One of the top areas that business architecture teams struggle with is articulating the value of business architecture. Their challenges have less to do with building the business architecture blueprint or even applying it to various scenarios, and more to do with getting the buy-in to be able to do so in the first place. This is partially due to circumstances related to the discipline and its increasing maturity, but also related to the way we communicate.

Those of us who have been in IT long enough have all witnessed it: the pride tax.

What is the pride tax? It is the amount of money organizations overpay for bad technology decisions. The pride tax takes many forms: runaway enterprise systems projects that persist because leaders don’t want to admit mistakes, choosing wrong vendors based on personal or short-sighted reasons, getting too attached to a set of tools or architectures then defending them at all costs, or even making strategic errors based on unquestioned acceptance of (so-called) best practices or the status quo.

Software has been a crucible of management practice. Since software development requires a wide range of types of work, from mostly routine to highly innovative, and software is often delivered into highly volatile environments, no single management solution can fit all needs.

It is difficult to think “outside the box” when you don’t realize that you are inside a box. This is what happens when enterprises get seduced into romanticizing abstract ideas such as “architecture” or “agility.” It is important to steel oneself to the allure of these siren calls and stay focused on what is of value to the business.

When we talk about wearables, most of us have one or two specific devices in mind that we use to add tangibility to our thinking. Yet the examples that occur to us most readily are typically those that require the least effort, rather than those that lend themselves to thorough consideration.

[From the Editor: In 2008, Cutter Fellow Rob Austin described the principles that need to be learned — and unlearned — in an innovation economy. Although nearly a decade has passed since he first wrote the words, his guidance still rings true today. We share his message again here.]

Industry/domain-specific IoT solutions are typically built on the provider’s IoT platform, implementing frameworks and expertise designed to support popular IoT and Industrial Internet use cases. This Advisor provides some examples of what is available on the market.

Organizational transformations come in many forms, including divestures, joint ventures, taking a business public or private, and general market reorientations. In this Advisor, we explain enterprise architecture (EA) in relation to one type of strategic transformation: acquisitions. Acquisitions are one way that businesses seeking to digitize use to accelerate the journey to their destination and, in our experience, to specifically complement their innovation-management pipeline.

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 served as a wake-up call not only to Chicago, but to other cities throughout the United States that they needed to do much more to manage their fire risks. This Advisor asserts that as we move into an era of truly hyperconnected, ubiquitous, cyberphysical systems, there could be huge consequences if these systems fail either accidentally or through deliberate actions, and that now, more than ever, there is a need for robust, reliable, and secure approaches across the lifecycle.

Agile can mean different things to different people depending on the context in which it is being discussed. This Advisor shows four different aspects in which we can understand and use Agile in practice: "learning," "doing," "embedding," and "being." Each of these four words can also represent four phases for adoption and transformation of an organization to Agile. 

As a CIO, you need to not only understand and embody the many aspects of leadership needed by your organization, but to mentor, coach, and propagate these leadership behaviors all the way down the line to the individual performers within your team. As the examples in this Advisor demonstrate, leadership is required at all levels within the organization, but at different levels, different aspects of leadership become more prominent.

This article asserts that much like publishers, insurance companies will need to build digital solutions to serve a new generation of customers who demand it. Whether it's accomplished by building in-house teams to address the changing market, or by partnering with startups to cut through internal politics and move faster toward a digital solution, the shift towards a future where things are easier for customer, carrier, and broker is quickly becoming reality.

A Maxim for the Times:

When a digital innovation that could destroy your current business model becomes economically viable, that business model will be destroyed.

Any business model in use exists because it fulfills a need. Destruction of that business model does not mean the need goes away; rather, it is fulfilled by different means.

Businesses need to face the connected consumer-led economy with clear-cut imperatives that are aligned in lockstep with business and IT. Every prior enterprise transformation journey has been enabled by IT, but the digital technology transformative imperative changes the equation. Most digital transformations lose their way due to the complexity of overlapping boundaries at a high level between traditional and digital IT.

We observe from digital transformation in the real world that EA as a discipline has the responsibility to facilitate changing the mindset or culture of the enterprise.

Of all the scrum roles, the scrum master seems to be the hardest one to grasp in large organizations.

Understanding individuals and how they interact with each other is one of the key priorities of Agile.

Our vision strives for a software-driven approach that improves drones' energy consumption by establishing practices, tools, and metrics for developing and evaluating energy performance at the system level. With this knowledge, we can outline ways to utilize software solutions to measure and optimize drones' energy consumption and critically improve their flight autonomy.

Connecting business expectations and value generation through enterprise scenarios envisioned by these storyboards can carry several benefits that help narrow the gap between Agile teams and business users by ensuring a mutual understanding of the business and technical vision.

The most common problem we see in RFPs for cloud services is the reuse of tendering materials that were designed for the outright purchase of physical objects. Problems that arise include buyers being unnecessarily specific in the definition of their requirements, buyers trying to impose what they would do in their small data center to an exascale cloud provider servicing thousands of diverse clients, and many others. The best way to spot these problematic approaches is by way of analogy.

In this Advisor, I discuss how we addressed, in building our own private cloud, the security concerns that companies considering a migration to the cloud often face.

Succeeding as a digital business requires organizations to fundamentally transform their operating model in order to infuse the required level of flexibility and data-driven responsiveness at every level of the enterprise. Establishing an operating model geared for competing in a digital economy involves three key capability areas, as discussed in this Advisor.

It is hardly necessary to explain or justify that security is a concern when we think of applying Internet of Things (IoT) technology to industrial applications, but it is useful to consider how it differs in this context from the consumer domain.

Business process change and cognitive computing do not necessarily overlap, but in business environments, they often do. Put simply, we will increasingly use cognitive computing techniques to improve business processes.

The key to Agile management is that the organization and analytics that implement the interlocking sense-and-respond loops up and down the organization enable overall organization agility.