Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Business Technology & Digital Transformation Strategies practice this year for today's Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients and those that created controversy among Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows.

In this Advisor, the author explores how cognitive technology can be used “in the small” with benefit today as potential users wait for it to scale for use “in the large.” The author shares three operational scenarios to show how firms could build tools to put cognitive computing techniques to work today.

Engaging enterprise architecture (EA) in the acquisition process allows the acquisition team to plan, execute, and evaluate acquisitions within a strategic planning framework that improves acquisition performance without compromising orga­nizational performance.

In this Executive Update, the first of three related articles, we examine financial services as an example of a highly regulated industry and outline the regulatory landscape that creates points of tension for cloud adoption. We also incorporate perspectives from a differentiated range of stakeholders, including lawyers, technologists, compliance executives, and outsourcing managers.

I've been in the software development industry for over 30 years, which is more than half my life. I love it, but I’ve had to undergo many changes over the years to stay current and valuable to the industry. Accord­ing to application developer Bob Martin, it’s possible that the number of professional software developers entering the job market doubles every five years. This means that 50% of software developers working professionally have less than two and a half years’ experience on the job. This is a scary thought for an industry that literally runs the rest of the world. This trend has been building for decades, and it’s getting worse. Because of the high demand for skilled programmers, computer science and software engineering curricula are now among the most popular in higher education, and there’s no sign of this letting up. But the skills students learn in school don’t always match well with what’s needed on the job.

Business capabilities are a foundational business architecture domain. Capabilities play the role of anchoring business perspectives for a wide variety of transformation scenarios, including digital transformation. Coupled with value stream, organization, information, product, strategy, and initiative mapping, capabilities provide a central focal point for exposing multidimensional aspects of a business ecosystem.

Why might you want to model strategies? Well, my experiences in working with hundreds of organizations around the world suggest that strategies are often unclear, ambiguous, or muddled. Now there are plenty (possibly good) reasons why this might be the case — some of which I’ll cover here, but from an enterprise architecture (EA) perspective, one of the architect’s key roles is to proactively manage and architect change … and this requires some sense of future direction. So, in this Update, we look at some ways architects help key decision makers form, manage, and use their strategic knowledge in collaboration with enterprise architects.

The economic gains brought by digital payments are significant. Greater financial inclusion and less friction in commerce lead to increased spending on goods and services. This, in turn, creates a virtuous economic cycle whereby increased consumption translates into more jobs and higher income. Moody’s Analytics estimates that increasing electronic payments contributed an additional $296 billion to consumption between 2011 and 2015, or a 0.1% cumulative increase in global GDP during the period. They also created 2.6 million jobs on average each year. By harnessing payments innovation, Asia can further accelerate its economic growth.