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.
Core Capabilities: Shifting to a Business Value Perspective
Brian Cameron
The job of the IT strategy isn’t to align to the business strategy. It’s to give the business people who create it as many options to change tack as possible. It’s a provider of IT capability in support of strategic business capabilities. Supporting, enabling, and aligning with core business capabilities equals competitive advantage when the business strategy is a good one.
A “Covidian” Architecture: Designed for Uncertainty
Balaji Prasad
We are now well into the depths of dealing with the current situation. In assessing performance in the face of uncertainty, have you identified and inventoried the capabilities, including ones that you barely knew existed within the depths of your enterprise? Can you use this learning to build a more Covidian architecture that will withstand future assaults that could be worse than the one we have been going through?
Back to Business: Social Distancing and Contact Tracing in the Workplace
Curt Hall
Vendors are now offering IT solutions designed specifically to help businesses enforce social distancing practices and support automated contact tracing in the workplace.
Disrupting Agile: Is Agile Ready? — An Introduction
Hillel Glazer
The introduction of Agile practices changed how product development was organized, managed, and executed with the objectives of enhancing customer satisfaction, improving customer/market responsiveness and developer morale, and cutting out impediments to delivery. Indeed, “Agile” has been clearly popularized in much of the product development world. But strong and steady signals are emerging that those objectives are not being met. What happened?
Digital Architecture as an Enabler of Digital Transformation
Kaine Ugwu
Unfortunately, most digital transformation initiatives fail not because they lack capabilities or intelligent, talented people but because they lack precise objectives, digital leadership, and an innovative mindset. Goals — such as what the target business outcomes are — must be clearly defined because a digital transformation journey on its own is already a very complicated endeavor. Digital architecture is what simplifies the journey and makes sense of it. It is vital to begin with a clear objective in order to create the right architecture.
Seeking Value Creation? Find Out What Humans Need
Athula Ginige, Marie Fernando
With the dawn of the 21st century, we have begun to observe a more inclusive digital shift in value creation, with the transformation of business as well as societal systems due to an emerging phenomenon: a new computing paradigm that has introduced myriad Web and mobile-based applications aiming to fulfill society’s primary and secondary human needs. Nonetheless, many attempts to develop social computing applications to facilitate value creation have failed. We have created a human needs fulfillment (HNF) model that enables an optimum fulfillment of human needs, resulting in value creation.
Misunderstanding the Need for “COBOL Programmers”
Andy Maher
Rapid and unprecedented changes to the unemployment laws have created both a tidal wave of transactions that need to be processed, and significant changes to the programmed business processes that execute those transactions. Those business processes are entombed in old COBOL code on old mainframe systems. People are starting to panic about needing COBOL programmers. Yes, but.…
Transitions to Remote Everything with COVID-19
Rich Huebner
In this Advisor, Rich Huebner shares some of his thoughts about how the COVID-19 pandemic is going to fundamentally change the education industry, in particular, and offers some lessons learned for other industries as well.
AI, ML, and Big Data: Functional Groups That Catch the Investor's Eye
William Jolitz, Lynne Greer Jolitz
Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and big data are expected to have a huge impact on how we live and what we choose to do. Most categories involving these technologies focus on specific lifestyle items like shopping, dining, movies, and so forth. But such customer-centric categories lack specificity from the investor’s eye. In this Advisor, we redrew the categories on which AI/ML and big data startups should focus.
Putting It Out There: Building a Model of Public Self-Governance
Mark Greville
Enterprises must move away from the old model of centralized decision making to a model of public self-governance. Away from monarchy and toward democracy, giving teams the knowledge and authority to make decisions in the open.
Can You Hear Me Now? NL and Speech Solutions for CX and Support
Curt Hall
As a result of the pandemic, we are witnessing increasing interest by organizations for utilizing natural language processing and speech recognition solutions targeted at customer engagement and support — particularly in the form of smartbots, intelligent assistants, conversational computing, and other applications designed to automate customer requests and assist human agents with contact/call center operations. In this Advisor, we examine some of the types of NLP and speech solutions available to organizations and consider some of the issues to keep in mind when it comes to employing such offerings.
When Life Gives You Lemons...
Paul Clermont
As of this writing, we have no firm idea of the human and economic toll to expect from the COVID-19 pandemic or how long painful countermeasures will be necessary. A crisis? For sure. Let’s not waste it; let’s learn from it. Our forced adaptation to a totally unfamiliar world can and should cause us to critically examine assumptions about how we live and work and conduct business. There is a broad spectrum of possibilities, but this Advisor focuses on where IT plays a major role.
Lessons in Decision Making from Wartime Medicine
Paidi O'Raghallaigh, Frederic Adam
For this Advisor, we analyzed reports from around the globe to point to dramatic changes in how leaders are making decisions to respond to the crisis of COVID-19. We expect that some of these changes are likely to become part of the “next normal” for decision making in complex environments.
