This article asserts that much like publishers, insurance companies will need to build digital solutions to serve a new generation of customers who demand it. Whether it's accomplished by building in-house teams to address the changing market, or by partnering with startups to cut through internal politics and move faster toward a digital solution, the shift towards a future where things are easier for customer, carrier, and broker is quickly becoming reality.

Business design looks at the enterprise from an outside-in perspective. Business design starts with examining the value customers receive through their interactions with the enterprise and how the products and services meet tangible and emotional needs. A key benefit that business design brings to an organi­zation over traditional EA is the focus that it places on value, and more importantly, on the value proposition that the products and services of the enterprise have for customers and clients.

Cognitive systems are well suited for use in customer engagement scenarios in general because of their ability to process questions similar to the way people think and to generate tailored recommendations pertinent to customer wants and needs. The Q&A format in which they interface with customers — allowing users to ask questions using human natural language — is particularly useful for establishing a more engaging and personalized relationship between a company and its customers. These capabilities can go a long way toward making customers feel like they are being treated as individuals when dealing with your company.

In this Executive Update, we discuss why IT professionals must become more T-shaped, what it means to be more T-shaped, and how mid-career technology professionals need to continue to grow in their career in order to thrive in this rapidly changing world. We will also discuss how an executive understanding of this concept can be incorporated into business today to drive greater flexibility and value in the future.

The nature and complexities of crises in the financial market is gradually increasing, posing significant challenges, especially for large multinational banks, in managing risks and negotiating through a crisis successfully. Moreover, financial institutions must comply with strict regulations around risk management laid down by global financial regulators. Architects must harness various new technologies, such as big data, to help them build a next-generation architecture that complies with their enterprise’s business, IT, and external regulator needs. This Executive Update draws from my experience in developing, implementing, and governing the enterprise architecture for risk management for a large British multinational bank by leveraging big data technology.

A Maxim for the Times:

When a digital innovation that could destroy your current business model becomes economically viable, that business model will be destroyed.

Any business model in use exists because it fulfills a need. Destruction of that business model does not mean the need goes away; rather, it is fulfilled by different means.

Agile implementations at scale involve many teams working in a coordinated way with the intent of affecting a broader set of business priorities and capabilities. At the portfolio and program level of such an implementation, it is critical to ensure that the value produced at the team level is aggregated into a broader set of deliverables and business outcomes that support a value stream.

Any portfolio analysis technique should embody the interests of all agents or stakeholders. Product managers earnestly pursue strategic alignment; administrators seek a healthy balance between growth opportunities and business constraints; and implementers work to deliver high-quality products on time and within budget.

Enterprise Patterns are an excellent way to involve all stakeholders in the architectural debate. If you are new to Enterprise Patterns, this webinar is a great way to get started.

In this on-demand webinar, Bill Keyworth offers insight into the concrete takeaways of IT operational excellence. It's not enough to be effective and efficient within IT operations, an IT service organization needs to be recognized for the value of the IT services it provides.

In this Cutter webinar, Senior Consultant Bob Benson provides you with a comprehensive framework to maximize the business value delivered by technology. Going well beyond theory, Benson provides real-world advice, including concrete examples, and an in-depth look at the seven critical enterprise IT capabilities every business and government organization must develop.

During this on-demand webinar, Murray Cantor explains how you can improve your development, IT, or devops teams' performance using Modern Lean principles.

In this on-demand Cutter webinar, you'll learn how to get the most from your retrospective practices. Senior Consultant Diana Larsen will introduce you to a simple framework for better outcomes from retrospective meetings, maintaining the relevance of improvement to the work of your team, and great returns from the time your teams devote to every meeting.

The stories and statistics are well known and troubling: the door to the CIO office remains a revolving one. Every CIO -- whether new to the organization or long-sitting -- needs to know what is required to ensure organizational success and personal longevity.

Big data analytics (BDA) is arguably the hottest information technology phenomenon today. Large and small organizations, in virtually every industry, are enamored with the ability to gather and analyze what would have seemed to be an obscene amount of data only a few years ago. This ability has led to the generation of insights that would not have been possible due to the complexity of the underlying data. As a result, these technologies are reaching the point of being fully diffused throughout public and private organizations worldwide. Even with this broad diffusion, we have only scratched the surface of what organizations can accomplish with analytics.

