Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

We have found the keys to using Agile methods in firmware development to be focus, flexibility, collabo­ration, tools, and teamwork. In addition, all participants (customers, product managers and owners, systems engineers, digital designers, hardware and software engineers) need to embrace the approach and work together as a team to get the job done as rapidly as possible. In this Advisor, we explore seven major issues that may come up during the product development cycle while putting Agile methods into action.

Most organizations simplify their implementation of methodologies. The quantity of knowledge in a given methodology is greater than its applied usefulness, so much of the methodology remains, probably very safely, as shelfware. In other more malignant cases where the leaders wish to see more rigor from their staff, the methodology can become overburdening. In statistical project management (SPM), we simplify the project management approach by eliminating many concepts that the dominant project management methodologies consider central. While I caution you to err to the side of adopting a lighter methodology rather than a thicker one, that choice is a local one and yours to make. The SPM ontology is presented in this Executive Update provides you with options.

In digital businesses, fragmentation is a design decision to deal with the fluidity of the business processes and business boundaries. It’s important to understanding the consequences in terms of the energy it takes to keep information con­sistent across a fragmented data landscape. Once you can accept that the beastly nature of working with information is created by your own actions and is an inherent part of the collaboration process that makes information work for you, you can finally start to for­mulate solutions.

Blockchain (in its current and future iterations) will certainly impact various industries and governmental applications. But we will likely derive additional oppor­tunity and value from the convergence of block­chain with other emerging technologies. Data currently created and available from IoT devices, for instance, may very well benefit from some variant of blockchain. Capturing informa­tion from trusted devices and storing it in a distributed model accessible for monitoring and real-time analysis for use by AI packages could dramatically alter the speed and quality of delivery of services and/or reaction.

Product development is challenging for both business people and engineers; one challenge is knowing which features to add and when to stop adding more features. Iterative development solves this problem. With short and repeated development cycles, the product grows. This Advisor seeks to demystify a common myth that surrounds Agile product development: the myth that only the most complete feature set will do. 

Here in Part XIII, the final Executive Update in Senior Consultant Curt Hall's series on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in the enterprise, we focus on findings surrounding the hype around AI and the potential for the technology to lead to social and economic disruption.

Viewing an enterprise as an assembly of various architectures and building blocks allows the development of a coherent vision of how an organization can build the required capabilities to meet anticipated changes in its environment. Enterprise architecture, in particular, helps provide guidance and communicates how the company needs to change to survive. EA brings a shift in focus from technical systems to designing coherent sociotechnical systems that meet strategic requirements and organizational needs, such as those around workforce development, culture, structure, and processes. This Advisor introduces the Service Dominant Architecture (SDA) as a tool to support the digiti­zation of companies by structuring actors and their resources and reducing overall complexity.

For most organizations implementing customer experience (CX) management practices, it is still too early to tell if their efforts are actually paying off. This finding comes from the preliminary results of Cutter's ongoing CX management survey. This Advisor explores this finding and others and discusses why organizations are still waiting to realize measurable benefits from their initiatives.