With today’s enormous amount of data sharing being a relatively new battleground for smart device manufacturers, the industry appears to be more about lowering costs and introducing highly marketable features. Consequently, introducing strong security is very rarely a priority — and is also a technological challenge due to relatively limited processing, energy, and network resources for wearables.

IT is often highly complex and difficult for nonspecialists to understand, yet it is crucial for business executives to understand enough about IT to make far-reaching strategic decisions. IT portfolio management (ITPM) forges a critical link between the strategic planning process and the PM process, enabling management to reach consensus on the best use of resources by focusing on projects strategically aligned with the goals of the business.

Today, big data platform providers and third-party security vendors offer enterprise-grade security solutions designed specifically for protecting and securing data maintained in Hadoop and other big data environments.

The impact that providing a capability catalog and roadmap for the portfolio would have on Agile leaders is significant. Linking this portfolio catalog and roadmap to other efforts and capabilities across the enterprise ensures that there is continued alignment to the enterprise’s strategic direction and that teams are not recreating redundant capabilities but rather leveraging and reusing current capabilities in new, innovative ways.

Beyond buzzwords, what we are seeing is a seismic shift in the role of technology in organizations. Technology is more and more embedded in everything we do as we move into an increasingly hyper-connected digital world, a world in which technology is driving significant social, organizational, and industry change.

The discipline of business architecture, which sits between strategy and execution, interprets the strategy to identify tangible changes to the business and guide design that will realize the desired future.

Because of its capabilities in security, privacy, and data management, blockchain has captured the interest and resources of the financial industry as well as numerous other major sectors — from music to healthcare and even governments — around the globe.

It is evident that traditional process- and workflow-oriented leadership styles are not enough to make organizations successful in their digital transformation journey. Digital leaders should have an entrepreneurial mindset, believe in collaboration, and exhibit the qualities of an adventurer. Below are the key differentiating qualities that digital leadership should have to carry out digital transformation and operations successfully.

Organizational change management is about changing the way that people think and behave — in that order. Unfortunately, change management programs that are begun after the digital transformation has been designed focus primarily on behavioral change. They neglect to engage people in changing their mindset and way of thinking. Any behavioral change that is not preceded by a change in thinking will not last. As soon as the pressure is off, as soon as managers turn their backs, people will revert to the way they’ve always done things. And the way they’ve always done things is ­continually reinforced by the organizational culture.

In this issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal, we have asked our authors to share their thoughts related to two concepts: information superiority and digital capital. Our assumption was that these concepts are particularly relevant to business leaders, who are right to believe that “digital” and “hypercompetition” are the “new normal” in business. 

Digital transformation is a journey of creating and combining specific business capabilities so that they give organizations a competitive advantage in the digital excellence domains in a way that reflects their chosen mix of strategic options. This journey is shaped also by the availability of critical resources — data, analytical skills, technology proficiency. It is very often seriously affected by the state of business and IT architecture, the style of integration, and data quality. It seems wise to focus on domains of excellence where the resources are available or can be relatively easily developed or acquired.

Data-centric protection and security focuses on the organization's sensitive data as opposed to its overall computer networks and applications, as is the case with the more traditional IT security models that typically operate by implementing a well-defended security perimeter designed to keep bad actors out. This is accomplished by locating, identifying, and cataloging sensitive data as well as by applying encryption, data masking, and policy-based data access controls (and end-user monitoring) to protect data residing across multiple enterprise environments. But to what extent are organizations adopting, or planning to adopt, data-centric protection and security practices?

Traditional banks, big tech firms, and new fintech startup ventures are the three major players that together will help shape the new financial services landscape. Are they all going to compete? Not necessarily! We are already seeing the first forms of collaboration between these different players materialize.

One major obstacle to business agility and innovation is technology debt (TD). TD obstacles manifest themselves as non-IT executives complain that “we can’t launch this new product/service as our IT systems will not allow us to.” From an IT standpoint, the inability of existing IT systems to support the proposed new product/service launch is a result of past technology “workarounds” that were implemented to meet an accelerated timeline or reduced budget.

Broadly, there are two facets to the people architecture. One facet is the desire to imagine; to make things better, to exploit new ways and technologies, to renew and replace the old. The other is grounded in the reality of the things, the people, and the ways of doing that took years to get to where they are today, with all their intricacies and nuances: the rust. But it is in the space between the imagination and the rust that things either turn to dust or get forged into what they must.

Organizations are increasingly using big data platforms and applications to store and analyze large collections of structured, unstructured, and semistructured data. Key technologies include Hadoop and its associated components (e.g., Spark, Hive, HBase, Storm) as well as NoSQL and in-memory analytic databases. A recent Cutter survey sought to understand the extent that organizations use big data environments for their sensitive data needs.

Digital transformation needs a robust platform that binds the systems of records and integration with the systems of innovation. This digital platform that sits at the cusp of integration and innovation provides the ability to bind the core processes with the new digital processes in order to allow building of new channel applications.

There are a lot of use cases for blockchain technology, and the business case for each needs to be developed. A lot of companies exist with a blockchain solution for a problem that does not exist — essentially a hammer searching for a nail. The use cases outlined in this Advisor have common benefits focused on simplifying existing relationships, reducing fraud, and improving the speed of commerce.

With the rush to new digital platforms, technology leaders often underestimate the value of continuous improvement. Many see it as a waste to invest in “fixing the old,” as it would leave fewer resources to develop “the new.” DevOps practices and cloud platforms can catapult enterprise technology forward, improving consumer responsiveness, time to market, throughput, and resilience, but they depend on continuous improvement to become internalized and self-sustaining.

Cloud and SaaS provide important potential advantages to financial organizations. But while “light-touch” SaaS applications may entice professionals in the short term, such arrangements have the potential to create serious regulatory problems, which may in turn cause considerable overheads as well as costly fines and reputational damage. Consequently, in the medium to longer term, SaaS arrangements — shadow or otherwise — may prove to be anything but light-touch for CEOs, CIOs, heads of regulated business units, and compliance and risk managers.

Leaders peering over the edge of the horizon of their own and adjacent industries might wonder, “What are companies that have achieved digital success doing differently?” 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.

Organizations are starting to use blockchain to develop a new breed of transactional business applications designed to embed trust, transparency, efficiency, and accountability into the process of sharing and transferring a broad range of assets in a business network. These business blockchains are not limited to currencies. Assets ranging from equipment, shipping containers, and warranties to healthcare records and data related to supply chains can now be shared, exchanged, or transferred via blockchain networks more efficiently, and with greater collaboration and less risk to shareholders, than is practical using traditional centralized approaches.

The success of Global Business Services (GBS) in managing this transition and in meeting the evolving expectations of business divisions has contributed to a sea change in Dell EMC in which all departments are being asked to align for business-driven digital transformation. This has prompted discussion around the changing value proposition of GBS over time, which began as a set of orthogonal and functional agreements but has transitioned into a process-entangled, ­bottom-up engine of collaboration, innovation, and ­personal development.

Attempting more demanding endeavors requires innovative methods for delivering, guiding, and managing projects. Meanwhile, the rise in complexity and uncertainty demands new ways of thinking about projects.

Not every business has the same problems, but the threats to information security are likely similar.