The Cutter Edge: Life and Data in a Time of Pandemic, Never Waste a Good Crisis, more!
Cutter Consortium
This week's Cutter Edge explores the challenge we face in ensuring the data we collect and analyze promotes a better life for all on this planet, rather than increasing the imbalances and dysfunctional behaviors; why we need to break out of familiar patterns in order to be open to innovation; and more.
The Cutter Edge: Life and Data in a Time of Pandemic, Never Waste a Good Crisis, more!
Cutter Consortium
This week's Cutter Edge explores the challenge we face in ensuring the data we collect and analyze promotes a better life for all on this planet, rather than increasing the imbalances and dysfunctional behaviors; why we need to break out of familiar patterns in order to be open to innovation; and more.
Settlement Could Set Regulatory Precedent for Unauthorized Use of Consumer Data
Curt Hall
A recent settlement between the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and photo app developer Everalbum, Inc. could have significant repercussions for organizations developing machine learning (ML) and other artificial intelligence (AI) models using consumer data. The settlement requires Everalbum to delete the face recognition models and algorithms it allegedly developed by using photos and videos uploaded by its users.
SAP HANA for Maximum Competitive Advantage
Improve critical enterprise systems management. Developed by Cutter Fellow and UC San Diego CIO Vince Kellen and his colleagues, this approach applies "new rules" for governing data analytics and leverages the SAP HANA environment to achieve next generation data warehousing success.
More on Implementing Business Agility: A Q&A
Borys Stokalski, Aleksander Solecki
In a recent webinar, Cutter Senior Consultant Borys Stokalski and Aleksander Solecki explored the processes and practices that support business agility from the perspectives of value innovation and product portfolio management. In this Advisor, we share the Q&A session that followed.
The Biggest Digital Transformation Risk Is Human
Noah Barsky
Digital transformation is the hottest trend and spend in technology circles these days. But how can employees possibly transform a business that they don’t fully understand?
How New Database Technologies Are Turning Data Analytics Rules Upside Down
Vince Kellen
Most analytics solutions designers today are using 30-year-old mental models around scarcity of compute and are thus crippling their designs, not fully realizing how radically different 21st-century analytics has become. The recent leap forward in database and analytics technology includes streaming technologies like Apache’s Kafka, which can handle real time and can scale to handle big data movement at extremely low cost; and high-speed, in memory analytics tools like SAP HANA, which makes mincemeat out of billion-row data sets.
EA Programs: Prove Your Value in Digital Transformation Efforts
Avinash Malik
In the enterprise architecture (EA) anti-pattern described in this Advisor, the EA team primarily functions to review projects in the architecture review board (ARB). Each IT project is given a series of standards that it is expected to meet, and at various checkpoints in the software development process, the project team submits a document to the ARB for review. Your enterprise architects are there to be, essentially, a “forcing function.”
3 Ways to Keep Your Options Open
Olivier Pilot, Michael Papadopoulos, Michael Eiden
While it is impossible to predict the future, the ability to adapt to what we already know is most likely to prompt a solution’s future pivot can make the difference between an elegantly evolving architecture and one that must be thrown away. In our experience, the patterns and techniques discussed in this Advisor are useful for keeping our digital and data architectures open to changes.
The Opportunities of Next-Generation Innovative Business Modeling
Zion Schum, Isaiah Morales, Roger Yin
The next generation of business and associated business models is being ushered in by blockchain’s versatility in creating and exchanging value. The opportunities are boundless, but first we must transition from our current infrastructure. Today, the data network protocols establish the rules of the Internet and facilitate its use. Most of the value these protocols create is absorbed by just a few companies — either by operating and distributing Internet access or governing the applications that make it easier to use. Only recently has blockchain emerged to offer businesses the chance to capture the value that will come from next-generation Internet protocols.
Ingredients for Enterprise Agility, Part I: The Countdown to Enterprise Agility
Jon Ward
This article is the first in a series of Advisors that will outline some of my lessons from leading Agile transformations. Getting started with Agile involves some organizational preparation; hence, the countdown to enterprise agility is the subject of this Advisor.
Digital Transformation: Shifting the Mindset from Cost to Investment
Sunny Ray, Joab Meyer, Karl Johnson
We have set out to “demystify digital transformation” through interviews with a cross-section of senior leaders at seven firms in a variety of industries. As we conduct our research, a comprehensive view of how mindsets must evolve to enable this transformation within firms is emerging. One of our most prominent initial observations centers on the digital mindsets of leaders; this mindset determines whether an organization’s digital transformation gains traction or flounders.
Business Architecture: Answering the Call to Achieve UN Sustainable Development Goals
Whynde Kuehn
In this on-demand webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Whynde Kuehn discusses how organizations can leverage business architecture to support the UN’s SDGs. You will learn how to determine which SDGs are relevant to your organization, thereby aligning motivation with action, and how to set internal objectives and metrics to help your organization achieve its desired level of contribution. Furthermore, you will explore how to leverage business architecture across organizational boundaries to facilitate collaboration on SDG achievement.