Risk Management: From “Measure and Manage” to “Sense and Respond”
Tom Teixeira
The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the risk landscape for businesses around the globe. Enterprises are learning firsthand whether the business resilience and business continuity plans they put in place are proving successful or not. In light of this crisis, it’s crucial now more than ever to reevaluate your risk management process and ensure you are well prepared for what may lie ahead. As an executive, this involves adapting your leadership and facing the current crisis head-on with a proactive approach to risk management.
From Many Models to One
Christian Kaul, Lars Rönnbäck
Many organizations today struggle with a strong disconnect between their business model and their IT systems, data distributed over a large number of nonintegrated IT systems, manual interfaces between incompatible applications, or difficulties with EU GDPR compliance. We can trace most, if not all, of these issues back to an abundance of unspecific, inflexible, and nonaligned data models underlying the applications these organizations use to conduct their business. Often, these data models have been developed with insufficient business involvement and in isolation from each other — or have been purchased from vendors with little concern for the actual needs of the organization. In this Advisor, we briefly describe the origins of some of these issues.
Data Architecture — The Warehouse Lives On
Barry Devlin
In my short series of Data Architecture Advisors, “Data Architecture — Containing the Lakehouse,” and “Data Architecture — Out of the Lakehouse, Into the Lake,” I first introduced the newcomer on the block — the data lakehouse — and then discussed the life of one of its parents, the data lake. What about the other parent, you may ask. You may have heard that it’s dead. To paraphrase Mark Twain’s alleged riposte: “reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.”
Managing Remote Workers in the Time of Coronavirus
Tom Bragg
“How can I tell that they’re working if I can’t see them?” It is a common complaint, based on a centuries-old style of working that we now need to move past. My rejoinder usually is, “When you CAN see them, how do you know they’re not shopping Amazon or playing solitaire?” But, in the days of unplanned, unusual work from home (WFH), this question deserves a closer look. In this Advisor, I’ll make use of decades of remote working, and managing remote workers, in the IT industry, but these same principles apply to many kinds of work.
Meeting CX Implementation Needs
Curt Hall
One of the primary issues impeding organizations from carrying out their customer experience (CX) management initiatives is a lack of CX professionals within the organization. So how are organizations meeting or planning to meet their CX implementation needs? This Advisor provides some answers.
Finding the “Secret Sauce” in Data Architecture Management
Sagar Gole, Vidyasagar Uddagiri
Enterprises must manage their data systems to overcome challenges and leverage the opportunities and benefits of digital transformation. The “secret sauce” to achieving this lies in a practical approach that can help enterprises transition from their current state to the desired state in which they are ready for the digital era and beyond.
Project MiPasa: Integrating, Verifying, and Sharing Data for Early COVID-19 Detection
Curt Hall
“MiPasa” is an important new blockchain project to assist healthcare providers, government health agencies, public health departments, universities, and other organizations manage and analyze COVID-19 data. MiPasa is a collaboration between many of the world's major health organizations, tech companies, and research institutions to build a blockchain-based, open, “global-scale control and communication system” to facilitate fast and early detection of COVID-19 carriers and infection hotspots via accelerated information sharing among individuals, authorities, and health institutions.
Purposeful “Self-Disruption” in the Time of a Pandemic
Gustav Toppenberg
As the world comes to terms with this “new normal,” it is easy to resort to a mindset of how things will be materially different following this worldwide management and, ultimately, recovery from a significant disruption to how we live our lives. As executive technology leaders, we have a choice to make about how we react to this disruption and how we prepare for future disruptions from a data and digital technology platforms standpoint.
DevSecOps Red Flags: Avoid These Implementation Mistakes
Sridhar Jayaraman
Too many companies rely on a solo approach to handle data security management. With one team working on getting data software out as quickly as possible and another team tasked with testing software and probing system vulnerabilities (tasks that require patience and discipline, and that can’t be rushed), too often the result is missed deadlines, missed opportunities, and missed outcomes.
Want Happy Customers? Make Your Employees Happy — An Introduction
Robert Scott
While often neglected, initiatives aimed at improving the employee experience can have an immediate and positive impact on customer satisfaction and, ultimately, the bottom line. Customer experiences do not just happen; they are the direct results of activities by the employees with whom customers come in contact. What can companies do to increase employee engagement in order to increase customer satisfaction and, ultimately, business results?
Digital Shift and EA: What Does It Take?
Samuli Pekkola, Maija Ylinen
Digitalization may be defined as using IT to improve the performance of people in organizations. These improvements may take place, for example, in business operations, the customer interface, employee experience, informed decision making, or in the form of new business models, products, and services. The digitalization of business operations involves improved business processes, cost savings, and faster lead times.
Blockchain’s Value Proposition
Pavankumar Mulgund, Ankit Sharma, Adarsh Srivastava, Lavlin Agrawal
The business value of blockchain technologies emerges in the form of business metrics, such as transaction efficiency, cost savings, and reduction of fraudulent activities, among others. In this Advisor, we explore some of the main drivers of value and potential applications beyond cryptocurrencies.