CX Management in the Enterprise, Part XI: Main Challenges to Adoption

Curt Hall
Part XI of this Executive Update series on customer experience (CX) management in the enterprise covers the major issues and stumbling blocks that organizations tell us are holding back their CX efforts.

Maintaining Customer Loyalty During & After a Crisis

Dave Cherry
Through a series of equations, Dave Cherry outlines how to maintain customer loyalty before and after crises. He asserts that “for technology and business leaders to count among the bold, deciphering how to capitalize on this opportunity requires a foundation of confidence, flexibility, and resiliency — all anchored and enabled by knowledge.”

Maintaining Customer Loyalty During & After a Crisis

Dave Cherry
Through a series of equations, Dave Cherry outlines how to maintain customer loyalty before and after crises. He asserts that “for technology and business leaders to count among the bold, deciphering how to capitalize on this opportunity requires a foundation of confidence, flexibility, and resiliency — all anchored and enabled by knowledge.”

5 Steps to an Effective BA Process

Brian Cameron
Leading organizations leverage BA not only to articulate and detail their business strategy, but also to create guidance that drives business and IT execution toward that future-state vision. Business architects can succeed only if they support BA in conjunction and in collaboration with, and maybe integrated with, other closely related disciplines, including business analysis, strategic planning, and portfolio management.

Enterprise Architecture: A Key to Unlocking the Value of Acquisitions

Gustav Toppenberg, Stefan Henningsson
This on-demand webinar explores how enterprise architecture can not only help mitigate the challenges that arise during growth by acquisitions, but can also enable value creation. You'll explore a few case studies of Fortune 500 companies that grew through acquisition. You’ll view through the lens of both the M&A leader and the EA professional how these organizations were able to unlock value. And, you’ll discover how EA catalyzed the acquisitions these companies made.

The Future Really Is Right Now: The Business Acumen Imperative

Noah Barsky
The article is a reminder that all management must be anchored in simple, adaptive business acumen. Barsky notes that “the convergence of tech­nology trends, evolving business dynamics, and the economic ramifications of the pandemic require astute business management, particularly in organizations now left with little room for error.”

The Future Really Is Right Now: The Business Acumen Imperative

Noah Barsky
The article is a reminder that all management must be anchored in simple, adaptive business acumen. Barsky notes that “the convergence of tech­nology trends, evolving business dynamics, and the economic ramifications of the pandemic require astute business management, particularly in organizations now left with little room for error.”

Crisis Alert! Strategies for Today & Beyond — Opening Statement

Steve Andriole
The articles in this issue discuss various aspects of corporate crisis management and how business technology can help companies deal with crises of all kinds, but especially those that change everything. Some of the articles are strategic; some are tactical. But they’re all engaging and useful, with purposeful points of view.

Crisis Alert! Strategies for Today & Beyond — Opening Statement

Steve Andriole
The articles in this issue discuss various aspects of corporate crisis management and how business technology can help companies deal with crises of all kinds, but especially those that change everything. Some of the articles are strategic; some are tactical. But they’re all engaging and useful, with purposeful points of view.

Raising the Bar: A Proposal for Improving Virtual Trust

David Tayouri
While the current level of trust may be satisfactory for some uses, we must secure a higher level of trust when accessing personal sensitive data. Establishing a trusted Web layer, in which users are uniquely identified and thoroughly authenticated, reduces the lack of trust issue.

“There Is No Spoon”: Residuality Theory & Rethinking Software Engineering

Barry M O'Reilly
While the software industry is currently grappling with ideas of complexity and resilience, there has been very little in the way of concrete actions or activities that software engineers can use to actually design systems. Residuality theory answers this need and draws on complexity science and the history of software engineering to propose a new set of design techniques that make it possible to integrate these two fields. It does this at the expense of two of the most important concepts in software design: processes and components. (Not a member? Download a complimentary copy.)

First Change the Culture: Managing Organizational Risk

Jim Highsmith
Effective risk management begins with a culture in which reality isn’t overwhelmed by hubris. No project manager can be a good risk manager in a political environment in which executives are so gung ho that it blinds them from the reality. Effective risk management requires that executives and project managers make hard tradeoff decisions as the speculative hypotheses we call plans are smashed against the reality of the rough-and-tumble business world.

