Guidance in Delivering Value through Architecture
You can create and deploy business and enterprise architectures that improve organizational understanding, increase business opportunities, support agility, and deliver value. Cutter’s Architecture team delivers continuous insights based on their hands-on experience assisting organizations worldwide.
4 Steps to an Antifragile Systems Design
Antifragile Systems Design requires an organization to move as one toward solving the problem of complexity, which means changing the perspective from “us versus them” (IT versus business) to simply “us” (business). The steps outlined in this Advisor require a mix of skills within business, business architecture, and software engineering. However, this is not simply a business activity or a software design activity and cannot be divided into different tasks for different silos; each step in the process creates feedback loops to ensure that answers arrived at are coherent. Business leaders, business/enterprise architects, and software architects all need to engage with the process to make it work.
Enterprises: Are You Playing The Infinite Game Yet?
We have done reasonably well, evolving the architecture discipline over the last couple of decades to a point where we are generally able to align the architecture foundation’s progress with a system’s progress. However, a system is only one piece in the system of systems: the enterprise, as it evolves over time. We may win the battle in the finite game of a single capability. But do we have the staying power to win in the infinite game that enterprises must play in? That is the key question that this Advisor raises.
Ambidextrous Organizations: How to Embrace Disruption and Create Organizational Advantage
This Executive Update describes the Ambidextrous Organization Development Canvas and how it enables management teams to discuss organization development issues in a common language and make decisions on development aims and organization transformation priorities. (Not a Cutter member? For a limited time, you can download your complimentary copy here.)
Defining a Roadmap for RPA and Intelligent Automation
Mohan Babu K presents a roadmap for rolling out RPA and examines RPA solutions from key vendors. He then presents a snapshot of real-world stories of RPA adoption across industry domains and, based on his personal experience, recommends five key design topics to consider in rolling out scalable RPA solutions.
Designing for Smart Automation
Aravind Ajad Yarra emphasizes that automation is most effective when humans and machines work together to deliver business outcomes and recommends that automation be designed in harmony with human experiences and business processes. He outlines three types of automation — experience automation, process automation, and platform automation — on which smart automation manifests, considers some smart automation fallacies, and examines how a design thinking approach can successfully be applied to smart automation.
The Next Frontier in Automation: Opportunities, Challenges, and Impact — Opening Statement
We feature eight articles in this issue that cover a range of topics of interest — from technologies that drive and support new frontiers in automation, such as blockchain, AI, and security, to automation strategies and design considerations.
Toward Balance in a Governing Architecture
When approaching an architecture representation, a key point is its decomposition into elements, usually leading to a containment-based representation structure. We might then navigate the architecture along the “containing” relations (for example, whenever a link is labeled as “part of” or “implements,” it is a “containing relation” by nature), or using predefined viewpoints. To reach the ideal balance in governing architecture, the challenge is to harmonize the intentional and the emergent architectures.
Treat Your Architecture Like a Product
Architecture stories are important to articulate so they gain visibility. For example, if you have a feature idea that you think a user would value, you might define a minimum viable product for it and whip up a quick/cheap prototype before making a final implementation decision. If the feedback isn’t positive, then you’d quickly pivot in another direction. The point is that I want the same level of thoughtful planning to occur for architecture as for features.