Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

This issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal (CBTJ) describes the range of methods, tools, techniques, and applications of the fintech revolution. The articles demonstrate fintech’s importance and explore the diff­erent levels of fintech technologies, experimentation, and applications. While many questions remain, fintech is unstoppable. Institutions, companies, and whole countries are adopting it for financial, political, and even military purposes. Make no mistake: fintech is a game-changer.

Many technologies exist today that have the potential to change the manner in which we get work done. Currently, the software developer job is heavily labor-intensive. Yes, we use software tools to perform many of the repetitive tasks; however, for the most part, the programming job is performed by highly talented individuals who specify, design, code, and test complex pieces of code and make them work. We have attempted to automate such tasks, but we can best characterize current efforts as assistance (helping workers by providing guidance and information) rather than automation (replacing humans with machines). In this Executive Update, we identify 20 technologies that have the potential to alter this picture in both the near and long term. 

Years ago, I started down the track of data democratization upon reading some Cutter Consortium Executive Reports, where the authors generally posited that if you want to manage an asset better, you must manage the data around the asset better. That may be all you have to do. But since we have to manage our companies through data, we need lots of people to do it. Hence, we need data democratization. In this Advisor, we explore how organizations can achieve data democratization.

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. A truly successful digitization project will change a company to its core. In this Advisor, we explore the impact of cloud-enabled transformation on company culture and identity.

As in the early days of the electric utility, all major cloud providers started off with a “vertically inte­grated” direct sales model (i.e., they also played the role of cloud supplier). However, several major cloud providers have started supporting sales through an indirect sales channel, leveraging specialist partners to reach out to the many different industries that could benefit from cloud services. They have allowed those channel partners to step into the billing chain, thus creating a more unique cloud supplier role, much like those electricity suppliers that stepped into the billing chain between electricity providers and electricity consumers.

As part of an ongoing series on artificial intelligence (AI) in the enterprise, in this Executive Update, we turn specifically to AI development platform preferences, including open source and commercial providers’ development tools and AI-as-a-service platforms. 

My colleagues and I have visualized a line-of-business (LOB) application as a collection of finite state machines (FSMs) that model subjects and their interactions with each other. This immediately brings some much-needed structure to our application, while at the same time allowing it to be perfectly extensible. This structure will help us to automate the generation of LOB apps, as the problem now simplifies to specifying FSMs.

Here are the Business Technology & Digital Transformation Strategies 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!