This article continues our focus on the creation of a digital backbone. The existence of a digital backbone in an organization means that anyone aspiring and planning to transform different parts of the enterprise will be able to leverage the digital backbone in a consistent and sustainable way, ensuring that each transformation effort connects and leverages a common platform. Digital transformation leaders are now starting to realize that a strategy for digital talent is a crucial element of the overall plans to digitalize the enterprise.

Change is a fact of life and has many benefits, but it is hardly ever easy and brings huge stress. How you manage the change process can determine not only the ultimate success of the change effort, but also the health of your organization during and after the change.

What do Amazon, GE, Capital One, and Starbucks have in common? They and many others use Lean Thinking and practices to engage their employees in streamlining the work processes that create value for their customers.

As digital disruption accelerates, having an effective EA group is now more valuable to organizations than ever before. Digital transformation is essential, and the enterprise architect plays a critical role in its success.

In this article, we investigate ways to use enterprise architecture (EA) to deal with disruptive business models, either by supporting the transformation of your own business to deal with disruptors or starting new spin-off businesses that attack the disruptors head on. How can a company use its existing EA to address the challenges in disruptive business models?

This final Update in a four-part series on business architecture peers into the future, considering business architecture’s foundational role in establishing the cognitive enterprise.

Success can be achieved by groups of highly talented individuals — heroics in action — but only in certain situations for limited periods of time. This is not repeatable or sustainable. Striving for the goal of sustainable improvement requires a more structured approach supported by technology. This can enable teams of “mere mortals” to perform and feel like superstars.

At a recent Cutter webinar, an attendee asked how blockchain is being implemented in the digital marketing space and how the technology's inherent transparency and security capabilities can benefit digital marketing and advertising in general. Since we are seeing considerable interest in the subject, I examine it in this week's Advisor.

In this Advisor, I describe the fundamental human causes of the growth of technical debt.

This article focuses on equity-based crowdfunding, or crowd investing, which has become a promising instrument to help overcome SME liquidity issues, referred to as the early-stage equity gap. The equity gap greatly reduces the success of smaller firms, and equity-based crowdfunding is a potential solution for reducing this gap because it removes barriers to equity.

For the most part, the IT function is technically capable of designing and implementing solutions that remediate technology debt (TD). The challenge lies in obtaining non-IT executive sponsorship and funding for TD projects.

If your organization is interested in exploring the nature and uses of blockchain technology, joining with others who are similarly inclined might prove a valuable way to get up to speed quickly.

In this Executive Update, we look at the current innovative champs and their best practices. We end with a list of questions you can ask yourselves about what and how to innovate. While your corporate culture and senior management team may be stuck in the old ways of innovation, at least you’ll know how today’s best innovators do what they do.

Digital transformation is a journey of creating and combining specific business capabilities so that they give organizations a competitive advantage in the digital excellence domains in a way that reflects their chosen mix of strategic options. This journey is shaped also by the availability of critical resources — data, analytical skills, technology proficiency. It is very often seriously affected by the state of business and IT architecture, the style of integration, and data quality. It seems wise to focus on domains of excellence where the resources are available or can be relatively easily developed or acquired.

Quantifying the results of business architecture certainly has its challenges, but there are creative ways to do so, even with limited resources. This Advisor describes the benefits and challenges of measuring business architecture success and provides some practical approaches that can be used to accomplish this very important activity.

Agile battles significant challenges with management. Managers crave and need predictability, but Agile practitioners are adamant that firm predictions are impossible. Recognizing the need and difficulty of resolving this dilemma, we have formed a company that delivers services to facilitate the right conversations and decisions among the Agile team, its manager, and its stakeholders. Our services recognize that the solution entails dealing with probability. This, in turn, requires a combination of fast and slow thinking.

Loyalty rewards programs are considered one of the most effective means for companies to attract and retain customers, and for increasing customer satisfaction and experience overall. Blockchain initially looks promising for shaking up the loyalty rewards program industry, and a number of companies are working on solutions to try and make this happen. 

In this Executive Update, we will take a brief tour of both the strengths and weaknesses of blockchain technology in the abstract, working toward a framework for thinking about its other potential uses. It’s likely that the future will see many and varied uses for blockchain. Understanding how and when to take advantage of the technology will help your business advance into the future more effectively.

In this Executive Update, we will take a brief tour of both the strengths and weaknesses of blockchain technology in the abstract, working toward a framework for thinking about its other potential uses. It’s likely that the future will see many and varied uses for blockchain. Understanding how and when to take advantage of the technology will help your business advance into the future more effectively.

Developments in the technologies we use to share and recall life events are likely to create an explosion of business opportunities within the next one to three years.

The IT governance task can no longer be seen solely as a compliance activity. As organizational structures become flatter, and interfirm partnerships become more commonplace, the onus is moving more toward a cooperative approach to IT governance. In this Advisor, we look at using a relationship-centered approach to a common IT governance situation in an IT outsourcing relationship.

Can you afford not to see significant architectural changes occurring in and around your industry? Perhaps changes in other industries may also stimulate thinking along different lines? Do you have people who think about architectural changes and dominant designs? Does your organization cultivate such people and enable them? These are important questions when the ground underneath shifts rapidly, but maybe the most important questions in this Advisor are: Do you know, or do you really know? And, do you have the ability to know the difference enough to act upon it?

In this Executive Update, we propose a real-time enterprise (RTE) framework for one such sense-analyze-respond framework. Armed with a practical and well-oiled RTE framework, enterprises can minimize their chances of being blindsided by adverse developments, internal or external, and maximize their chances of leading disruption in their markets.

The key element of competitive advantage lies in access to the data.

If we don’t as an IT community start to stop excusing IT failure — or, worse, normalizing it as a success in disguise — then as IT becomes even more embedded into our daily lives with the Internet of Things, we'd better get used to living with very mediocre systems. And we had better not complain when the public decides that the reputations tech workers deserve are lower than those of politicians.