DevSecOps: 7 Metrics to Measure Culture Change
Kristin Curran, David Lipton, Steven Woodward
Organizational culture change is disruptive, but along with implementing a DevSecOps culture, the integrated security, and the automation, the comfort we crave is just as accessible. Communication and transparency allow DevSecOps and organizational culture change to thrive, facilitating its continued relevance and growth. But how do we measure culture change? In this Advisor, we identify a logical set of seven incremental steps to measure culture change.
Find the Sweet Spot on the Path to an “Agile Architecture”
Svyatoslav Kotusev
Instead of trying random “Agile” or “traditional” planning approaches prescribed by famous industry gurus and institutions, organizations should consciously find their “sweet spots” along the various dimensions of agility. This path will save dollars.
How Parler May Have Hedged Its Architectural Bets, Digital Change in Banking, more!
Cutter Consortium
This edition of The Cutter Edge explores architecture tail risk with Parler as an example, how a community bank facilitated change and improved customer loyalty through digitalization, and more!
Reducing Concerns with Confidential Computing, Part II: Products and Applications
Curt Hall
Confidential computing offers a hardware-based solution for protecting data in use, enabling organizations to confidently migrate their sensitive data to cloud platforms by allowing them to maintain complete control of the data and to meet or exceed government and industry regulations for protecting data in cloud environments. This Advisor examines some confidential computing products and applications that organizations have developed by leveraging the technology.
A Guide to EA Metrics for the Digital Enterprise: The Strategic Use of Value Metrics
Brian Cameron
This Executive Report is an update to a 2015 edition that introduced a process for deriving enterprise architecture (EA) value metrics that align with the value drivers particular to an organization — those important to both the core business capabilities of the organization as well as its key stakeholders. It contains refinements to the process as well as additional information and perspectives from the field regarding the strategic use of value metrics that will, over time, allow the EA organization to be viewed as a strategic resource/partner and eventually earn a seat at the strategic planning table.
A Guide to EA Metrics for the Digital Enterprise: The Strategic Use of Value Metrics
Brian Cameron
This Executive Report is an update to a 2015 edition that introduced a process for deriving enterprise architecture (EA) value metrics that align with the value drivers particular to an organization — those important to both the core business capabilities of the organization as well as its key stakeholders. It contains refinements to the process as well as additional information and perspectives from the field regarding the strategic use of value metrics that will, over time, allow the EA organization to be viewed as a strategic resource/partner and eventually earn a seat at the strategic planning table.
A Guide to EA Metrics for the Digital Enterprise: The Strategic Use of Value Metrics — Executive Summary
Brian Cameron
This Executive Summary accompanies an update to a 2015 Executive Report that introduced a process for deriving enterprise architecture (EA) value metrics that align with the value drivers particular to an organization — those important to both the core business capabilities of the organization as well as its key stakeholders. It contains refinements to the process as well as additional information and perspectives from the field regarding the strategic use of value metrics that will, over time, allow the EA organization to be viewed as a strategic resource/partner and eventually earn a seat at the strategic planning table.
A Guide to EA Metrics for the Digital Enterprise: The Strategic Use of Value Metrics — Executive Summary
Brian Cameron
This Executive Summary accompanies an update to a 2015 Executive Report that introduced a process for deriving enterprise architecture (EA) value metrics that align with the value drivers particular to an organization — those important to both the core business capabilities of the organization as well as its key stakeholders. It contains refinements to the process as well as additional information and perspectives from the field regarding the strategic use of value metrics that will, over time, allow the EA organization to be viewed as a strategic resource/partner and eventually earn a seat at the strategic planning table.
Learning to Lead Collective Creativity from Miles Davis
Daniel Hjorth, Robert Austin, Shannon Hessel
When you watch live video recordings of jazz legend Miles Davis, he walks among the assembled musicians on stage during performances, guiding the focus or center of gravity of the music that they collectively create; he performs leadership. As one’s belonging gets more distributed in networks, relations become key to achieving collective creativity. Leaders are challenged to develop within their teams the capability to act and respond as one entity greater than the sum of their parts — to sound with one voice.
Never Waste a Good Crisis! It’s Time for Innovation
Jutta Eckstein, John Buck
The challenge of being open to innovation is in breaking out of familiar patterns. A lot of what we do is guided by patterns. These patterns help us in a stable context but get in the way in a dynamic or complex context and hinder innovation. The first step in dealing with suboptimal patterns is to be aware that they are hard to see.
Using Wave Alignment to Achieve Successful Agile EA
Avinash Malik
This Advisor looks at “wave alignment,” a process used to accomplish the goals of Agile enterprise architecture (EA). Wave alignment is an addition to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), although the principles can be applied to any Agile development organization of size.
EA Is at the Heart of Digital Transformation
Stefan Henningsson, Gustav Toppenberg
We believe that at the heart of the ability to manage an ongoing and multilayered organizational transformation rests a sophisticated enterprise architecture capability with a specific charter to act as a transformation engine connecting strategic intent and execution excellence.
