The main value of being increasingly agile is to allow the organization to realize its potential visions more quickly, with less investment, and with greater chances of success. To realize those visions, one must have abilities — both non-digital and digital. Digital abilities are information systems–enabling abil­ities that allow for agility. In this Advisor, we define digital abilities through a partial list of key abilities in the form of technologies, attitudes, and approaches we should adopt to become agile.

Despite general agreement among researchers and academics of the need for board-level involvement in IT governance, it appears that in practice this is more the exception than the rule. Given the prevalence of this issue, we have sought to answer the question, “What is the state of the art of the research domain of board-level IT governance?” In this Advisor, we share a few of our findings on the various determinants, theories, and outcomes surrounding board-level IT governance.

An architecture is often thought of as one uniform thing that underlies an enterprise. However, if an enterprise itself is not uniform, is it reasonable to think of its underpinnings as being consistent everywhere? Would we not expect an ideal architecture to mold itself around the curves and ragged edges of the real outlines of the enterprise, guiding it, and being guided by it? This Advisor suggests a three-dimensional framework intended to help in grasping the critical spatial dimensions of enterprises, and to assist in seeing the lines and jagged edges of a specific enterprise, along those dimensions. Architecture needs a ground to stand on – that ground is the enterprise architecture. It behooves architects to grasp what lies beneath their feet.

Much effort has gone into convincing various organizations within a government to start producing open data. However, the outcomes of such efforts have merely created a disparate landscape of a few leading — some following, some nonengaging — organizations. Hence, we cannot ignore the importance of the cultural and change management dimension when setting up an open data program.

In this Executive Update, we explore why organizations need data democratization and how they can achieve it.

In this Executive Update, we explore why organizations need data democratization and how they can achieve it.

In Part VII, we continue to illustrate the concept of “assurance” for ADF artifacts and how it might be implemented using verification and validation. We make reference to a set of example artifacts and propose a more detailed assurance layer, which implements the ADF assurance view and reflects the ADF perspectives and views discussed thus far in this series.

We hope the insight provided in this issue gives you an enlightened perspective on the current and future cloud computing market and the guidance required to make well-informed decisions on the strategies and technologies that will provide your organization a competitive edge.

We hope the insight provided in this issue gives you an enlightened perspective on the current and future cloud computing market and the guidance required to make well-informed decisions on the strategies and technologies that will provide your organization a competitive edge.

This article tries to take a very pragmatic viewpoint about cloud computing: what are the things we have learned? What do most reasonable analysts and users now agree on, as opposed to questions to which the jury is still out? What should you spend time worrying about, and what should you consider settled, for good or for bad? Finally, with various lessons learned, what should you educate your managers or clients about, so they don’t waste their time or yours?

This article tries to take a very pragmatic viewpoint about cloud computing: what are the things we have learned? What do most reasonable analysts and users now agree on, as opposed to questions to which the jury is still out? What should you spend time worrying about, and what should you consider settled, for good or for bad? Finally, with various lessons learned, what should you educate your managers or clients about, so they don’t waste their time or yours?

A truly successful digitization project will change a company to its core. Thus, product-to-service transformation is probably the best example of the pervasiveness of digital technologies.

A truly successful digitization project will change a company to its core. Thus, product-to-service transformation is probably the best example of the pervasiveness of digital technologies.

In this article, we draw attention to the benefits of including a mechanism for the wholesale trading of contracts in delivering cloud services to mirror that of delivering electricity. Plus, we argue that it is possible for the cloud market to avoid the plethora of mistakes experienced in the many deregulated wholesale electricity markets globally. We also detail features from certain electricity markets that have led to attractive market attributes, such as increased competition, price transparency, and increased resilience to external shocks. Moreover, we leverage the analogy to explain how we can replicate such features for a global IaaS cloud computing market.

