Cognitive computing is starting to impact the enterprise by changing the way data is analyzed and the manner in which employees and customers interact with computerized systems. This is happening across various industries, ranging from healthcare and retail to banking and financial services. 

Digital solutions are intelligently and seamlessly wrapping themselves around the complex lives of consumers in a bid to deliver deeply personalized services as and when required. Consumer expectations of the digital world are heightened by the resulting experiences, which ultimately creates further demands on organizations. If we wish to take advantage of this virtuous cycle, we must gaze into the future and consider the complex systems of interactions that will emerge between more demanding humans and smarter technologies. 

The habits of thought that we learn and practice as we conduct EA can influence our thinking and behavior in broad aspects of our lives. Indeed, wise use of EA can train us to be better thinkers; unwise use can reinforce our bad habits. This Executive Update explores how we should revisit the original intent of EA and bring the human element back into EA practice. Not because we failed in our attempt to automate enterprise architecture (thank goodness), but because it is the right thing to do.

People in every organization that has Agile teams reach the point where they ask themselves: how far do we go with Agile? As we explore in this Executive Update, the answer depends on the strength of the Agile principles — not just in the teams — but in the larger organization.

As we explore in this Executive Update, understanding the driving forces behind digital transformation, its effects, and the role that certain enterprise architecture (EA) best practices can play in embracing digital transformation will help organizations benefit in this challenging time.

Enterprise architects are well aware that their subject is multidimensional and complex. So how on earth do architects manage versions across architectures, building blocks, components, and artifacts? There is surprisingly little written about this topic, despite its obvious importance. In this Executive Update, I hope to rectify this by outlining current best practices on the subject of architecture versioning.

Software has been a crucible of management practice. Developing software requires a wide mix of types of work from mostly routine to highly innovative. For that reason, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to software development. While Agile does not fully solve the development management problem and is still evolving, there are important lessons we can learn from Agile principles for a wide range of business practices.

Clearly, one of the top business drivers behind crowdsourcing is that it can be relatively cheaper than outsourcing. An equally important business driver is that it enables businesses to promote creativity and excel at innovation while leveraging resources and collaborating inside and outside their own organizational boundaries. The creativity component arises from the fact that the ideation of a concept desired or solicited by the business or enterprise requires vision and resourcefulness. It involves the imaginative mindset of a varied and often intuitive, skilled group of professionals as well as a broad range of users (specifically, untapped expert customers). The innovation element is also significant. Creativity, creative thinking, and intuition have a common connection to innovation. Creative thinking offers an avenue for intuition to generate pragmatic ideas, and ideas transform into innovation. More important, crowdsourcing establishes a new channel for communication and collaboration among external users and experts and an enter­prise’s employees, partners, and associates. This collaborative effort ultimately instills the spirit of innovation in the enterprise. This Executive Update explores how to best leverage crowdsourcing in your enterprise, using a case study in digital healthcare.

The rapid pace of technology innovation that characterizes the digital economy is altering established competitive landscapes, breaking industry barriers, and redefining the core parameters of customer relationships. Competing in this disruptive, digitally fueled business environment — and realizing the unprecedented growth potential of digital business — requires a level of agility and responsiveness that cannot be delivered by conventional business strategies and operating models. 

In this Executive Update, we explore the implications of four imperatives to identify the key architectural characteristics and capability foundations that define a digital enterprise. 

Leadership is absolutely critical for high-performance outsourcing. In this realm, however, it differs from the typical management narrative of a single individual who inspires and influences others. The key difference is that high-performance outsourcing requires effective leadership pairings, not a sole leadership figure. And leadership pairings between parties is not just at the top; it needs to cascade through the formal biparty hierarchy and include opinion leaders as well. This Executive Update explains leadership pairing and how it saved a contract in default.

This Executive Update examines key trends and developments impacting the market for, and the application of, data-centric security and protection technologies and practices that organizations should track in 2016 and beyond.

This Executive Update focuses on the opportunities for, and the challenges in, leveraging value in unstructured data — in particular, text. 

