Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

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.

Here in Part XII of this ongoing series on artificial intelligence (AI) in the enterprise, we examine findings pertaining to the use cases that organizations in our study viewed as most viable for applying AI.

Antifragile Systems Design requires an organization to move as one toward solving the problem of complexity, which means changing the perspective from “us versus them” (IT versus business) to simply “us” (business). The steps outlined in this Advisor require a mix of skills within business, business architecture, and software engineering. However, this is not simply a business activity or a software design activity and cannot be divided into different tasks for different silos; each step in the process creates feedback loops to ensure that answers arrived at are coherent. Business leaders, business/enterprise architects, and software architects all need to engage with the process to make it work. 

In Part VI of this Executive Update series, we take a look at “the procrastination metrics" of V5  and V8.

Shortfalls in the risk management approaches many companies currently take can leave them dangerously exposed. These companies either have no corporate-level mechanisms for monitoring and acting on risk exposure or gather potentially relevant data but fail to develop appropriate metrics to support effective monitoring, control, and timely remediation. These metrics can take the form of key risk indicators (KRIs), which all levels of management can use to provide evidence of the effectiveness of the implemented risk management strategies. In this Advisor, we share some features of effective KRI implementation.

In the future, and as the technology advances, corporate, government, and military leaders will increasingly turn to advanced AI advisory systems to assist them with business strategy development. Such advanced AI advisory systems will likely function in the form of some kind of assistant. In this Advisor, IBM’s Project Debater application offers some insight into how such an advanced AI advisory system might function.