In this article, we draw attention to the benefits of including a mechanism for the wholesale trading of contracts in delivering cloud services to mirror that of delivering electricity. Plus, we argue that it is possible for the cloud market to avoid the plethora of mistakes experienced in the many deregulated wholesale electricity markets globally. We also detail features from certain electricity markets that have led to attractive market attributes, such as increased competition, price transparency, and increased resilience to external shocks. Moreover, we leverage the analogy to explain how we can replicate such features for a global IaaS cloud computing market.

This Advisor reflects on the technology evolution of data warehouses and data lakes as well as the evolution of computer-assisted decision making, including data exploration, analytics, and decision support. Arguably, the data warehouse still serves an important purpose and will continue to have a significant place in the IT infrastructure. It is important, how­ever, to consider new technologies to support the need for real-time data, dynamic data warehouses, self-service business analytics, and algorithmic decision making.

For a scrum team to be successful, it is important to learn of and solve problems as they occur. As we work together, we express how we’re doing, what’s in our way, and our concerns so they can be addressed. It’s an ongoing process of improvement from sprint to sprint. There are as many team dynamics as there are teams, so sometimes getting started is awkward if people feel uncomfortable opening up. As we explore in this Advisor, sustained success demands a brave willingness to be “all in.”

During this on-demand webinar, you'll explore how to overcome the barriers to innovation using a Breakthrough Incubator model. You'll learn how to use a breakthrough incubator—an external partner that manages networks of collaborators—to accelerate the creation of new business propositions, and to overcome the barriers to innovating radical, non-core products and/or services at your organization. (Not a member? For a limited time, guests can watch the recorded webinar here.) 

Gone are the days that an organization could plan for sustainable competitive advantage and build a five-year (or even three-year) strategic plan. The business environment has become ever-more chaotic, dynamic, and disruptive. Enter agility, as the new capability to develop transient competitive advantage with shorter planning and execution cycles. Welcome to the age of “agilification.” In this Advisor, the authors touch on the important interplay among leadership, culture, business architecture, and digital architecture.

Customer expectations have never been higher, and they are forcing companies across almost every industry to rethink their approaches to commerce, marketing, sales, and, in particular, customer engagement, service, and support. The result is that companies are taking a great deal of interest in all things related to the experience customers encounter when dealing with their businesses.

The simple reason we cannot see (or perhaps refuse to see) a paradigm shift upon us is because we tend to look at the world through the old paradigm. So perhaps all we need to do to meet tomorrow’s problems is to stop using yesterday’s thinking. This Executive Update is a call for the acceptance of complexity and the introduction of interdisciplinary thinking to all aspects of life, starting with software engineering as the guinea pig. By seeking to understand complexity instead of hiding it, we can build better-quality software with less stress.

Value-stream mapping is a useful tool that forces tech teams to focus on activities that add the most value for the customer, rather than those that are recommended in some textbook, or that employ a hot new technology a senior person happens to want to learn, or that use a development method that will look good when reporting to the CIO. However, too often advocates of this laudable technique have been operating on long-discredited ideas of which economic activities “add value” and which ones do not.

As companies adopt Agile as their standard for software development, they usually encounter resistance from several directions — from other parts of IT as well as from the business. We often see organizations struggling with cultural change, insufficient business involvement, and other aspects of scaling. To overcome these challenges, some organizations use ways that worked for them in the past, but in an Agile context this results in counterproductive outcomes. These anti-patterns are hard to root out and tend to reappear. In this Advisor, we highlight two of the most common Agile anti-patterns.

Data governance, a broad and very expansive subject, potentially applies every time there is a transition between data states (i.e., contextual, temporal, or geographic) or when data is accessed. Currently, adoption of data governance policies tends to be passive and non-active rather than overt or proactive. In other words, data governance is the default, out-of-the-box governance that requires no action. But today we have the opportunity to create more individualized overt and proactive data governance policies that meet the specific needs and requirements of a corporation. Indeed, the issues of responsibility and liability for keeping data while it is at rest or in motion are beginning to dominate many conversations about data.

Here, in Part VII, we continue examining industries and domains where organizations see AI having its most significant impact.