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.
Case Study: Architecture as a Tool to Prevent and Resolve Technical Debt
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.
Taking a Capability Assessment Approach to Business Value
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.
The Cloud and “Shadow IT”
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.
Transformational Cloud Projects Require a Broader Perspective
For almost 20 years, cloud and related technologies have been transforming entire industries. Interestingly, most of the discussions around transformation tend to focus on the technical aspects, technical solutions, platforms, and various as-a-service offerings. Although the technology perspective is very important, it’s not the most critical. Truly transformational projects require a much broader perspective. In this Advisor, we explore the impact of cloud-enabled transformation on product lifecycle, processes, and organizational culture.
Future Metadata Frameworks Offer Enhanced Digital Business Solutions
The increasing importance of a coherent organizational strategy to maximize the exploitation of data for growing a digital business is clear. There is a need to locate, consolidate, classify, and access the necessary data — often data of many different formats stored in different areas of the enterprise as well as external data — to drive many different aspects of a successful digital business. To achieve these types of capabilities in an efficient and scalable manner, the digital business needs to be able to identify, extract, transform, contextualize, and distribute the necessary data. The data warehouse or data lake is a critical part of this data ecosystem, and many different aspects of the digital business can exploit this resource in a consistent way by means of a shared metadata framework.
Case Study: Providing the Long-Term View with Agile Architecture
Based on our client experience, a significant opportunity to improve the business value of both enterprise architecture (EA) and Agile lies in combining their practices. Several frameworks could help in this sense, and with the right vision in mind, companies can increase their ROI for both EA and Agile. In practice, we have seen several ways in which organizations combine EA with Agile thinking and methods to break through the anti-patterns and improve results. This Advisor highlights a useful example from a Netherlands central government client and comes down to the adoption of Agile architectural approaches described in SAFe 4.5.
The Increasingly Complex Cloud Deployment Options
Do not underestimate the pace of evolution of cloud technologies. If no one in the organization watches (and understands) the new cloud delivery technologies, you may choose the wrong one, or you may be misled by a vendor that will fail to mention a better option because the vendor does not offer it.
Top Intriguing Business & Enterprise Architecture Articles for 2018
Here are the Business & Enterprise Architecture articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients in 2018. Look for these lists from each of our four practice areas, and rediscover Cutter's most intriguing articles of the year!