Strategic advice to leverage new technologies
Technology is at the heart of nearly every enterprise, enabling new business models and strategies, and serving as the catalyst to industry convergence. Leveraging the right technology can improve business outcomes, providing intelligence and insights that help you make more informed and accurate decisions. From finding patterns in data through data science, to curating relevant insights with data analytics, to the predictive abilities and innumerable applications of AI, to solving challenging business problems with ML, NLP, and knowledge graphs, technology has brought decision-making to a more intelligent level. Keep pace with the technology trends, opportunities, applications, and real-world use cases that will move your organization closer to its transformation and business goals.
Recently Published
Timothy Chiu discusses how data and digital architectures require improved application security and how the new security framework from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) endorses this view. As more and more organizations move rapidly to the cloud, he argues, applications and their associated data are increasingly at risk. With supporting data from multiple sources, Chiu frames the risks through examples of data breaches across multiple industries and geographies. Fortunately, he says, NIST is on the case.
Thomas Gossler writes about how a digital ecosystem platform demands a solid architecture for data and infrastructure on top of which a network of stakeholders can engage in valuable interactions with each other. The journey from a pipeline business model to an ecosystem platform is no small feat, and the author shares the approach he and his colleagues at Siemens Healthineers took and the lessons learned in their seven-year digital transformation
The authors take a two-part approach to discussing the design of adaptive digital and data architectures. First, they propose a way to design solutions that actively identify and address key uncertainties and concerns so that the right kinds of EA artifacts will emerge to answer key questions about user desirability, technical feasibility, and financial viability for the right people. Second, they share patterns and techniques that can be used to design and build digital and data architectures with a high level of flexibility and adaptability that can better support the changes in priorities that successful digital transformation efforts need to be able to steer.
Any digital transformation requires significant changes across many dimensions, ranging from operating models to funding models to platform architecture, among others. In this article, Eric Willeke argues that keeping these changes aligned can be one of the hardest elements of digital transformation, especially when organizations try to sidestep the challenge of evolving their current technology organization to the required level of capability by creating a new, “digital” organization instead. Such attempts fail to address three problem areas that can trip up any digital transformation effort: fragmented value streams, poor decision governance, and inadequate management of the business capability portfolio.
In this issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal, we explore how enabling successful digital transformations through data and digital architectures can facilitate the enablement of the value streams and customer journeys companies build to stay in touch with changing client expectations and user experiences, all while building out the organization’s digital backbone.
Here in Part II of this Executive Update series, we examine findings pertaining to surveyed organizations’ plans for adopting IPA into the enterprise, the establishment of dedicated enterprise IPA groups, the groups that are taking the lead on IPA, and the reasons such groups oversee enterprise IPA initiatives.
SAFe has emerged to provide the organizational context and hooks needed to support operating Agile at the level of an entire IT organization. Unfortunately, architecture has been left out of the conversation, leaving IT departments struggling to retain the benefits of architecture in Agile. But perhaps it is time to answer the question: SAFe is fine, but what about enterprise architecture? This Executive Update shows how to innovate on enterprise architecture, bringing it into the Agile model, using a technique called “wave alignment.”
In a recent webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Jon Ward explained how shifting to IT development production lines, managed in the same way as car manufacturers manage their vehicle production processes, can improve delivery in an organization. In this Advisor, we share some of the answers to questions participants asked about how the concept of an IT development production line enables organizational learning and greater delivery efficiency.