Digital transformation requires investing early in digital technologies and involves organization-wide changes that pose significant challenges and uncertainties to business leaders. There are many research reports available today on digital transformation technologies, business models, and potential strategies. This Executive Update complements such efforts by assessing the enabling factors, organizational readiness, and skills gaps in Asia-Pacific for 2017. This research was undertaken in conjunction with the IT Conclave organized by the SP Jain School of Global Management in Mumbai, India; Dubai, the United Arab Emirates (UAE); Singapore; and Sydney, Australia, in February 2017. The survey involved more than 150 leaders and business professionals from over 120 organizations. The results were further discussed at IT Conclave events, and inputs were considered in drafting this Update.

Cutter Consortium has been conducting a survey to gain insight into how organizations are adopting — or planning to adopt — blockchain technology. We are also seeking to identify important issues organizations are encountering or foresee encountering in their blockchain efforts. This Executive Update, Part I in a series, examines initial survey findings pertaining to the general status of blockchain in the enterprise as well as whether enterprises have dedicated groups to lead the blockchain initiative. 

To gain insight into the various trends and issues impacting enterprise data security and protection practices, and the extent to which organizations employ data-centric security practices and tech­nologies, Cutter Consortium surveyed 50 organizations worldwide. This Executive Update examines problems and considerations surrounding the protection of sensitive data in Internet of Things (IoT) devices, platforms, and applications.

Digital transformation leaders and enterprise architects have a choice to make in developing their digital backbone. The digital backbone can be an asset in ensuring that digital transformation efforts are carried out in such a way that they align to the enterprise and its approach to transformation. This Executive Update explores how it is essential to ensure that the methodologies, skills and talent, and technology tool chain and infrastructure are created in such a way that they can be easily consumed and adjusted as the company changes.

The following is a “Tale of Three Companies” in which I had personal experience leading/managing their outsourcing efforts at some level. In this tale, I offer an overview of key areas and some observations concerning those three experiences and then provide a brief conclusion.

In a recent Cutter Webinar, “Cognitive Digital Transformation: The Next Wave,” Cutter Senior Consultant Paul Harmon considered the growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive technologies in all aspects of business. He argued that cognitive technologies will simply extend the ongoing digital transformation of today’s enterprises, requiring them to reconsider their business models and understand fully why they will need to incorporate intelligent elements to remain competitive. Paul’s webinar concluded with a lively Q&A session. In this Executive Update, we highlight some of his thoughtful responses.

This Executive Update describes six leadership strategies essential to successful Lean-Agile transformation, together with one bonus strategy (the “+1”). All seven strategies describe patterns observed across a range of organizations in the public and private sectors. They and their accompanying pitfalls highlight the need for a number of specific leadership behaviors.

In this Executive Update, we examine how three different IT groups used data virtualization for purposes other than supporting user queries to deliver significant benefits to their organizations.

To ensure that the focus of any analysis of technical debt includes the real causes of technical debt, we must define it in terms that are unbiased relative to cause. One approach that meets this constraint is a definition not in terms of cause, but in terms of consequence. 

To gain insight into the various trends and issues impacting enterprise data security and protection practices, and the extent to which organizations employ data-centric security practices and tech­nologies, Cutter Consortium surveyed 50 organizations worldwide. Here in Part III of this Executive Update series, we examine survey findings pertaining to the specific issues and concerns involving the protection of data maintained in big data platforms and applications.

In this Executive Update, the last of three related Updates, we evaluate how financial organizations are responding to the new challenges of cloud outsourcing and continue to distill our findings based on research and data collection conducted from 2014-2016. Using insight from our interviewees, we share some action points through a framework that enables organizations to manage this increasingly complex, crucial area. We also outline some good practices for managing cloud-based innovation on a continuing basis in order to maintain daily compliance. 

The IoT is rich with opportunity — and risk. Designers must proactively consider the privacy implications of the design choices they make. Designs should help people make intelligent, rational decisions about their interactions with sensors and devices, not obfuscate those decisions. When the benefits appear to outweigh the risks, society as a whole should be informed, educated, and engaged to develop appropriate social norms to be followed.

As the amount of data generated by personal devices increases, supported by the trend of making these devices more personal (i.e., wearable, sewable), so too will the risks of personal privacy violation rise. From the technological perspective, it is important to follow privacy-by-design approaches, incorporating both data encryption and data anonymization techniques. From the perspective of enterprises and users, understanding that “wearing means sharing” is a valuable first step.

