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.
Recently Published
Design for the Future: Security, Safety, and Resilience Are Key for Smart Automation
While standard security practices still apply for automation initiatives, there are specific security practices to keep in mind for automation design.
Strategies to Meet the Challenges of Dissent
Complex technology projects require a pushback against biases, oversimplifications, and the need for certainty that will inform many proposed solutions. The role of dissent is to harden and strengthen these proposals and to identify the right course of action among them.
Defining Digital Architecture: Shifting the Focus to Customer Centricity
Kaine Ugwu presents a series of tips, tricks, and techniques to approach the development of a digital architecture. He offers some clear guidance on putting the experience of customers at the heart of the architecture, positioning digital as a strategic approach to reimagining business models and infusing the organization with agility. Ugwu proposes a pragmatic use of industry reference models and pinpoints the key areas that need to be addressed to kickstart this process.
Buffet-Style Architecture: The New World of Public Self-Governance
Mark Greville proposes an alternative to the command-and-control theater that is governance (particularly technology governance) in most large organizations. He offers examples of business-model-assassinating decisions from previous generations and lays out a path toward a scalable, sustainable, useful governance approach that avoids the bureaucracy typically associated with governance. The article explores decision dynamics and proposes the method of public self-governance to break up complex governance structures, eliminate governance body queues, accelerate change, and drive accountability and transparency via a modern, decentralized approach.
Achieving Digital as an Organizational Capability
Dinesh Kumar comes at digital architecture from the perspective of business capability maturity: the readiness of any organization is a function of the maturity of a set of digital business capabilities. He goes on to describe the DigitalCMF, including the business capability domains, the digital business capabilities, and various assessments and tools within the framework. He outlines a roadmap using capability engineering as a way forward to assist organizations on the journey to a digital future.
Why There’s Probably No Such Thing as Digital Architecture
Barry O’Reilly calls on us to rise above the hype, myth, and storytelling that have created the concept we call “digital architecture.” He proposes that the concept is part of an ongoing storytelling process that we as humans use to understand and navigate our world; digital architecture isn’t a real thing, it’s just part of a story to help us find our path. O’Reilly cautions against adherence to dogma and the slavish belief that copy-and-paste frameworks can solve our problems. He counsels that we should recognize that we are in an infinitely repeating cycle of hype.
How Can We Evaluate a Digital Architecture?
Simon Field integrates business capability modeling into SARM, a formal method for developing and evaluating competing designs for solution architectures. In this article, he shows how this technique can be used to build competing designs for “digital services.” SARM focuses on architecturally significant requirements, as these are most likely to be difficult (and expensive) to change once enshrined in the architecture. The framework uses business capabilities as a way of expressing functional suitability, which introduces a layer of abstraction difficult to achieve through other means.
Business Capability Modeling: Propelling Digital Transformation
John Murphy proposes some practical steps to resolve the communication difficulties that still plague transformation programs. He proposes business capability modeling as a way to create shared understanding and bridge the worlds of business, process, and technology information encapsulated in business capabilities.