Leaders who implement digital transformation through a top-down approach, consultant-led approach, or IT-led approach often ignore the conditions that prompted the need for digital transformation in the first place. They decide how to solve the problem without considering the organizational dynamics, behavioral habits, and culture that created the problem. In a rush to make a significant change, leaders decide to postpone dealing with human issues until after critical decisions are made and the transformation is underway. This approach spells failure. If your organization is rife with weak managers, a wholesale talent upgrade will be required. Digital transformation is a waste of time until you clean house. If you have good managers whose decisions have, nonetheless, created problems, then an understanding of the environment that led to those decisions is in order.

In this article, we explain how established firms can benefit from appointing a chief innovation officer (CInO) to lead a meaningful and sizable innovation department. We focus on the changing nature of innovation — what we have called “innovating innovating” — and discuss the nature of the innovation age, why innovation is critical, and the role of the “digital force” that drives much of 21st-century innovation. Next, we share the PIE model, with its three phases of planning, implementing, and evaluating, as a mental model for innovation management. We use the process of strategy making as an example of the changing nature of the 21st century’s digitally driven organizations. Finally, we show how CInOs can use the PIE model to effect transformation from the strategic, tactical, and personal perspectives.

This article presents a ­business-driven framework for digital transformation. This framework draws on contemporary thinking around the socialization of technologies, as well as practical experience from a large multinational corporation (Dell EMC) that is currently undertaking business-­driven digital transformation via the introduction of a Global Business Services function.

Here we illustrate how an EA capability can contribute to an acquisition process by preparing the firm so it is ready to acquire, identifying value-creating possibilities, engaging in direct inte­gration efforts, and monitoring the progress of work. Through our research and practical experiences, we’ve come to appreciate the value of enterprise architecture as an activity or action (the process of architecting) over that of a static framework (the concept of architecture), thereby focusing on the outcomes and impact of EA rather than the idea.

The digital world, with its liberal economy, innovative startups, universally accessible infostructure, and consumerized technology, is a heavy train racing toward any business stuck on the crossing between the past and the future. In this article, we attempt to provide readers with some orientation for the difficult — though in many respects also rewarding and exciting — journey of digital transformation.

The rush to find a solution to achieve business targets often overshadows the task of fully understanding the needs of customers and employees, which is vital to ascertaining where the real opportunity to create value lies. Management teams zoom in on cost reduction or revenue increases rather than what people will be able to do. Enhancing what people can accomplish is what delivers the benefits, and where there is sufficient demand for them, these benefits create commercial value. Therefore, to create value, organizations must start by focusing on outcomes — that is, the things that people are able to do. This enables management not only to prioritize, but also to communicate change in meaningful terms.

This article defines a framework for delivering a business-driven approach to digital transformation and provides an example of how articulating end-to-end stakeholder value delivery can help frame, scope, and prioritize digital transformation investments. In addition, it links digital transformation to strategic business objectives, ensuring that transformation is driven by the business. Finally, the article outlines the role of technology transformation as an extension of end-to-end strategy delivery.

Given the fast-changing business environment, large legacy organizations need to embark on a digital transformation journey to stay relevant and flourish. Specifically, they need to work with a business-driven framework that enhances business capabilities with architectural principles in mind so the business can adapt faster. Business architecture is a discipline that can help in this journey by bringing to the business the same rigor and adherence to architectural principles that IT has matured over the past few decades. While all of the architectural principles are critical in such a transformation, two specific ones — modularity and reconfigurability — are needed so the enterprise can adapt and respond quickly to a fast and continuously changing environment.

Our digital transformations need to succeed. In this issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal, we demonstrate how to approach them more comprehensively to ensure that they do. You will discover a couple of key themes across the articles. The first is the necessity of a top-down, business-driven approach to defining, designing, planning, executing, and measuring digital transformation in a coordinated way across the enterprise. The second requires us to rethink the way we manage the constant stream of change within our organizations altogether. Managing change is our new normal, and continuous innovation is no longer a differentiator but a core ability.

Develop a common voice, shared vision, and a degree of transparency that enable innovative solutions to major business challenges with business architecture consulting led by William Ulrich.