Projects are successful when the entire team has the same cohesive vision for the solution. Failure to understand the solution's goal will have rippling effects throughout the project and can lead to failure. It's imperative that the architect and the Agile team members be aligned.

In keeping with digital transformation’s principle of viewing a business holistically across a variety of contexts, viewing how a business delivers stakeholder value is a key element of this holistic perspective. Stakeholders are first and foremost customers, but they also include business partners, other third parties, and internal resources. The value stream provides a nontechnical, value-driven, end-to-end perspective that includes all of the enabling capabilities and participating stakeholders required to deliver the value proposition for that value stream.

AlphaGo is a major breakthrough in cognitive computing; it is a software application that can successfully play the hardest strategy game that people play and can beat human experts at it.

One of the top areas that business architecture teams struggle with is articulating the value of business architecture. Their challenges have less to do with building the business architecture blueprint or even applying it to various scenarios, and more to do with getting the buy-in to be able to do so in the first place. This is partially due to circumstances related to the discipline and its increasing maturity, but also related to the way we communicate.

For enterprises disrupting the marketplace, technology is the key enabler that is helping them create new business models and processes.

Those of us who have been in IT long enough have all witnessed it: the pride tax.

What is the pride tax? It is the amount of money organizations overpay for bad technology decisions. The pride tax takes many forms: runaway enterprise systems projects that persist because leaders don’t want to admit mistakes, choosing wrong vendors based on personal or short-sighted reasons, getting too attached to a set of tools or architectures then defending them at all costs, or even making strategic errors based on unquestioned acceptance of (so-called) best practices or the status quo.

Software has been a crucible of management practice. Since software development requires a wide range of types of work, from mostly routine to highly innovative, and software is often delivered into highly volatile environments, no single management solution can fit all needs.

It is difficult to think “outside the box” when you don’t realize that you are inside a box. This is what happens when enterprises get seduced into romanticizing abstract ideas such as “architecture” or “agility.” It is important to steel oneself to the allure of these siren calls and stay focused on what is of value to the business.

Digital transformation is aspirational. Everyone wants to transform their business, and every business person who's alive knows that transformation now primarily depends upon leveraging the right digital technology at the right time on the right processes and business models at the right cost. With this in mind, let me suggest five steps to successful corporate digital transformation.

In response to the growing number of data breach incidents, the data-centric security vendors have introduced new, advanced database threat-protection solutions employing machine leaning (ML) and behavior analysis techniques designed to monitor and protect databases in real time. Although these advanced solutions are a fairly new development, we wanted to gauge the extent to which organizations are adopting them.

Speed is the new currency of business; customers are expecting organizations to deliver changes and new products at a faster pace. If you’re not going fast enough, you can guarantee that you will be choking on the fumes of organizations that are. New startups are forcing companies to rethink the way they deliver change, but the delivery of the best designs remains an issue. Whilst you may now have your design plainly articulated around the needs of people and outcomes, there is still the matter of resolving the delivery challenge.

When we talk about wearables, most of us have one or two specific devices in mind that we use to add tangibility to our thinking. Yet the examples that occur to us most readily are typically those that require the least effort, rather than those that lend themselves to thorough consideration.

Aspects of planning, implementing, and operating a big data platform affect the traditional enterprise viewpoints of business, technology, information, and infrastructure. Managing the change within one of these viewpoints may be difficult, but due to the technical and business reach of big data technology, ensuring that these changes are cohesive across viewpoints and can be successfully delivered within the organization is even more challenging.

IBM has been working with healthcare providers to develop commercial applications for its industry for almost five years. Two particularly interesting applications are helping transform how patients are diagnosed and treated through the use of individualized, evidence-based medicine. Their development offers insight into the extreme processing and analysis capabilities of cognitive computing and the complexities involved in implementing and training cognitive applications.

Cloud-native design holds a lot of promise. Despite the effort needed to set up the tools, methods, and organizational practice around this approach, more and more organizations are following the successful implementations proven by Netflix and Amazon. But this is not a purely technology-driven trend. Adjusting all parts of your organization to work in a new way will enable your business to gain agility, which is crucial in a digital world. In this Advisor, I discuss the four most important benefits that come from cloud-native design.

[From the Editor: In 2008, Cutter Fellow Rob Austin described the principles that need to be learned — and unlearned — in an innovation economy. Although nearly a decade has passed since he first wrote the words, his guidance still rings true today. We share his message again here.]

I no longer think of technical debt as a problem. It is a symptom — a symptom of deeper system problems in our organizations. Trying to fix technical debt by simply fixing the code is like bailing a boat that is taking on water. It is likely necessary, but it won’t stop the water coming in. We need to find and fix the root causes of the technical debt.

Industry/domain-specific IoT solutions are typically built on the provider’s IoT platform, implementing frameworks and expertise designed to support popular IoT and Industrial Internet use cases. This Advisor provides some examples of what is available on the market.

During the first two quarters of 2016, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey that focused on the methods, tools, and techniques surrounding business adoption of disruptive technologies. We collected data across multiple industries and countries, but primarily from the US. There were just about as many business professionals as technology professionals who responded to the survey. The purpose of the survey was to understand how companies identify, pilot, and deploy specific emerging or disruptive technologies.

Organizational transformations come in many forms, including divestures, joint ventures, taking a business public or private, and general market reorientations. In this Advisor, we explain enterprise architecture (EA) in relation to one type of strategic transformation: acquisitions. Acquisitions are one way that businesses seeking to digitize use to accelerate the journey to their destination and, in our experience, to specifically complement their innovation-management pipeline.

The biggest problem facing organizations in their data protection efforts is finding and classifying sensitive data because they are unsure of where it actually resides. This can be attributed to various reasons.

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 served as a wake-up call not only to Chicago, but to other cities throughout the United States that they needed to do much more to manage their fire risks. This Advisor asserts that as we move into an era of truly hyperconnected, ubiquitous, cyberphysical systems, there could be huge consequences if these systems fail either accidentally or through deliberate actions, and that now, more than ever, there is a need for robust, reliable, and secure approaches across the lifecycle.

Agile can mean different things to different people depending on the context in which it is being discussed. This Advisor shows four different aspects in which we can understand and use Agile in practice: "learning," "doing," "embedding," and "being." Each of these four words can also represent four phases for adoption and transformation of an organization to Agile. 

This Advisor explores how to define and implement the target-state architecture for risk data aggregation and reporting, including the three main aspects of technology, governance, and process reengineering.

Capabilities are the main link between business architecture and IT architecture in general, and digital transformation in particular. Not all capabilities can be automated, but as a rule, the greater the level of capability automation, the greater the degree of efficiency, effectiveness, and digitization.