprise use.
Integrating Architecture and Agile Practices
This Advisor discusses how scaling architectural process and artifacts to suit Agile practices enhances the value of the architect's role.
The Innovation Imperative and Challenges in Big Data, IoT, and the Cloud
Innovation's potential is brought to fruition only when it is complemented by back-end cloud technologies.
Time Matters: The Time-Driven Company
There is no technology that will allow us to generate more time or produce a substitute for time, but technological advances do enable more efficient use of time, thus maximizing its utility.
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: EVM for Agile
The EVM method was first developed to help manage complex R&D projects, which are mostly characterized by an unstable, volatile, and evolving scope. It is therefore no surprise that EVM applies to Agile projects.
4 Steps to a Strategic Architecture for Digital Transformation
Successful digital transformation requires strategic architecture thinking.