Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

Part II of this series described the conceptual, IDEAL architecture required for a modern, all-inclusive information management environment. I proposed that such an architecture provides the blueprint for a data lake, which should be considered from the point of view of the three “thinking spaces”: information, process, and people. The architectural principles are encapsulated in the acronymic name: integrated, distributed, emergent, adaptive, and latent. Latent, or hidden, implies that these three thinking spaces are not a representation of how this architecture will be built. That it is the role of a logical architecture.

Clearly, one of the top business drivers behind crowdsourcing is that it can be relatively cheaper than outsourcing. An equally important business driver is that it enables businesses to promote creativity and excel at innovation while leveraging resources and collaborating inside and outside their own organizational boundaries. The creativity component arises from the fact that the ideation of a concept desired or solicited by the business or enterprise requires vision and resourcefulness. It involves the imaginative mindset of a varied and often intuitive, skilled group of professionals as well as a broad range of users (specifically, untapped expert customers). The innovation element is also significant. Creativity, creative thinking, and intuition have a common connection to innovation. Creative thinking offers an avenue for intuition to generate pragmatic ideas, and ideas transform into innovation. More important, crowdsourcing establishes a new channel for communication and collaboration among external users and experts and an enter­prise’s employees, partners, and associates. This collaborative effort ultimately instills the spirit of innovation in the enterprise. This Executive Update explores how to best leverage crowdsourcing in your enterprise, using a case study in digital healthcare.

This article explores some of the circumstances that have led to rampant technical debt and offers some suggestions on how they might be averted. 

One of the forces that holds enterprise architecture (EA) back from successful management of rapid change is a perspective from earlier days of the profession. A long-standing school of thought holds that architectural work at the enterprise level is best accomplished by a formal and comprehensive architectural project, which may — one hopes — be revisited periodically. However, the practice of pure “architecture projects” is antithetical to the current rapid pace of disruptive change. Architecture work measured in months and years is a relic of bygone times. What our current situation really needs is for EA to be performed by a continuous and situationally nimble process.

I was reading a press release from a large health care provider notifying customers of a potential data breach. According to the company, “a test database was inadvertently left accessible via the Internet.” Upon learning of the incident, the company secured the database and removed it from public view. It then conducted an “exhaustive investigation,” determining that the database included patients’ names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, medications, and “limited” clinical information.

The rapid pace of technology innovation that characterizes the digital economy is altering established competitive landscapes, breaking industry barriers, and redefining the core parameters of customer relationships. Competing in this disruptive, digitally fueled business environment — and realizing the unprecedented growth potential of digital business — requires a level of agility and responsiveness that cannot be delivered by conventional business strategies and operating models. 

In this Executive Update, we explore the implications of four imperatives to identify the key architectural characteristics and capability foundations that define a digital enterprise. 

What strategies do you apply to modernizing a product code base? What results do you get with those strategies? This Advisor takes a retrospective look at a past project, both to describe the strategies my colleagues and I used to rearchitect the product and to validate the effectiveness of those strategies with two technical debt assessments via Cutter's Technical Debt Assessment and Valuation practice. 

This Executive Update examines key trends and developments impacting the market for, and the application of, data-centric security and protection technologies and practices that organizations should track in 2016 and beyond.