In this on-demand webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Frank Contrepois shares advice, forged from his experiences with AWS, on how you can avoid wasting money on cloud services by keeping an eye on — and acting upon — three things.

In this on-demand webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Frank Contrepois shares advice, forged from his experiences with AWS, on how you can avoid wasting money on cloud services by keeping an eye on — and acting upon — three things.

Organizations should focus their attention not on integrating, storing, or even analyzing data, but on the effective use of time.

Miklós Jánoska provides a perspective on how we can shift architecture from a governor to more of an enabler. 

Bob Galen lays out nine rules of Agile architecture to inform us in how to think about architecture and help us strike the right balance between architecture and agility. 

The authors explore Agile architecture and architectural agility and how these two fundamentally different paradigms can reinforce one another. They describe the pitfalls or “anti-patterns” for both enterprise architecture and Agile — and then make a case for how they can be overcome by combining the practices. 

The authors point out how the worlds of Agile and architecture can’t quite fit together. To resolve this, they introduce a new architectural approach, asserting that by “architecting for antifragility, busi­nesses can gain real agility and deliver systems with a higher level of quality.” They describe the challenges of complex systems and then define an Antifragile Systems Design process.

The authors articulate con­crete ways in which we can shift our perspectives and act to “agilify” our organizations. 

This article focuses on business architecture and discusses how it can be leveraged as an enabler along the strategy realization path to harmonize the execution of business direction across organizational boundaries and initiatives.

According to the principle of yin and yang, all things exist as inseparable and contradictory opposites. In this issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal (CBTJ), we explore the relationship between architecture and organizational agility as a powerful paradox: architecture is the way to agility.

Analytics can be performed at various points in the deployment of a solution. Certainly, there are situations where “localized” analytics may be more appropriate than analytics performed in the cloud, and still others where analytics on the organization’s network might be more appropriate. The location of analytics can also determine where and when to integrate data into the analytical solution.

In this Advisor, we present a sample of core thinking — a set of practices needed to build a Lean/Agile organization — grouped under three different categories: (1) foundational thinking, (2) designing, and (3) redesigning.

With the arrival of private blockchain platforms that integrate nonfunctional requirements arising from typical market conditions (i.e., privacy, confidentiality, controlled access), the barriers to creation of a digital economy become less significant and easier to overcome.

This Advisor describes several EA techniques in an IoT context.

In this Advisor, I describe some important AI developments we are seeing with the IoT.

The Internet offered wide access, and the smartphone offered direct and personalized access to the insurance customer. What can AI offer?

Can the same path to Agile transformation work for every organization? Does every organization need to go through the same number of steps? Do the organization’s culture, technological landscape, and customer needs necessitate a customized model of such a transformation? In this Advisor, we identify the five elements of design thinking as key principles that every Agile transformation should follow.

We have developed a simple yet powerful framework to help business leaders navigate the digital landscape based on four business-focused questions that are at the core of effective governance of digital. We call these questions the four “ares.” In our previous Advisor, we discussed the first two of the “ares”: Are we doing the right things? and Are we doing them the right way? This Advisor explores the two that remain.

In this Advisor, we examine how fog architecture addresses cybersecurity for next-generation networks.

Agile-at-scale relates to scaling Agile methods for software development use enterprise-wide or on large software development efforts. Scaling has been key as organizations try to tap the benefits of Agile methods to deliver their software products quicker, more cheaply, and with higher quality. This Executive Update presents conclusions based on the analysis of data from over 5,000 software projects fielded by about 500 organizations.

“A culture transformed” means reaching an elusive cultural end state within a business. There are mile markers on this transformative journey, many of them technological, but rarely do we include cultural milestones within the scope of a digital transformation project.

In this Advisor, I introduce an Agile development framework (ADF); not a mainstream Agile offering like Scrum, but rather something I tend to carry around in my head when trying to think about the various views, products, roles, and tasks that a multidisciplined team can bring to bear for different types of Agile projects.

Customer expectations are shaped by their interactions with Uber, Amazon, and Apple — where each interaction is intuitive, easy, and instant. In customers’ eyes, the age, size, and complexity of the organization or industry are all irrelevant: all they care about is having a great experience. Traditional organizations have no choice but to step up their game to stay relevant.

Your business architecture knowledgebase should include content for each business architecture domain that you have determined to be applicable for your organization (most or all usually apply). The content for each domain includes names, attributes, and relationships to business architecture domains as well as other domains (e.g., system applications). The knowledgebase can be created and refined over time.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has reached the point where most major organizations are now investing in the technology. But, a key question I have had for some time now is: to what extent are organizations deriving measurable benefits from the AI applications they have deployed? Fortunately, the latest results from our ongoing survey examining the adoption and application of AI technology in the enterprise offer some insight into this question.