Advisors provide a continuous flow of information on the topics covered by each practice, including consultant insights and reports from the front lines, analyses of trends, and breaking new ideas. Advisors are delivered directly to your email inbox, and are also available in the resource library.
Do I Really Need Enterprise Architecture?
Scott Whitmire
This Advisor portrays a fictional conversation between the COO of a regional manufacturing company and an enterprise architect, and illustrates how enterprise architecture supports business strategy by monitoring structures, managing the investment portfolio, and ensuring the operating model stays aligned with the business model.
Digital Twin Technology for Smart Sustainable Cities
Jacqueline Corbett, Adnène Hajji, Sehl Mellouli
Many cities are now pursuing smart sustainable city strategies with the aim of enhancing their performance; optimizing their infrastructures, processes, and services; and improving residents’ quality of life. Recognizing the potential of digital twins, smart sustainable cities are experimenting with these technology solutions. This Advisor highlights a few ways smart sustainable cities can leverage digital twin technology.
Study Shines Light on Business Architect Strengths
Whynde Kuehn
In order to bring a bit of science into the mix to help us understand why we view business architects as gifted in certain areas, along with why we see common challenges, I initiated the global “Business Architect Strengths Study,” a first-of-its-kind. The study was a primary research effort conducted by me and Pete Cafarchio, a certified coach by the International Coaching Federation as well as a Gallup Certified Strengths Champion.
Agile Lineout: How an Alternative to Scrum Can Create Enterprise Agility
Jon Ward
Scrum embodies Agile ways of working and new organizational constructs, but does it consistently deliver the Agile promise of improved performance? Agile Lineout — another metaphor from rugby — is a new approach that uses progressive steps to increase predictability, quality, and delivery efficiency.
Digital Twins in Automotive: Balancing the Challenges and Benefits
Madison White
Although the concept of a digital twin in automotive is not new, the mass deployment of embedded connectivity and the ability to remotely extract critical vehicle data is. As vehicle components and systems evolve from concept and design to manufacture and operation, so does the digital twin.
Low-Code/No-Code: Empowering Citizen Developers & Unleashing Innovation — An Introduction
Michael Papadopoulos
This Advisor explores the challenges of LC/NC and the potential benefits for businesses, from simply reducing the IT backlog to serving as a POC for digital transformation.
Preparing for the Circular Economy: A Q&A
Cutter Consortium
In a recent webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Mike Rosen explored the circular economy concept, its broad impact on business and operating models, and the role of architects in facilitating the shift to a circular economy. This Advisor shares the Q&A session that followed. Perhaps Mike’s advice will spark some new ideas on how your organization can participate in the circular economy.
With Nuance Acquisition, Microsoft Goes All Out for Speech Solutions
Curt Hall
Microsoft buying Nuance Communications — a leader in natural language processing (NLP) and speech-powered solutions — for US $19.7 billion is the most important artificial intelligence (AI)–related acquisition to take place so far this year.
Putting Digital Twins Within Reach: A Straightforward Solution
Sameer Kher
Digital twins have the power to vastly increase the reliability and cost-effectiveness of products, creating an enormous economic impact. However, most businesses lack the dedicated resources to create a simulated product model, verify the model, deploy the model, and analyze the collected information. This article presents a solution that easily integrates across business functions and places digital twins within reach of many companies currently overwhelmed by the challenge.
Master Classes in Risk Mismanagement, Part II — The US COVID Vaccination Rollout
Robert Charette
In this Advisor, we turn our attention to the risk mismanagement of the US’s COVID-19 pandemic vaccination preparations.
5 Causes of Failure in Enterprise Portfolio Management
Brian Seitz
Portfolio management in the enterprise is very similar to portfolio management in the financial community — with similar disappointments. In this Advisor, we explore five elements of failure that contribute to these disappointments.
Building EA Maturity: Commonsense Suggestions
Roger Evernden
There are many good practices in bridging the maturity gap that are common to all leading EA practices: Determining the type of architectural change required, deciding the required level of EA maturity, defining the right set of areas for change, and creating well-defined maturity descriptions all help make overall improvements in EA maturity. This Advisor provides suggestions to help you build EA maturity that are considered common sense, but are frequently overlooked.
