“Know your customer” (KYC), a key process for banks today, remains, in most cases, a very costly and long process. Most challenges lie in the efficiency of verifying customer-provided information. With digitally verified claims, verification can be improved, accelerated, and replicated on a large scale. KYC and digitally verified claims open new business opportunities for banks to act as validators for other organizations. This Advisor explores two case studies of KYC implementation.

Here in Part XI of this Executive Update series, we look at how responding organizations view the success of their AI application development efforts to date, including whether they are deriving any benefits from their deployed AI applications and whether such applications are, in fact, actually changing how their organizations operate. 

Here in Part XI of this Executive Update series, we look at how responding organizations view the success of their AI application development efforts to date, including whether they are deriving any benefits from their deployed AI applications and whether such applications are, in fact, actually changing how their organizations operate. 

Although some jobs will disappear during the AI transformation, AI was not created to eliminate jobs but to automate mundane or time-consuming tasks. This will complement and empower humans to be more effective and efficient at jobs that require human insights and judgment. Organizations that fail to pay attention to the AI digital transformation are putting themselves at risk. Employees need to understand this reality and view this required personal transformation as an opportunity to grow and tackle new opportunities. Today it is no longer a matter of what you know, but how fast you can learn and adapt.

One of the techniques people in the Agile community argue for is retrospectives. A retrospective refers to a meeting held at the end of an iteration where teammates reflect on what they experienced and recommend improvements. It is an important tool because it allows the team to take advantage of their lessons learned. The bottom line is that organizations need to put processes in place to facilitate sharing. Besides being easy to use, developers need to be motivated to use these processes, or else the databases that are provided will remain unused.

One of the techniques people in the Agile community argue for is retrospectives. A retrospective refers to a meeting held at the end of an iteration where teammates reflect on what they experienced and recommend improvements. It is an important tool because it allows the team to take advantage of their lessons learned. The bottom line is that organizations need to put processes in place to facilitate sharing. Besides being easy to use, developers need to be motivated to use these processes, or else the databases that are provided will remain unused.

Though robotic process automation (RPA) implementations mimic humans and replace human effort, they cannot, as of yet, replace humans’ emotional ability. By freeing humans from repetitive tasks, RPA will allow humans to focus on better understanding customer needs in different situations and better connection with customers. Humans can then perform tasks that require uniquely human strengths like emotional intelligence and judgment, enabling better interaction with customers.

Architecture stories are important to articulate so they gain visibility. For example, if you have a feature idea that you think a user would value, you might define a minimum viable product for it and whip up a quick/cheap prototype before making a final implementation decision. If the feedback isn’t positive, then you’d quickly pivot in another direction. The point is that I want the same level of thoughtful planning to occur for architecture as for features.

This Executive Update takes a closer look at being Agile when it comes to firmware. We begin with some tutorial information. Next, we discuss the firmware development process. Finally, we explore the issues typically encountered and identify ways some have taken to resolve them.

To meet increasingly elevated customer expectations, organizations are implementing detailed strategies for distributing and standardizing customer experience (CX) practices and technologies across their various lines of business. In this Advisor, we explore the five most significant challenges organizations face in implementing CX strategies and supporting technologies.

Nowadays, there is a huge popular demand for Agile as a means to enable change and accelerate value. Popularity, however, is something other than reality; for most companies, the introduction of Agile requires a significant mindset shift. This almost always meets resistance from several directions in the organization. In addition, Agile adoption is often accompanied by some element of inefficiency and chaos if left unguided. The authors of this Advisor describe some specific ways organizations have combined architecture with Agile thinking and methods to improve their results.

Fintech firms are bringing to market a variety of technologies to introduce new products and compete with existing firms. However, the financial markets have a long history of regulation, meant to protect depositors and stakeholders and maintain the safety and soundness of the financial system. The industry must begin by creating an experimental space (a small market), where technology and its related products can be introduced. This is known as a “sandbox.”

Most organizations do not begin creating and leveraging business architecture until they have reached a certain size and start to encounter challenges such as poor customer experience, complexity within the business and technology environment, or ineffective strategy execution. However, if organizations instead employed business architecture from the very beginning — even in a very lightweight manner — they could likely avoid these challenges as they scale.

Milestones are just an independent, simple, one-level hierarchy that stands side by side with our object list. That said, when milestone commitments (estimated end dates) change — or when teams deliver work ahead of, or lagging behind, the milestone estimated end date — these all become important changes and outcomes that we need to monitor. Monitoring these changes gives us insight into the nature of project scope changes and the interaction between our project management team and IT governance. 

Today’s chief data officer not only needs to rethink the relationship between data producer and data consumer but must become intimately familiar with the new requirements for predictive modeling (to unravel scenarios and identify patterns), advanced query (to follow an idea into discovery), and data visualization (to understand interconnections) — the big three for data analytics.

As has been our tradition over the past few years, we have gathered a group of Cutter Consortium experts to weigh in on the strategies, technologies, and business models that will impact business transformation efforts in 2019. We hope the articles in this issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal help you prioritize your business technology objectives and chart your journey forward in today’s digitally competitive world.

As has been our tradition over the past few years, we have gathered a group of Cutter Consortium experts to weigh in on the strategies, technologies, and business models that will impact business transformation efforts in 2019. We hope the articles in this issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal help you prioritize your business technology objectives and chart your journey forward in today’s digitally competitive world.

During this webinar with Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Jon Ward, you'll learn about an Agile team that was able to cut time-to-market in half and reduce the cost to deliver by 60%. He will address how AI could have been used to even further enhance the team's productivity, where AI might inhibit it, and he will outline where AI can be used to improve your productivity.

During this webinar with Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Jon Ward, you'll learn about an Agile team that was able to cut time-to-market in half and reduce the cost to deliver by 60%. He will address how AI could have been used to even further enhance the team's productivity, where AI might inhibit it, and he will outline where AI can be used to improve your productivity.

The technologies of this era — the postnormal era, the fourth industrial revolution, or any of its other synonyms — have accelerated society to such an extent that we have been, in effect, colonized by the future. Work is being futured at a pace driven by the advance of our fastest technologies and the consequent blurring among digital, physical, biological, and even cognitive systems. 

With twice the product in half the time™ being a generic goal for industry, what exactly is going wrong in today’s industrial environment? What stops or delays improvements in product delivery, despite embracing practices from Lean and Six Sigma? Why does it take years to get a new product out of the manufacturing plant? This Advisor seeks to demystify one of the myths that surrounds Agile product development: the myth that one way to optimize people’s time is to have them work on large batches: design the whole product, build a full prototype, test a full prototype, and design manufacturing only when the prototype passes all tests. The thinking is that this will reduce task-switching, eliminate mistakes, and achieve the desired high utilization of people. By planning the work in phases, we believe we can prevent problems in the phases that follow.

2019 is likely to shape up as a year in which the news is less about what technology can do for us than about what it can do to us.

2019 is likely to shape up as a year in which the news is less about what technology can do for us than about what it can do to us.

We’re going to make some business people cringe right off the bat with this claim: there is an ontology in your near future. In this article, we will explain what that means and why we assert it.

We’re going to make some business people cringe right off the bat with this claim: there is an ontology in your near future. In this article, we will explain what that means and why we assert it.