Agility does not come easily; it is more a question of culture and values than a question of using specific methods and tools. Using a self-assessment tool, this Executive Update describes how organizations can measure their agility.

Cutter Consortium is conducting a series of surveys on how organizations are adopting, or planning to adopt, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. We also seek to identify important issues and other considerations they are encountering or foresee encountering in their efforts. Here in Part V, we look at findings pertaining to the industries and domains where organizations see AI having its most significant impact.

Agile-at-scale relates to scaling Agile methods for software development use enterprise-wide or on large software development efforts. Scaling has been key as organizations try to tap the benefits of Agile methods to deliver their software products quicker, more cheaply, and with higher quality. This Executive Update presents conclusions based on the analysis of data from over 5,000 software projects fielded by about 500 organizations.

“A culture transformed” means reaching an elusive cultural end state within a business. There are mile markers on this transformative journey, many of them technological, but rarely do we include cultural milestones within the scope of a digital transformation project.

Despite general agreement among researchers and academics of the need for board-level involvement in IT governance, it appears that in practice this is more the exception than the rule. Given the prevalence of this issue, we have sought to answer the question, “What is the state of the art of the research domain of board-level IT governance?” In this Executive Update, we share our findings on the various determinants, theories, and outcomes surrounding board-level IT governance and share some practical guidance.

Here in Part III, we begin to explore what type of process might be employed at a business analysis level when using the ADF, starting with an examination of some ADF activities and thinking about the inputs, steps, and outputs produced. We then delve into how business analysis fits into the ADF for the early and continuous delivery of valuable system capabilities.

Cutter Consortium is conducting a series of surveys on how organizations are adopting, or planning to adopt, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. We also seek to identify important issues and other considerations they are encountering or foresee encountering in their efforts. Here in Part IV, we look at survey findings concerning the various AI technologies organizations are interested in adopting.

A business architecture tool provides a repository for maintaining business architecture content and the ability to generate a wide array of blueprints and reports, which are then used for purposes of analysis and communication in various business scenarios. 

In this Executive Update, we take a deeper look at the ADF and examine some of its aspects in more detail. Along the way, we illustrate the concepts of the Agile epic and story.

Given the risk/reward tradeoff inherent in disruptive technology adoption, this Executive Update aims to identify the motives, pressures, and efforts that influence continued adoption intention and usage of a disruptive technology after the initial adoption stage. 

Cutter Consortium is conducting a series of surveys on how organizations are adopting, or planning to adopt, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. We also seek to identify important issues and other considerations they are encountering or foresee encountering in their efforts. Here in Part III, we look at survey findings concerning the benefits and goals organizations hope to achieve with their AI initiatives.

As IT dependency continues to increase within all industries, IT governance disclosure might well become a critical piece of the non-financial information on most annual reports. As such, boards will increasingly be incentivized to disclose on the matter, increasing their own expectations of executive management. This Executive Update offers some examples from the field for boards and executive management to use to set up and ensure an adequate disclosure strategy.

This Update highlights the role of the cloud in big data strategies. In particular, it builds on the characteristics of the cloud and how big data analytics can utilize them.

This Executive Update is the second in a series that focuses on how to accelerate the development of an organization’s business architecture. It explores how to leverage reference models to further accelerate business architecture development.    

In this Executive Update, I wish to argue that, whatever one thinks of F.A. Hayek’s politics, his work has vital insights to offer those advancing Lean/Agile/DevOps ideas for software development. Here, I focus on his essay “Competition as a Discovery Procedure” and note how similar Hayek’s vision for the role of competition in the market is to the Agile understanding of the importance of the “development” part of the phrase “software development.”

In this Executive Update, we present the Data Value Map (DVM), a discursive template that facilitates the development of a shared understanding around data. The template helps enable open conver­sations and a co-construction of understanding between the parties involved, which can promote a value-driven approach to data projects.

The objective of this Update is to present an overview of an Agile development framework (ADF) as a set of different perspectives covering artifacts, roles, and activities, as the elements that populate the framework. Using a set of views, it suggests how this set of perspectives and elements may help us, as business analysts, in our understanding of Agile development and where we could next explore the ADF in more detail.

Organizations that desire to leverage business architecture for transformation, better strategy execution, or various types of decision making need to build their business architec­ture knowledgebase first before they can fully benefit from the discipline. This Executive Update is the first in a series that describes how to accelerate the development of an organization’s business architecture. 

Here in Part II, we examine findings pertaining to the establishment of detailed strategies for enterprise adoption and dissemination of AI across the organization, status of “chief AI officers," and budgeting for AI.

In this Executive Update, we recommend some Agile techniques and best practices that retain the benefits of a central EDW while reducing the expense and lack of responsiveness to business needs and change. This data-focused approach offers a way to define user stories in a complex EDW architecture, addressing both application and information value to users and delivering a data warehouse that provides high-quality information and is resilient to change.

In this Executive Update, we devise a conceptual model and practical design guidelines for the holistic management of all resources (e.g., servers, networks, storage, cooling systems) to improve energy efficiency and to reduce the carbon footprints in cloud data centers (CDCs). Furthermore, we discuss the intertwined relationship between energy and reliability for sustainable cloud computing, where we highlight the associated issues. Finally, we propose a set of future areas to investigate in the field and propose further practical developments.

This Executive Update presents a Data-Agile approach designed to apply most Agile principles to a robust soup-to-nuts spiral data integration methodology that includes all the data management activities crucial for enterprise-class data integration projects. 

In this Update, I delve deeper into the importance of the level at which analytics are performed — in particular, the need to pay attention to two keywords: granularity and context. In the absence of awareness of granularity and context, analytics may not provide the necessary value to the business and, as a result, increase business risks. 

In this Executive Update, we explore some of the truths about the business architect role, potential focuses for the role, career path options, and what the future holds for a discipline that finds itself at the heart of business and technology change.

This Executive Update discusses the thinking behind employing artificial intelligence (AI) in an organization through “augmenta­tion.” It presents a case study on how a superregional bank implemented a cogni­tive contact center by using an AI framework called HALO — Human Augmented Learning Organization —  and showcases the meaning of “AI as a practice” within an organization.