Healthcare Digital Twins: What They Are and How We Can Use Them
Chloé Audigier, Dileep Mangsuli
As the technology develops, digital twins could give rise to a new era of predictive medicine by giving clinicians a way to simulate the outcomes of possible interventions and create detailed plans for complex surgeries. This Advisor explores the potential of digital twin technology in the healthcare industry.
Learning to Lead Collective Creativity, Part IV: Leading Distributed Groups
Shannon Hessel
Explore the leadership lessons learned by observing four gathered but distant string quartets performing a new 35-minute piece of music collaboratively in various performance settings.
Ingredients for Enterprise Agility, Part IV: Maintaining the Transformational Momentum
Jon Ward
As the fourth installment in the series “Ingredients for Enterprise Agility,” this Advisor explores how a transformation team can create and maintain momentum by mobilizing volunteers, walking the board, applying the pickup sticks model, and creating an evidence board.
Setting the Foundations for Cloud Usage
Frank Contrepois
This Advisor offers a brief introduction into how to create a cloud center of excellence and provides procurement-friendly discussion points for reaping the benefits of cloud computing.
Fully Homomorphic Encryption — Vendors, Products, and Services
Curt Hall
Although still in development, products and services utilizing FHE are available. Organizations should consider investigating the technology now in order to prepare for when it starts to enter the mainstream. This Advisor examines some companies, products, and services utilizing FHE that can help you in your investigation.
Meeting the Challenges of a Very VUCA World
Salvatore Moccia, Shuming Zhao, Patrick Flanagan
For years, businesses have been operating in a world that has become riskier and increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). With the emergence of COVID-19, the past year has catapulted that risk, upending social, political, and economic structures in ways previously unimagined. In this Advisor, we take a closer look at some of the challenges that employees and leaders face in this increasingly VUCA world.
Micro-Fulfillment Is Tech’s Next Innovation “Big Bet” for Malls, Retailers, and Restaurants
Noah Barsky
Innovation doesn’t always mean grand invention. Sometimes reimagining the supply chain can yield big results and redefine a company’s future.
Even before the pandemic, online retail and rapid food delivery struggled to service “the last mile” to the doorstep. Surging demand from “stay/work/live-at-home” consumers compounded the problem and stressed even the most reliable delivery services.
Toward Accelerated Value Delivery: 3 Pillars
Jayashree Arunkumar
To successfully accelerate transformation, digital leaders must be tightly aligned in three pillars: 1) team (for continuous collaboration), 2) talent (for continuous learning), and 3) technology (for continuous delivery). This Advisor provides insight into these three pillars and explores how to use each to support organizational transformation.
Exploring the Intersections of Digital, DevOps & Agile — An Introduction
Eric Willeke
This Advisor explores the strategies leaders should embrace to enable transformational change. These include integrating elements of digital, Agile, DevOps, and other modern practices, embracing a holistic mindset and culture, measuring impact, and reimagining new approaches to formerly tried-and-true practices.
Tackling Today’s Security Concerns with RASP
Timothy Chiu
Digital transformation brings an accelerated move of data and applications to the cloud, which translates to a larger attack surface for cybercriminals. This Advisor explores how to use runtime application self-protection (RASP) to improve and advance application security for organizations.
New Rules Analytics Adoption Challenges
Vince Kellen
This Advisor explores the seven new rules of data analytics, the associated IT architectural adoption challenges which encompass technological, IT staff, and organizational issues. and strategies for addressing them.
Master Classes in Risk Mismanagement, Part I — The Texas Cold Snap
Robert Charette
How many times must a predictable, recurring risk transform into a crisis before those in charge decide that perhaps steps should be taken to mitigate the risk? In the case of Texas power-generating utilities and US states’ pandemic vaccinations preparations, it appears that the answer is at least three times and counting.
Using Digital Twins to Enhance Organizational Agility
Jacqueline Corbett, Adnène Hajji, Sehl Mellouli
Digital twins have a range of capabilities that contribute to organizational agility. This Advisor explores how these capabilities link to agility dimensions, including data management capabilities, simulation, modeling, optimization, learning, and traceability.