How do you compute the valuation of something that has no clear definition? There are a couple of ways to respond: accept that it is good enough to have a very general value proposition for activities that somewhat fit under an “architecture” umbrella, or delineate specific architecture strategies and initiatives whose value can be measured in a manner similar to other investments that enterprises are used to.

Roboethics owes its existence as a new discipline to robots and algorithms, but these are not themselves the real ethical threat. Rather, the threat comes from robotic and algorithmic approaches to situations where the human edge is critical to ensuring results that are fair and beneficial to individuals and society at large. Computers may or may not be involved; it’s the approach that matters. Addressing the threats needs to happen at multiple levels.

Connected consumer devices and Industrial Internet applications can generate incredible amounts of data from sensors and other operations — data that can be difficult to process using traditional data management and BI tools due to the diversity and size of the data sets involved. Achieving business value from this massive data stream requires the use of big data storage and analysis technologies that can scale to meet the ­constantly increasing demands placed on organizations.

For innovation to be valuable to an enterprise, it must have real tangible business impacts and be well positioned within the organization. Linking it to the underlying enterprise architecture (EA) demonstrates how ideas have evolved. Enterprise archi­tecture needs to be able to address real innovation. If the architecture changes, what effect does this have on innovation and its related strategies? Innovation management and enterprise architecture go hand in hand. Although each can be successful in their own right, it’s when they are used in conjunction with each other that the full benefits are realized.

Digital transformation occurs in economies, sectors, and industries. Businesses can choose to embark on a journey that makes them more than just mere observers of the transformative changes. So what happens on this journey? And how can the businesses transform?

Agile isn’t going to help if we continue applying outdated change models to how we transform; that is, a bunch of change people — either Agile coaches, change management folks, or the vendor — gather in a room and create the plan.

In essence, a Jeopardy!-playing application posed two different problems: understanding natural language (NL) so as to be able to identify the right question and then searching a huge database of general information for an answer that fit the question. Searching a huge database quickly was a more-or-less physical problem, but parsing general questions in English and then determining which of several possible answers was the right match for the question being asked were serious cognitive problems.

Enterprise architecture plays a growing role in strategic discussions and decision-making, and many EA components are no longer contained within a single enterprise because they form part of a much wider environmental, social, or human ecology. In other words, we are at a crucial tipping point for EA, where the decisions that enterprise architects make play a vital role in our collective destinies and futures.

I think I have finally have come up with a good theory to explain why there have been so many stories of government projects in trouble recently: the inhabitants of Talos IV are managing them.

Establishing a successful, sustainable business architecture practice is a journey that takes time, especially within large organizations. While there are always many ways to achieve an outcome, this Advisor shows a practical and well-tested path to accelerate the process of establishing and maturing a practice.​

[From the Editor: In 2012, Senior Consultant Lee Devin wrote about industrial thinking and methods (see  "Artful and Industrial Making"). His words continue to ring true today. We share his message again here.]

Due to its ability to view an enterprise through a common lens, business architecture offers unique insights into the impact and viability of various business strategies and requirements.

Understanding how to become Agile starts with understanding the kind of work your organization performs.

For many practices, it’s a change in lexicon or technology that make them new “flavors,” but the underlying principles remain the same. We need to embrace our teams. We need to identify what we expect of them, and give them the tools and capacity to accomplish their goals. Read between the lines of virtually any new approach, and there should be signs of an homage to what’s been done in the past (and done well).

Introducing Agile causes pain to your organization. This is not because Agile doesn’t work — it works for hundreds of organizations, some of them probably quite similar to yours. This is because Agile shows you the problems and deficiencies in your organization as brutally as the mirror you look into in the morning after a late night out. It is not the mirror that makes you look bad! The short iterations of XP and Scrum and the focus on lead time in Kanban work better the more mature the engineering and management skills in your organization are.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is driving demand for cloud-based platforms designed for building and managing connected solutions and for storing and analyzing the data they generate. This Advisor examines the available products for IoT infrastructure services.

Many popular definitions of leadership emphasize charisma, vision, or position. The darker definitions hint at manipulation or even coercion. In software companies, though, people throughout the organization are smart, well intentioned, and capable of making good decisions. So we need a different definition if we want to make our companies more flexible and smarter.

Agile requires real cultural change. Unfortunately, many people new to Agile don’t see the connection between the principles and the practices. In their eyes, Agile is just another process, something that requires following a checklist of behaviors. Other processes in their experience, such as CMMI and ITIL, never asked them to adopt a new worldview. Therefore, even if they become aware of the important connection between Agile principles and practices (which they may not), they may have no past experience in software innovation for making the connection between them.

All that has been said and written about the challenges associated with the Internet of Things (IoT) does not quite prepare you for the practical difficulties that crop up as you start implementing and deploying IoT solutions. Most of the publicly available knowledge about IoT challenges relates to high-level issues that are typically addressed through architecture and design decisions. One of our recent successful implementations, an enterprise-wide Remote Energy Management System (REMS), brought us face-to-face with an entirely new set of ground-level challenges, from data ingestion to data storage, to data processing, to data analytics and visualization.

This article presents three examples of companies that have successfully pursued a strategy for using technical debt assessment as the basis for better technical and business decisions.

From the school of business, a belief emerged that the needs of business must drive technology, not the other way around. From the school of engineering, there is a belief that technology should shape the business. Naturally, the school of business typically wins. Yet speaking as digital business strategists, this is a gross oversimplification. Every organization has operational needs and line-of-business (LOB) concerns, all of which advance incrementally on decadal cycles.

By asking the CEOs of some of the most successful and influential companies in the world, such as GE and Google, a clear definition of innovation manage­ment emerges. The definition addresses the need to quickly and effectively implement organizational goals and objectives to remain competitive and the desire to strengthen advantages through the adoption of innovative ideas, products, processes, and business models.[1]

The current market for Internet of Things (IoT) platforms is quite unsettled, consisting of a broad range of providers offering a large number (and somewhat confusing array) of IoT implementation products. These range from independent providers marketing comprehensive standalone IoT platforms and services to major enterprise software vendors whose IoT platforms are designed to build on, or integrate with, their various ERP, CRM, database, and other enterprise applications. Products in the standalone category include comprehensive IoT platforms in the form of platform as a service (PaaS) offerings designed to ­provide the infrastructure and facilities necessary for developing, connecting, and managing IoT-connected products and applications.

“Agility” is the facility of quick response — the ability to be nimble. In general, to be agile entails the ability to detect changes in your environment as well as the ability to respond quickly and appropriately. Being “agile” (in the traditional sense) is about excelling in a constantly changing environment, much like a serious athlete who masterfully integrates the aspects of balance, speed, strength, coordination, and reaction to the dynamics on the field. Management has two roles in bringing agile behavior to the organization:

It truly takes a village to build a nimble (Lean) and flexible (Agile) enterprise architecture (EA) program in this digital era. EA as a discipline may not have to change drastically to address digital transformation, but EA does have to play a much bigger role in embracing the change swiftly and facilitating the change across the enterprise.