CIOs and their teams are now tasked with enabling digital strategies, and many of the user stories target tangible benefits for customers and the organization.

Digital ecosystems are formed by a network of businesses linked together through a collective goal. Success in the financial services sector will increasingly be determined by which ecosystem you choose to participate in and how these ecosystems will compete against each other.

Regardless of whether Agile teams operate with or without a scaled frame­work, the need to match the expectations of the business users on the receiving end of the value generated by the team with the internal measures of throughput is critical. The three challenges described in this Advisor highlight the importance of measuring value in the eyes of the recipient of the output of work, not only the effort generated to attain value.

At the Cutter Digital Transformation & Innovation Bootcamp, Cutter Fellow and Harvard Business School Professor Karim Lakhani talked about digitally-driven disruption of traditional business models for value creation and capture, discussing platform models like Facebook and Twitter. To date, Twitter has clearly done a good job “creating value.” But unlike Facebook, it continues to struggle with the capture part of the equation.

The role of EA leaders in technology innovation is to scan the horizon of emerging technologies to determine how they are being applied and identify opportunities for the organization to innovate for competitive advantage. Once EA leaders have identified and analyzed those opportunities, businesses can formulate strategies for adoption.

Today, when everybody wants to disrupt their own or somebody else’s business, and new technologies that let them do it seem to appear almost daily, people with the “capacity to lead” are critical, and nowhere more than in the exploitation of IT. Obvious though this is, recognizing, empowering, and sustaining good IT leaders has been a challenge. People who can think strategically about what, why, and how to deploy technology but have trouble delivering it — and the reverse — fall short as IT leaders. Both skills are needed, and this edition of Cutter Business Technology Journal covers them in great depth.

The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to garner considerable attention as companies announce they are developing new connected products and services. Of course, this brings up the important topic of to what extent organizations are maintaining sensitive data in IoT devices, platforms, and applications.

For organizations to survive and thrive in the modern world, we should be able to work “remote first”: working online as if we were in the office together. Our companies will only be stronger for it. The things that make remote working successful are the same things we want in place anyway: effortless and fast communication, a shared place for files and conversation, and alignment on a common vision.

Having clearly defined outcomes creates the opportunity for stakeholders to reimagine their business, which informs the shape of future capabilities.

Consumers have become so enamored with mobile, social media, and popular messaging platforms (e.g., Facebook Messenger, Twitter) that they now expect companies to know them individually and to deliver personalized interactions and self-service options in real time. In short, today’s social, technologically savvy consumer forces companies to optimize how they engage with customers and transform the way they conduct marketing, sales, and service.

There is a common set of questions burning in peoples’ minds when they think about the business architect role, whether they are new to the discipline or experienced but seeking to compare approaches. In this Advisor, we address these important questions based on practical experience and best practices employed by a wide range of industries, organizations, and geographies.

Regulatory authorities are becoming increasingly focused on monitoring outsourcing arrangements in the financial services industry.

If you are spending US $50,000+ per month on public cloud, you have likely reached the penultimate rung of cloud torment — a journey from the Plains of Forecasting to the Gates of Commitment — and certainly you want to pass through the Undercroft of Budgetary Responsibility as unscathed as possible. Even those organizations that have been in and around the cloud for some time will need to go deeper to understand how to address challenges to their cloud buyer strategy. What’s around the corner for some CIOs is already a reality for those organizations in the throes of digital revitalization.

The new generation is looking for life-work balance as well as inspiring leaders who will fire them up and motivate them. In the new workplace, company values actually need to mean something. People need to see their leaders living and breathing these values every day.

The execution of digital strategy depends on a strong IT architecture and design. The architecture should also consider the existing application, infrastructure, and processes. The roadmap for successful execution should focus on technology enablers that underpin successful digitization.

Roadmaps have two key functions in strategy planning. The first is to outline planned architectural changes that will deliver the required strategies; the second is to outline alternative ways to achieve the same results.

Thinking in terms of digital business capabilities helps focus on things that need to be done to achieve expected business results.

I have been a member of the “gig” economy for the last 20 years — I just didn’t know it.

It is the enterprise architects’ responsibility to successfully implement and grow big data technology adoption. The real challenge, from my experience, lies in managing the various stakeholders involved and onboarding them successfully onto the big data transformation journey.

Just as recent global events have given us reason to pause and reflect, the pace of technology emergence and disruption is proving to be a source of inspiration and uncertainty. Transitioning to a digital world is front-of-mind for many business executives, yet finding the right path is an ongoing challenge. So we asked Cutter’s team of experts for their insights on some of the technologies, trends, and strategies that will be relevant in 2017 and beyond. In typical Cutter Business Technology Journal fashion, our call produced a wide range of opinions and reflections worthy of consideration as you chart your business technology journey for the new year.

Human communication is based on natural language. Teaching computers to understand natural language is obviously a requirement, but our communication uses more than just voice (speech). An important part of human communication is our ability to see and understand what we see. Providing visual recognition capabilities to machines is the next big step in teaching them to understand a person when they speak.

Japan is placing considerable emphasis on the use of AI applications and it will prove an interesting source of new information on upcoming developments in the application of cognitive technology.

Ask any developer and they’ll tell you that they waste most of their time debugging or adding features to code after it is initially written. Many systems have been hacked up so much that fixing one bug can sprout several more and what should take a few hours to fix ends up taking days, or even weeks. But with test-first development, developers find many errors before they can become bugs. Tests instantly catch errors and problems, not only in the current module but also against the whole system. This helps developers write software that is compatible across the whole system.

An architectural risk assessment is not a penetration test or merely a vulnerability scan. It is an engineering process with the aim of understanding, defining, and defending all the functional output from customers, line workers, corporate staff, and client-server interactions. Performed correctly, it will empower the technology staff and enable the business to focus less on security and more on customers.

By understanding the intent of human language, a cognitive system can correlate a user’s question with other sources of data to put it into context for a specific situation.