Those of us born before 1990 know how much the world has changed in only a few years. Among a myriad of changes, we have seen obsolete technologies mercilessly replaced and witnessed a couple of global economic collapses, and several products and services that we could never have imagined before — like the Internet — have become part of our daily lives. Whenever I see new, life-changing technology, I can’t help thinking: how did we get here so fast?

One of the hardest things to teach or learn is self-awareness. By self-awareness, I mean the capacity to evaluate oneself accurately from the perspective of others and the ability to detect differences between our behavior and our values. So many leaders are unaware of what others around them truly think about them and at some point in these leaders’ careers, this inevitably leads to trouble. Usually these troubled leaders are constantly interpreting the world around them into their internal logic, thus preventing them from seeing the gap between their own internal understanding of themselves and what others think.

While the rise of financial technology companies and services has been gradual and steady over the years, beginning perhaps with the founding of PayPal in 1998, there’s been a particularly explosive boom in this sector just in the past couple years, with a new FinTech startup sprouting up nearly every week and disrupting the financial game in a major way. Indeed, companies like Stripe, Intuit’s Mint, Payoneer, and even such developments as Apple Pay are offering an array of fundamental changes in the many ways consumers and small businesses interact with their finances.

A frequent complaint we hear from Agile teams is that their self-organization is not respected and their manager routinely overrules their decisions. If you talk to the manager, he or she complains that the team doesn’t respect company policies anymore and makes decisions they’re not entitled to make. What seems to be a battle about power in many cases and like a confusion of self-organization with autonomy turns out to be an unfinished Agile integration into the organization.

In a recent Advisor, we called out an important function of architects: “to grapple with the elements of the enterprise that are disproportionate in their influence, and make them deliver [business value].” What is implicit in that statement is a recognition that “grappling” occurs because complex situations demand that we make the right tradeoffs and choices. It’s all about decisions. Who makes these decisions?

The truly game-changing opportunities or challenges we face in our businesses are a blend of the complicated and the complex. Being able to understand the difference between the two domains and manage accordingly is thus the key to success. An inability to differentiate between complicated and complex leads to one of the most fundamental causes of business and technology failure — the illusion of control.

A digital transformation isn't just launching a brand on social media, hosting an electronic storefront, or connecting the enterprise workforce. Nor is it activating big data or analytics to synthesize new differentiators. A digital transformation requires escape from the routine mindset of business strategy to discover adjacent opportunities and strategies that create an asymmetric competitive advantage (i.e., a powerful advantage that denies competitors the use of similar strategies and tactics).

Over the past few years, the professional prestige of IT departments has declined while the use of IT keeps growing. Soon, practically all smartphones and smart TVs worldwide will connect to the Internet, and while billions of these devices and the systems that power them will go online and increase the demand for IT, my professional practice and the data from the MMVM project indicate that the influence of CIOs and IT teams is decreasing, while the frustration of organizations and clients with the IT organization is increasing. The high failure rate of IT projects persists, while obsolete systems and cybersecurity risks are on the rise. That’s why it’s indispensable to start moving IT management in a different direction — the professional and deliberate management of trust, along with continuous growth in the soft management capabilities of IT professionals that have become the new core competences of the technical professional.

Several companies have tried to enter the payment market and failed. When developing new disruptive innovations, success is about entering the market at the right time with the right product. Danske Bank launched a mobile payment application, which gained market dominance by following a disruptive "up market" path, from a simple application to a now-advanced payment platform, competing in several payment markets.

Building and enterprise architecture are two aspects of the same concern: How do we see the bigger picture? How do we oversee and integrate a wide range of diverse components into a single, unified whole?

Twenty years ago in May, the American Academy of Political and Social Science published a special issue of its periodical The Annals that focused on the challenges in risk assessment and risk management, especially within government. The premise of that highly influential issue was that assessing risk needed a new perspective; one that went beyond the methodical quantification of risk prevalent at the time to one that encompassed “the complex psychological, social,

With Goal #1, we've found an approach that helps us deal with specific challenges within the company. It's not perfect, and it certainly comes with a price. Therefore, we will continue to develop the format even further. 

