The world is changing rapidly, and we are witnessing a plethora of significant events, including the outcomes of a global pandemic, climate change and extreme weather, global supply chain disruptions, the war in Ukraine, the emergence of innovative technologies, and more and more smart products. These are all shaping the business environment, forcing organizations to adapt and change at unprecedented speeds. Consequently, senior managers are asking themselves how their organization should respond to deal with the technological storm and what steps they should take to prepare the organization for the future. As we explore in this Executive Update, the range of actions managers must take is broad and includes, among others, the development of organizational innovation processes, digital transformation, making the organization agile, adapting ways of doing business that meet new expectations of customers, and more. One theme runs through all of these initiatives — innovation.

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is becoming a critical component of operations undertaken in the financial industry. It stems from the growing sophistication of state-of-the-art AI models and the desire for them to be deployed in a safe, understandable manner. Responsible artificial intelligence (RAI) principles ensure that machine learning technology is applied in a transparent way while safeguarding the interest of each player in the financial ecosystem. Not surprisingly, banking and financial services regulators have shown an interest in adopting XAI and RAI techniques to help them meet the need for model governance, operational servicing, and compliance in the digital world.

Amid the 2008 US housing market debacle, I offered some insight into how ineffective risk-mitigation efforts contributed to the financial contagion that spread across the globe. Given the latest banking crisis involving SVB, it might be useful to revisit some of those ideas.

Tim Giuliani discusses how digital twins are being used for regional planning by the city of Orlando, Florida, USA. Here, digital twins are employed via virtual reality to offer an immersive environment so users can experience the impact of various scenarios. The article shows how organizations are bringing together vendors and partners to integrate data, digital twins, and emerging technologies.

Colin Dominish highlights a variety of revenue opportunities that could be realized by applying digital twins to real estate and buildings. He discusses improving building performance and some opportunities to enhance tenant experiences.

Ruth Kerrigan and her colleagues describe the application of digital twins to building-performance twins at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. They discuss tracking electricity and heating performance in campus buildings and lessons learned, many of which are organizational in nature, not technological. The authors conclude with a methodology for the deployment of performance digital twins and recommendations for addressing some of the issues they encountered.

Carl Faulkner presents a mining industry case study with a focus on data collection, integration, and storage challenges. The article includes lessons learned from the application of a solution designed to facilitate user-friendly access to digital twins as well as the importance of connecting digital twins to other business systems to get the most value.

Sustainability has become a recent focus for digital twins. David McKee and Tim O’Callaghan present a case study from a UK town using digital twins to achieve its net zero obligations. The authors discuss the use of tools to visualize historical data and utilizing new data from various sources to simulate possible outcomes and manage risk.

This issue of Amplify takes a lessons-learned approach — revisiting the concept of digital twins with an eye toward how organizations are using digital twins, the implementations, and the challenges encountered. The articles in this issue were selected to provide important lessons about real-world deployments and case studies. They also provide insights about industries where digital twins have gained early traction and what types of organizations are adopting digital twins, including those focused on sustainability and those seeking to enable Metaverse scenarios.

Alexander Weber discusses the use of digital twins in radar systems. This is a good example of using digital twins to simulate products that are costly to build (especially if they are built incorrectly) and their use in addressing compliance requirements. Weber explains how the model was verified and how the simulated data corresponds to the real data.

Jason Radel explores the application of a digital twin framework for the ingestion, application, and visualization of digital twins and the integration of light detection and ranging data, photographs and scans, and other engineering documents. The article includes case studies from the energy and defense sectors, demonstrating how such an approach can be used in managing digital twins in different industries.

In this Advisor, Matthew Walsh explores the results of in-depth research conducted to identify the inequities that women of color experience in the technology industry. If employers can tap into a skills-similar, tech-eligible workforce revealed by the Equation for Equality, there would be nearly 250,000 more women of color in tech jobs today, double the number currently in tech.

