Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

The “Recordkeeping for Timely Deposit Insurance Determination” rule from the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), or FDIC 370, seems simple but, as we explore in this Executive Update,  it presents several challenges for covered institutions (CIs).

Being able to show that your organization actively considers and cares about its impact on the world is sure to become one of the most important levers for talent and investment attraction and retention. Expectations now go beyond having great-sounding values on your website; people want to practice those values every day and be proud of what they are creating. Investors want to know that they can count on pro­active mitigation. Users want to see those values in the products they use. Consequence scanning requires that participants know what the product or service is intended to do, be able to determine whether the potential consequences of the product or service are positive or negative, and know what their organization considers positive.

Ninety-two percent of executives say agility is critical for the future of their business, yet only 4% of their transformation efforts are delivering agility. The leading causes for this gap are an entrenched legacy culture and general resistance to change. Responding to these challenges and delivering business agility may require more than Agile practices. As we explore in this Executive Update, many organizations are discovering “solution focus” to be the missing piece of their transformation puzzle.

Leveraging visuals is particularly important for a business architecture practice. Visuals matter, and for a business architecture practice to be effective, it must connect with people on a human level and in ways that build true under­stand­ing. Graphic recording is the visual live capture of content for an event or meeting, which acts as a visual record of the session. With this technique, there is little to no interaction between the graphic recorder and the speaker and participants. Graphic facilitation also includes visual live capture of the content for an event or meeting, but the graphic facilitator serves as a guide throughout the entire meeting process. These visual techniques bring people together to co-create around a specific topic, challenge, or opportunity. They allow people to “see” their thinking and shape concepts together. 

The field of robotics has benefited considerably from advances in various artificial intelligence (AI) technologies — most notably deep learning neural networks, computer vision, intelligent guidance and control systems, and voice and speech recognition. The biggest advances are being realized from developments in deep learning algorithms and machine vision technologies, which are allowing the creation of robots featuring advanced autonomous navigation and intelligent object recognition capabilities.

Large, non-software companies introducing Agile to their organizations tend to suffer from a cognitive dissonance of sorts: we would like to have the same look and feel across the entire company, delivering stellar-quality products, yet we want to enable high-performing, self-organizing, self-managed, and self-empowered teams to deliver (or demo) at the end of each sprint. In this Advisor, we summarize one area where this conflict becomes especially evident for large companies, particularly with non-software teams: process misalignment. We also share a potential solution that we’ve seen work in industrial practice.

Here in Part II of this Executive Update series on customer experience (CX) management, we look at survey findings covering budgeting trends for CX initiatives and the status of the “chief customer officer” (CCO) in the enterprise.

In this Advisor, I have chosen the simple word “change” as a starting point for thinking about architectural change, rather than many of the others in rampant use — words such as “transformation,” “permutation,” “enhancement,” and so on. This choice seems appropriate because “change” is an abstract, neutral, and descriptive word without the deeper connotations that might impede the nuancing of this notion into something of a practical, if rudimentary, taxonomy that will help us grapple better with the different kinds of changes that we are compelled to deal with.