Cross-Functional Teams: Closing the Gap Between Business and IT

Jonas Fagerlund
Several fundamental Agile principles drive behaviors that can improve an organization’s ability to make use of its data. One of the Agile behaviors that is key in identifying and analyzing data, and eventually for designing a solution, is the use of cross-functional teams.

Tackling Digital Transformation? Go the Whole Way!

Jutta Eckstein, John Buck
Digital transformation needs to address the whole company as part of the larger strategy. Transforming the digital aspects of your company means transforming the whole company.

Centering Architecture Decisions: The Architectural Spirit Level

Balaji Prasad
There is a space within which we operate. There is also a time window through which we peer into the world. There may be a broader universe that contains more of space and more of time, but that would be of little concern to us because the only universe that realistically matters is the little piece of it that we have carved out for ourselves, out of the vast spaces and time horizons of the broader one. And therein lies the architect’s challenge: Where are we operating in the space-time continuum? And are we sure that this is where we would like to be? This Advisor introduces an architectural tool that helps the enterprise center itself.

The Cutter Edge: Capability Models for Business Advantage, Social & Emotional Project Dynamics

Cutter Consortium
This edition of The Cutter Edge discusses the business advantage of capability models, improving project performance by identifying the social and emotional dynamics, and more.

The Cutter Edge: Capability Models for Business Advantage, Social & Emotional Project Dynamics

Cutter Consortium
This edition of The Cutter Edge discusses the business advantage of capability models, improving project performance by identifying the social and emotional dynamics, and more.

Bridging Silos with Business Architecture

Whynde Kuehn
Business architecture is many different things, capable of delivering many different value propositions to an organization. It is a shared enterprise business language and mental model; a macro business lens for analyzing investments, risks, opportunities, and more; a key component of end-to-end strategy execution; and an important mechanism to bridge and break down silos. Certainly, silos can be necessary for organizations to operate; however, silos can be detrimental to an organization’s success. This Executive Update explores the challenges with organizational silos and how business architecture is uniquely qualified to address them.

Intelligent Process Automation Is at the Ready

Curt Hall
According to Cutter Consortium research, organizations are using NLP and advanced imaging to add conversational computing and intelligent document processing capabilities to RPA platforms — enhancing their RPA deployments with more advanced process automation capabilities.

How to Create Value and Avoid Obstacles During Acquisitions

Gustav Toppenberg, Stefan Henningsson
Examine your organization's process for acquisitive growth and explore how advances in EA practices can not only help overcome obstacles, but also enable value creation.

The Quest for Digital Equilibrium: A Case Study

Fabian Sempf, Fabian Doemer, Volker Pfirsching
A major player in the transportation and logistics industry recently conducted a digital shift over an extended period. The program was initiated by the IT department, with the clear goal of making the organization more digital and finding its digital equilibrium. This introduces a key question: is the IT department really the best place to start when it comes to digitalization?

The Quest for Digital Equilibrium: A Case Study

Fabian Sempf, Fabian Doemer, Volker Pfirsching
A major player in the transportation and logistics industry recently conducted a digital shift over an extended period. The program was initiated by the IT department, with the clear goal of making the organization more digital and finding its digital equilibrium. This introduces a key question: is the IT department really the best place to start when it comes to digitalization?

(Re)Defining the Game: From Methods and Tools to Principles and Mindset

Erik Schon
Tools and methods can work in some contexts but not others. If you have your own principles and mindset, then you can adapt or create your own methods and tools to fit your context. Once we realized this, we made a mental leap from a focus on methods and tools to a focus on principles and mindset.

(Re)Defining the Game: From Methods and Tools to Principles and Mindset

Erik Schon
Tools and methods can work in some contexts but not others. If you have your own principles and mindset, then you can adapt or create your own methods and tools to fit your context. Once we realized this, we made a mental leap from a focus on methods and tools to a focus on principles and mindset.

Four Key Questions Along the Path to Digital Transformation Success

Jonas Andrén, Lokesh Dadhich, Johan Treutiger
Although many organizations have developed digital strategies, far fewer have managed to implement them successfully. As we explore in this Executive Update, creating a “sense of urgency” is often seen as a top challenge for digital transformation due to general unawareness of the opportunities and threats to the core business. Furthermore, many organizations consider a lack of skills and competencies as major challenges on their digitalization journey.