This article describes some trends about technologies, technologists, and technoligarchs. First, we’ll look at the technologies with the most momentum. Next, we’ll examine the technologists escaping from data centers. Finally, we’ll round out the discussion by addressing the technoligarchs who control much of the digital landscape.

This article describes some trends about technologies, technologists, and technoligarchs. First, we’ll look at the technologies with the most momentum. Next, we’ll examine the technologists escaping from data centers. Finally, we’ll round out the discussion by addressing the technoligarchs who control much of the digital landscape.

Combining the fundamentally different paradigms of Agile architecture and architectural agility can prove to reinforce one another. In a real-world case study from the consumer sector, this Advisor describes one company’s experience combining Agile and EA.

Architectures that combine blockchain and AI offer some exciting possibilities, not only for DRM, but for other applications as well — like supply chain, financial, and trading systems. These include those systems that need to provide responses to events that require a higher form of reasoning than can be practically performed using blockchain’s smart contract functionality alone. Researchers are now working out the particulars of such applications, and we hope to see commercial platforms emerging over the next few years.

In this, the final Update of the series, we summarize the ideas we have discussed with the goal of leaving you, the business analyst, with a starting point for the application of Agile principles.

In this Advisor, the authors use the case of a fictitious financial company to take a detailed look at fintech and marketing and how a company can leverage big data, analytics, marketing, and financial services. 

One of the keys to a solid architecture is considering how your organization will test it. This is true not only from an end-to-end perspective, but also when considering areas like usability, performance, security, reliability, and resilience. You must make these investments in quality and testing transparent to your stakeholders and help them realize their value proposition.

In this Executive Update, we focus our attention on the intersection of design thinking (as a method for understanding opportunities through a different lens) and digital transformation (the use of technology to radically improve performance or reach). In many cases, digital transformation is employed in an effort to create a competitive advantage, which in today’s business environment can at best be considered a transient advantage because sustaining anything for a long period of time is highly unlikely. 

Agile development is best known in the software world, where projects are easily understood as iterative. But until now, it hasn't been leveraged in developing industrial products. The new Industrial Agile Framework brings the benefits of Agile methods to industrial product development.   

When people speak of capability assessments, they are referring to capturing and maintaining various metrics about the capabilities in their capability map, which can then be assessed to identify improvement opportunities and make such decisions as where to invest. Capturing these attributes provides a more complete view of each capability, beyond mere definitional information, making capabilities much more useful in practice. Organizations can use capability assessment information in a variety of proactive or reactive scenarios.

Creating your own How to be Successful with Breakthrough Innovation syllabus from our modular sessions will ensure that your program is right for your organization. No matter how you configure the series of sessions, you can be sure you’ll be getting strategy, insight, and advice that you can put to work right away. You’ll emerge with new ideas and strategies that have been tested and proven by innovative business leaders, and which you can put into action immediately.

In Part X, we examine survey findings pertaining to current AI application design and development trends and plans by organizations to utilize outside AI experts and to train employees in AI development. 

In Part X, we examine survey findings pertaining to current AI application design and development trends and plans by organizations to utilize outside AI experts and to train employees in AI development. 

One of the key reasons organizations invoke for staying away from public clouds is security, and specifically the risk that unauthorized parties will access data. From a technology perspective, placing data in a public cloud may actually improve security rather than weaken it. We explore the four simple reasons for this in this Advisor.

In this hour-long webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultants Hubert Smits and Peter Borsella introduce the Industrial Agile Framework — a framework for applying Agile to physical product delivery (for example, cash registers, integrated circuits, cars, or …).

This continuation of my previous Executive Update series encompasses my experience with this method of project management beginning in 1992 and continuing with successive waves of improvements across five different organizations — two in the consulting business and three within university CIO offices. Here in Part IV, we look at metrics V3 and V4.

We cannot measure organizational agility from a simple definition. We must break down this definition into some measurable elements and build a measurement tool around those elements. Luckily for us, many scholars and others have worked on developing such tools. In this Advisor, we explore one of them.

Several factors are leading the fintech revolution and affecting technological innovations. These include cryptocurrencies, tokens, initial coin offerings, blockchain, and other security advancements (i.e., multifactor and biometric authentication). The ability of the financial services industry to experiment with these new technologies responsibly is an essential component of their future success and sustainability. The disruption affecting innovation in the financial industry is also driven by the pervasive connectivity that characterizes today’s telecommunications sector, enabled by the diffusion of Internet access worldwide and the integration of the Internet with other sensor-based technologies, forming the Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure.

We have learned that the cloud has enabled a shadow IT to emerge. That sounds scary (mostly to the IT people), right? But we have also learned that shadow IT is not totally a bad thing, as long as there is communication, coordination, architecture, and governance. We discuss this shadow IT more specifically in this Advisor.

The bad news is that wildfires worldwide appear to be increasing — both in frequency and intensity. The good news is that the electrical utilities are applying AI for the inspection and analysis of critical infrastructure in an effort to detect and prevent wildfires caused by extreme weather, encroaching vegetation, and infrastructure failure.

We have learned that a big part of the motivation or benefit for going to the cloud is agility. Call it flexibility or scalability if you want, but “agility” is a bit broader and evokes the principles of the Agile movement. The cloud allows you to try something, fail, and move on to something else with relatively less severe consequences. The cloud does not require you to calculate with high accuracy the amount of resources you will need, or the length of time you will need them. You should be able to scale up and down, to add and remove services, to get the latest updates, and so on — without having to do the work yourself.

Most organizations will experience a large security incident at some point. The difference between an organization that survives and thrives following an incident versus one that flounders can be summed up in one word: preparation. Athletes, emergency responders, performers, and many others practice for hours before the main event. So why do organizations not do the same for security incidents? Urgent timelines, high stress, uncontrollable events, and scrutiny from customers, regulators, press, and investors are surely good reasons to put better preparation practice in place. While many organizations have a disaster recovery and business continuity plan, few focus on preparing specifically for a large security incident. In this Advisor, we examine the preparation of a strategic incident response plan.

This article takes us into the insurtech platform world and describes how incumbents must adapt their business models and processes to exploit technological opportunities to remain competitive. The authors suggest that the definition of “platform” can extend from a purely technological definition to a more integrated one, and they explore ways incumbents can benefit from the capabilities insurtech offers.

This Executive Update explores some tools and techniques that have been used to successfully deal with and manage a hidden culture.

This Executive Update explores some tools and techniques that have been used to successfully deal with and manage a hidden culture.