Breaking through psychological barriers to entry is key to succeeding with any data management initiative. This is doubly true when seeking to adopt semantic standards to implement a knowledge graph within your organization — because change is risky. Application owners don’t want to give up control. Most key stakeholders don’t really understand the principles of data; they just want a near-term solution to an isolated use case. And the data dilemma is often viewed as too low-level for C-level executives to get their arms around. In this Executive Update, we explore how to fundamentally fix data so that it becomes a resource organizations can truly leverage.

We conducted an empirical study in Malaysia with IT practitioners and confirmed that communication plays a vital role in project success. Our study probed the influence of five communication characteristics: content, method, velocity, process, and frequency, and how they can propel a team toward success. With the exception of frequency, the findings showed that the remaining characteristics influenced project success.

In this Advisor, we argue that disruption in banking is not being driven by technological achievements like artificial intelligence, decentralized platforms, or mobile computing. Rather, changes are the result of: (1) technology commoditization and (2) industry actors pursuing strategic interests and repositioning themselves within the sector as disruptors, innovators, and fashion-setters. Envisioning a technology agora where technological artifacts are developed and commoditized and interested parties exercise influence over innovation choices, we will see that fintechs and banks are not so much competing with each other as they are collaborating.

To address the gap between DAO awareness and adoption, along with the prevalent misconceptions and skepticism surrounding them, we seek to understand why some DAOs succeed and others fail through an industry-specific lens.

This Advisor enumerates classic leadership mistakes made in turbulent times and provides guidance on how to adapt to this turbulence.

This conversation on the Advancing Workplace Equity issue of Amplify is open to all of the authors who participated in the issue, and all members of ADL's open consulting community.

Linda A. Patterson talks about the strength that women of color possess that “stems from endurance, perseverance, and survivorship.” Given their many roles in the workplace, home, and community, women of color excel at managing, creating, innovating, strategizing, and multitasking. These skills are often additive to their formal education and specializations. So why aren’t they being given an equitable seat at the table? Why do we still have low percentages of women of color in technology jobs, senior-level positions, and board roles? Patterson suggests five steps toward offering “equitable opportunities for women of color in a meaningful, sustainable, and measurable way.”

Eli Doster shares that having a broken culture was not only terrible for staff at his company, it was also costly and had a negative impact on business. Five years ago, the company lacked values employees could believe in, which affected their decisions and actions. Furthermore, the company lacked “diversity of cultures, ethnicity, and perspective.” Doster talks about the signals that enabled its leaders to identify these problems and describes how they implemented the changes that transformed the culture and improved their overall results.

David S. Lee “offers an on-the-ground perspective of how diversity policies encounter issues once they leave home shores.” He examines the construction of diversity policies along with relocation issues that come up and provides ways to enhance diversity policies in a more holistic way that considers cultural contexts.

Timicka Anderson and Philip Fitzgerald highlight why diversity is both a strength and a priority at Citibank, a global bank committed to DEI. The authors explain the impact to the bottom line when companies increase access to nontraditional ways to pursue careers, rather than relying on traditional pathways. Anderson and Fitzgerald emphasize that “upskilling, the practice of facilitating continuous learning by providing training programs and development opportunities that expand an individual’s abilities, is key.”

Matthew Walsh explores the results of in-depth research conducted to identify the inequities that women of color experience in the technology industry. He begins his piece by pointing out the “occupational segregation” that exists in the workplace with the underrepresentation of Black, Latino, and American Indian women in fast-growing sectors. To help mitigate this concern Walsh offers the Equation for Equality, a tool employers can use “to expand their talent pool in a low-risk way by identifying workers outside a given sector who use a similar skill set to the one required by an open position.”

Rohini Anand explains that a “willingness to expose oneself to experiences outside one’s home country to truly understand local cultures and geopolitical contexts without judgement” is at the core of global DEI competency. By doing this, we can be authentically curious about other cultures and continuously learn. Anand also encourages us to be strategic about integrating that global mindset and intellectual curiosity into our work.