Buy-in has been the mantra for consultants for as long as I can remember. Besides “walk the talk” and “be the change,” “getting buy-in” has been the most overused and misguided principle ever to haunt the halls of organizational development. If I sound jaded, I am. I’m tired of the blame game. I’m tired of fixes that are more simple than possible.

Content management is a fundamental building block of your digital business strategy. Digitization and the potential it offers for streamlined, efficient, and lower-cost management of content is extensive and largely untapped. Enterprises that want to ride the wave of digital transformation must develop a robust model for content management. The roadmap outlined in this Executive Update is a key enabler for enterprises to implement healthy digitization and simplification. 

The MMVM project, a collaboration between Cutter Fellow Bob Benson and my­self, was developed on the premise that traditional IT evaluation methods, which focus mainly on technical aspects such as technology performance, availability levels, and monetary cost-benefit relationships, are unable to deliver insights into the business value delivered by IT investments. Given this premise, we determined that it was necessary to build a new model — discussed in this Executive Update — that could go beyond the usual constraints, while at the same time allowing us to better understand the following aspects of each organization:

The potential of gamification as a business transformation and performance improvement tool is immense — if done right. The focus of this Executive Update is enterprise gamification: gamifying business scenarios and processes to derive more value.

In the November-December 2015 issue of Cutter IT Journal (CITJ), I shared “Five Steps to Digital Transformation.” This Executive Update picks up where that discussion left off and dives deeper into the front end of the transfor­­mation process.

Localization is an inevitable requirement of mobility. However, once an individual enters a building, GPS becomes inaccessible, Wi-Fi triangulation may be unreliable, and cellular triangulation may be impossible. As we illustrate in this Executive Update, the next area of importance is indoor location, which continues to lag due to various obstacles.

The use of vendor panels has been standard practice in business and government for some time; indeed, you probably don’t give it much thought. However, panels are grossly underutilized, despite receiving the highest “very satisfied” score with customers relative to sole sourcing (single suppliers) and head contracting (prime contractors with subcontractors).

Explaining the poor utilization of panels is not so simple. There are a myriad of traps that organizations fall into. This Executive Update explains the common traps and provides the tricks to leverage your use of panels.

This Executive Update discusses the strategies and objectives of automating the SDLC processes through IT tools, the execution methodology and framework, key execution challenges, and the benefits derived. We use a real-life case study at a large stock exchange based in the Asia-Pacific region to describe a pragmatic and holistic approach for automation that resulted in substantial ROI.

Many CIOs and CTOs have no idea how the business units see “participatory governance” or “digital trans­formation.” Exhausted from the climb, or distracted by the demands of IT-as-usual, they have no energy left for personal or professional transformations. This Executive Update is not for business-as-usual CIOs and CTOs. It is for real technology chiefs who want to participate in — and lead — digital transformation.

Whether you call it a “measurement meeting,” “sunset review,” or “project post-mortem,” you should always hold a meeting of this nature at the conclusion of your business process management system (BPMS) project in order to determine and analyze project-specific elements deemed successful or unsuccessful. The agenda for such a meeting is singularly interesting because the business process experts — who have just completed a business process transformation for other experts in the organization — now face the task of analyzing their own established process and procedures to improve the organization’s existing processes.

Mobile app security is a problem for the individual user, for the corporation, for the app developer, for the network provider, and for any software or access point available for exploitation. The seriousness and wide extent of these vulnerabilities define the “Great App Trap.” Without sufficient care, it is easy to overlook any of the innumerable issues. 

In today’s world of business dependence on technology, it is nearly impossible to separate business continuity planning from information security governance and IT governance. At the same time, many organizations continue to deal with these important issues as separate and distinct activities. Often, business continuity is a business operations responsibility, while information security and technology governance are left to the IT department. Harmonizing these activities can streamline planning, manage costs better, and improve an organization’s ability to react appropriately and quickly when a business-impacting event occurs.

This Executive Update examines key trends and developments affecting the market for, and the application of, data management and analytics that organizations should track in 2016.