It’s the year 2020. The popularized notion of “Agile development” has now been around for the better part of at least two decades. To no one’s surprise, the concept of Agile has sprung new trunks, branches, twigs, and leaves and is now an entire genus, sometimes making the proto-Agile ideas unrecognizable. These new flavors, colors, and shapes can be described as evolutions of the original concepts. Or can they?

While often neglected, initiatives aimed at improv­ing the employee experience can have an immediate and positive impact on customer satisfaction and, ultimately, the bottom line. Customer experiences do not just happen; they are the direct results of activ­ities by the employees with whom customers come in contact. The articles in this issue of CBTJ will challenge you to think differently about how you engage your employees.

Today, every company needs to become digital, but what this entails will differ depending on industry, company size, and competitive landscape. Focusing on the right aspects of the digital shift — and getting the balancing act right between maintaining productivity and accelerating change — is vital if a company is to thrive rather than fall by the wayside. This issue of CBTJ will help you navigate what could be the most important journey your business will ever take.

With all that is new and changing before our eyes, we asked the Cutter Consortium team of experts to weigh in on the technologies, strategies, and business models that will have the most relevance this year and beyond. Their responses — delivered in this issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal — range from the need for more tech­nology regulation to what technologies will be most transformative, from guidelines for keeping our data safe to minimizing the profusion of misinformation. 

This issue of CBTJ will help you understand that a data architecture should be much more than merely a technology roadmap. To be of any value to people in an organization, the architecture should guide the people in an organization to an understanding of how to organize for ever-changing information requirements.