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.
The Four Forces of Agilification
Gone are the days that an organization could plan for sustainable competitive advantage and build a five-year (or even three-year) strategic plan. The business environment has become ever-more chaotic, dynamic, and disruptive. Enter agility, as the new capability to develop transient competitive advantage with shorter planning and execution cycles. Welcome to the age of “agilification.” In this Advisor, the authors touch on the important interplay among leadership, culture, business architecture, and digital architecture.
Connected Architecture: Designing the Arena for the Data Beast
Applying the principles of “loosely coupled” to master data and containing fragmentation within a framework that governs the collaboration process will lead to the design patterns of solutions that fit the collaboration process. This is designed fragmentation, or “connected architecture.” This framework — a thought process more than a recipe — is described in this Advisor.
Play by the Rules to Strike Balance Between Agile and Architecture
Software architecture requires balance. Often, you can focus too much on it, creating robust products that miss customer needs or over-engineer solutions. Conversely, especially in Agile contexts, you can under-engineer things and your product efforts can succumb to relentless refactoring rework. So there’s a balance to strike in architecture, no matter what methodology you use to create your software. In Agile contexts, that balance is often lost. And it usually leans to less over more. In this Advisor, I describe a rule that has helped me successfully strike the right balance between Agile and architecture: chaos is constant, so continuously refactor.
A “Hybrid” is an Architecture Skybridge
Being hybrid is not new. Not at all. If we look around, we can see the entrenched old and the emerging new sitting side by side in our enterprises. And, in important instances, we have actually thought through, at some level, how the old and the new are tied together, thought of together, and managed together. If we do it right, we can build hybrids that allow us to have one foot in the present and one foot in the future, as we make our way across the skybridge to the new buildings of the future.
A Glimpse into the Agile Architect’s Day
Given an established enterprise with its decades-old IT department, processes, and practices versus the accelerating marketplace — missing out on modern IT practices and being too rigid to react to market trends, and even putting innovation on half-yearly cycles — the hiring of a talented Agile architect can bridge the gap and lead the recently established digital pillar of the company. In this Advisor, we explore the common challenges the architect faces via the story of a day and propose building a “non-blocking” architecture governance practice for Agile development teams.
Applying Business Architecture for Improved CX
In this one-day workshop presented by Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Whynde Kuehn, you'll learn how to catalyze valuable collaboration between business architects and CX teams. You'll assess current integration efforts between these two distinct disciplines, and identify best practices and opportunities to work together on customer-focused initiatives for increased value.
IoT and Interoperability in the Cloud: Practical, Challenging Scenarios
Big data, the IoT, and the cloud are technological innovations that need to demonstrate corresponding business value. While the aforementioned technologies have distinct identities of their own, they are also interdependent. Innovating with these technologies at a business level demands a multidisciplinary, holistic approach that also incorporates an understanding of how to manage risks. In this Advisor, we discuss challenges that arise in real-life scenarios due to lack of interoperability and some practical standards in the IoT and cloud space.
Leveraging Capability Assessments for Business Value
This Executive Update provides an overview of capability assessments and examines their use. It also provides some key tips to anchor the assessments in practicality so that you can begin using them within your organization.