Technology backlash is as old as technological innovation. It is inevitable that people will grouse about new technologies and adopt them with varying degrees of acceptance. Yet, with one caveat, the cool stuff will take hold and prevail on the basis of its functionality and actual worth to people. The caveat is that this will happen only if these products do not give people some absurd reason to do a double-take and say, "What? You didn't tell me this amazing product" -- and here, take your pick -- "uses triangulation to share my location with perverts," "shares my aimless meandering around department store aisles with marketers," "leaves my television camera running," or "records my child babbling away to a beloved toy."

Agile as a concept and as a "method" is invaluable. But have you ever wondered how Agile itself was developed? Did the signatories to the Agile Manifesto use an "Agile approach" to arrive at the manifesto? The science of methods has this age-old conundrum: which method was used to develop a method? And how was that method validated? I share my thoughts with you in this Advisor.

Digital transformation continues to change the financial sector. The increasing use of smartphones and tablets has changed customers’ behaviors and fueled adoption of mobile banking. Wearables capable of storing and processing data allow us to integrate better with the technology and incorporate electronics into every domain of our lives. The question arises whether the wearables can follow that success and become a new disruption for the financial sector. And if so, will they replace or supplement the mobile devices that are currently in use?

As part of our shift to cloud and open source platforms, we chose to introduce a number of culture changes. Early in the process, we decided to make the cloud migration a rallying cry for the technology organization. Specifically, we challenged senior technology staff regarding the fundamentals of what our systems did and how well they served the business. This resulted in key changes in the way we addressed the fundamentals of our multi-petabyte, big data problem. In this process, new high-potential technology leaders were identified and elevated in the organization. The hiring and staffing effort that accompanied this effort also provided an opportunity to further reshape the technology profile of the company.

No enterprise big or small should fail to think about what digital transformation can do for — or to — them. Within commonsense economic limits, current technologies should be exploited. Further, it's important to envision potential technological changes a few years out and think through how to prepare for and exploit them. Obviously, that's not easy.

Perhaps the best example of an adaptive and integrated field of knowledge is IT. Yet, it is quite shocking to see how many companies fail to invest a meaningful amount of time and resources to thinking actively about the future, with teams based in transdisciplinary collaboration.

Business continuity planning, information security governance, and IT governance are critical activities in managing the operations of today’s organizations. Traditionally, these areas have been handled as separate and distinct activities. Effective organizations can no longer afford to manage these activities separately if they wish to streamline planning, guarantee adequate response to business-impacting events, and control costs.

There is a new line separating human beings from each other and it is a great technocratic divide. Calling the reaction against this technocratic invasion a Luddite one doesn’t capture the significance of this scientific tsunami. All roads to the future lead through a forest of computing and scientific complexity. There are fewer mentally easy routes to economic prosperity. How the next generation sorts out their place in the 21st-century economy will be quite different than in the 20th-century economy.

Disruptive innovation, a well-known business concept defined by Clayton Christensen, is changing. When he first defined this concept back in 1997, digital technologies already existed, but they were just beginning to make their impact on strategy and the process of disruption.

In the difficult global competition today and ahead of us, finding solace in victimhood serves no one. As in the past and in the future, events will be dictated by teams of people believing all things are possible. Setting big goals, establishing metrics, and monitoring performance become important, but the most important metric will be counting the myriad of small successes found in daily challenges and the continual pursuit of even more complex ones. Is your organization so brave as to measure something this mundane?

When a company adopts new ways of working and embeds them throughout the organization, it is imperative that all new employees, in addition to having the skills necessary to do the work, are also either already practicing the company's ways of working or are very willing to embrace them. Without this, the company runs the risk of diluting its Agile "gene pool." All change initiatives are fragile, and introducing additional critical or dissenting opinions can upset the balance and be detrimental to the change effort.

Traditional technology adoption models describe a process that’s phased and driven by validated requirements analyses. These traditional models have defined the technology adoption process for decades. Emerging hardware, software, and networking technologies like the Internet of Things (IOT), automated reasoning, cashless payment systems, real-time analytics, augmented/virtual reality, 3D printing, and always-on tablets are changing the way business operates.

Today we are witnessing a new round of interest in AI and knowledge-based computing that is currently being called cognitive computing. This new round of commercial AI is based on the hugely more powerful computing platforms we have available today. Moreover, it is based on new AI techniques — with the emphasis on neural networks rather than business rules. Business rules provided the basis of some great expert systems, but they didn’t provide a basis for software systems that could learn and adapt — and neural networks do provide these advantages.