This issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal explores various angles to big data with a focus on the trends in predictive analytics, ML, IoT, and the cloud.

This issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal explores various angles to big data with a focus on the trends in predictive analytics, ML, IoT, and the cloud.

Businesses hoping for increased customer engagement must fully consider customer experience management (CEM), or be left lagging behind their competition.

This Advisor provides a hands-on list of five Agile planning activities for executives who are actively involved in large-scale software deliveries in their companies.

The adoption of business architecture has continued to increase globally — and at a faster pace than ever — demonstrating that the discipline is here to stay. This Advisor provides a brief reflection on the state of business architecture to date and a glimpse into the future.

Governments worldwide are seeking to apply blockchain to a range of applications and domains to streamline and secure information systems and to better serve their citizens.

Governments worldwide are seeking to apply blockchain to a range of applications and domains to streamline and secure information systems and to better serve their citizens.

Agile is all about learning. But do Agile leaders know how and what to teach?

To meet the challenge of insurtechs, incumbent companies need to develop a clear strategy to guide the following aspects of engagement with them: a holistic approach, an insurtech evaluation framework, and an engagement model between the insurtech and the incumbent. This Advisor describes these three aspects in greater detail.

In the heat of practicing architecture within organizations, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that “architecture” is not a real thing. It is a paradigm: a metaphor transplanted from other fields in which the idea of architecture was firmly and usefully established.

As with other data-intensive technologies, collecting and analyzing data from Internet of Things (IoT) deployments requires sound data management strategies and tactics. Col­lecting and analyzing this data can be generalized to include three distinct processes: (1) data collection and storage, (2) data integration, and (3) data analysis (see Figure 1). In this Advisor, we examine each of these processes.

Extracting business agility from a big data strategy requires an all-encompassing, holistic approach to the technology, the analytics, and all other aspects of an organization.

Effective CIOs must demonstrate both operational and strategic leadership. Although it is unclear how and when CIOs make the transition from operational to strategic leadership, we argue that the transition depends on the accumulation of transitional capital. Timing and sequencing of CIO actions are critical to the accumulation of this transitional capital. Thus, strategic CIO leadership is earned and is contingent upon actions of the CIO in building operational excellence and social capital, sequencing and kairotic timing of these actions to accumulate transitional capital, and achieving acceptance by the top management team.

What is the role of a Major Incident Manager (MIM)? Should he or she be technically skilled or business savvy or process oriented? This Advisor suggests some core competencies for MIMs. 

Based on budgeting plans revealed in our survey that asked 103 organizations about their efforts to utilize blockchain technology, 2018 could prove a breakout year for organizations getting their blockchain initiatives underway.

Though innovation and disruptive technologies are mentioned as key themes for most organizations, many times the focus seems to divert to incremental improvements rather than preparing for major breakthroughs that could disrupt and add value to the market, economy, customers, and industry.

In this on-demand webinar, Cutter Senior Consultant Bhuvan Unhelkar goes in depth on why innovators in such a dynamic business space need to be extremely flexible and agile and why understanding the business value of innovations requires imagination and a capacity to map those innovations to existing business opportunities and challenges. He also reveals how big data, the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Cloud necessitate agility and imagination in order to demonstrate the value of an innovation.

The emergence of CX design as a key discipline practiced by many organizations has opened up some questions about how it relates to business architecture.

Connected insurance (from wearables usage to mobile health appli­cations) presents great potential for both the insurer and the insured. Such potential should be harnessed in a profitable way by targeting less risky clients and presenting them with an improved, better-priced value proposition. For this to happen, insurance companies will have to seek partners from both the technological innovation sphere and the medical field, keeping in mind that insurance’s role in the health system is changing from payer to player.

This Executive Update highlights several areas where European initiatives are helping to guide, bolster, and reinforce the structure of the cloud market toward one that encourages healthy competition. These are specialist frameworks and services that address very specific market requirements and remove friction in the adoption of cloud services. 

This Executive Update highlights several areas where European initiatives are helping to guide, bolster, and reinforce the structure of the cloud market toward one that encourages healthy competition. These are specialist frameworks and services that address very specific market requirements and remove friction in the adoption of cloud services. 

This Executive Update outlines a roadmap for big data adoption based on the Big Data Framework for Agile Business (BDFAB). My last two Updates on big data strategies addressed overcoming the big data strategy lacuna and the importance of extracting the 5th “V” for value from big data. This Update builds on my previous two by demonstrating how organizations can adopt big data.

Many long-standing problems like technical debt owe their longevity to two factors — not dealing effectively with their causes and not dealing effectively with their resilience. Because what limits our ability to deal with technical debt might not be technical, it is useful to explore possible psychological and political sources of the longevity of the technical debt problem. This Advisor takes a close look at five problem areas and suggests the ­outlines of a program for managing technical debt.

In this Advisor, we present the approach taken to set a roadmap for the journey of the Hellenic Telecommunications Organization (OTE), the incumbent telecom operator in Greece, toward digital transformation.

We believe that having a successful, well-connected, and respected enterprise architecture (EA) group with experienced enterprise architects is critically important in an organization’s effort to become a successful digital business. EA provides an approach for understanding and managing the complexity of digital transformation.