Social collaboration is not about technology. It’s about connecting people, and it’s changing the way business is being conducted. Similarly, gamification is not about games. It’s about motivating the per­sonal and professional behaviors that drive business value. Together, social collaboration and gamifi­cation help companies reap great benefits — among them, the ability to deepen customer relationships, drive operational efficiencies, and optimize their workforce. 

As companies strive to be more nimble and agile across their value chains, they are rapidly evolving their information management and analytics capabilities. Business intelligence and data warehouse (BI/DW) competency centers need to transform themselves to stay relevant and help their companies build a competitive advantage. This Executive Update provides a description of some key changes you can make to start transforming your BI/DW competency center in a cost-effective manner. Some of these changes include enabling advanced analytics, accelerating speed to market with Agile and DevOps, and empowering citizen developers and data scientists.

Our analysis in this Executive Update builds upon the challenges and risks we outlined in a previous Update, which showed how managers in regulated firms face a quandary: whether to play it safe and lock out cloud-based innovations and correspondingly lock themselves out of related innovations or to negotiate a rocky course, balancing the risks associated with these technologies and regulatory expectations. This Update provides a detailed assessment to help management understand when to strategically engage with cloud technologies and when to avoid them, thereby helping executives balance the need to innovate with the need to manage compliance risk. Our assessment, based on research and data collection conducted from 2014-2016, allows managers to evaluate the criticality of impacted services to maintaining compliance along with managers’ ability to understand and control transparency and supervision over cloud arrangements.

Knowledge must be discovered and utilized in context. Creating our own route in our own work will enable us to develop our personal theory of problem solving, thus making sense of our deliberations and dis­coveries. Educating learners engaged in professional practice in-the-unfamiliar requires us to abandon the safety of universal theory and instead embrace the principles of personal discovery, reflective practice, sensemaking, and the development of capability.

This Executive Update focuses on the execution of digital strategies and begins with an overview of digitization along with the distinct categories in which transformation programs fall. It highlights the responsibilities and accountabilities of IT leaders in enabling digital transformation. This Update also examines key technology enablers that underpin successful digitization efforts.  

In Part II of this series, we examine survey findings pertaining to the biggest perceived threats to sensitive data protection efforts as well as issues and concerns for protecting data in cloud platforms and applications.

In this Executive Update, the first of three related articles, we examine financial services as an example of a highly regulated industry and outline the regulatory landscape that creates points of tension for cloud adoption. We also incorporate perspectives from a differentiated range of stakeholders, including lawyers, technologists, compliance executives, and outsourcing managers.

I've been in the software development industry for over 30 years, which is more than half my life. I love it, but I’ve had to undergo many changes over the years to stay current and valuable to the industry. Accord­ing to application developer Bob Martin, it’s possible that the number of professional software developers entering the job market doubles every five years. This means that 50% of software developers working professionally have less than two and a half years’ experience on the job. This is a scary thought for an industry that literally runs the rest of the world. This trend has been building for decades, and it’s getting worse. Because of the high demand for skilled programmers, computer science and software engineering curricula are now among the most popular in higher education, and there’s no sign of this letting up. But the skills students learn in school don’t always match well with what’s needed on the job.

Why might you want to model strategies? Well, my experiences in working with hundreds of organizations around the world suggest that strategies are often unclear, ambiguous, or muddled. Now there are plenty (possibly good) reasons why this might be the case — some of which I’ll cover here, but from an enterprise architecture (EA) perspective, one of the architect’s key roles is to proactively manage and architect change … and this requires some sense of future direction. So, in this Update, we look at some ways architects help key decision makers form, manage, and use their strategic knowledge in collaboration with enterprise architects.

Data-centric security has been around for a while; however, it is receiving renewed attention as a way to extend data protection and security to end-point and edge devices as well as computing associated with cloud, mobile, and IoT technologies. Such applications can be complicated to protect because they tend to stretch the bounds of what we’ve come to consider as quite a well-defined computer network. To gain insight into the various trends and issues impacting enterprise data security and protection practices, and the extent to which organizations employ data-centric security practices and tech­nologies, Cutter Consortium surveyed 50 organizations worldwide. 

I propose a discipline of “teamspotting,” which you can think of as a variety of “management by walking around.” It involves direct observation of the group or its surroundings, supplemented with some models of how a team achieves the intellectual equivalent of sofa lifting.

Designers are working feverishly to add connectivity to products, weighing the potential value to users, as well as risks. For example, the capability exists today to make toilets smart, but is there really a need for a toilet that can be flushed remotely? On the other hand, a smart oven can be triggered remotely to heat up by the time you return from work. It could be a great time saver, but is it a fire risk? As designers grapple with these questions, there are also a host of design issues that they must keep in mind while moving toward IoT capabilities. In this Executive Update, we explore the top 10 design considerations.