Instead of seeking expertise from the beginning, accepting emergence of expertise over time may be the best way to combat a crisis that possibly exists more in our perception than in reality.

Despite society’s push for transparency, when we move the discussion of transparency outside the public sphere to the domain of individual corporations, there does not appear to be a common understanding of what transparency means, whether it’s actually needed, or if it has any benefits at all.

In this Advisor, we examine some current trends in the API space, including API platforms and moving beyond REST-based APIs.

Organizations that hope to survive in the digital age must utilize a systematic and solid corporate performance management process. A crucial part of that performance management process is metrics.

In this Advisor, we look at how some specific Industry 4.0 technologies can create advances within regulated industries.

As companies move toward solving more of their critical everyday needs with advanced technology, almost all report suffering from a shortage of skills to handle wave after wave of new technologies. This Advisor explores the skills shortage in Industry 4.0.

By creating a shared direction, a common purpose around the need to improve, and learning how to scale our innovation efforts, our company made the leap from scattered experiences to a culture of continuous innovation.

Cognitive enterprise scenarios span business ecosystems, extending into partner and customer domains. Generally, the cognitive enterprise is a sense-and-respond, adaptive organization that can execute quickly, learning as it evolves. The cognitive enterprise represents a holistic vision for organizations through which they may view other near- and long-term strategies.

There is a symbiotic relationship between the picture frames arising from such words and the pictures painted by enterprise architects. That is the theme of this Advisor: architects can make enterprise frames come to life, and the frames can breathe life into architecture.

Transparency and fairness are major concerns for end-user organizations, commercial developers, AI researchers, and government agencies seeking to apply AI technology.

This Advisor proposes an architecture for the delivery of a connected health service that may pave the way for future connected health systems.

We’re all familiar with the analogy of peeling an onion to find out what’s going on in the center. If what we want is to create and sustain a high-performance operation, then we already know what’s at the center. We just have to figure out what’s required to get there.

When applying an Agile approach to product development, the key Agile principles remain the same. However, as we explore in this Advisor, certain elements take on a different twist.

Communicating with others about a new architectural vision of the future requires techniques such as illustrations and presentation design, graphic recording and facilitation, and storytelling. Storytelling in particular reaches people on a human level, as we explore in this Advisor.

In our studies of medical decision making under stressful conditions, we found that individual differences between users, such as experience level or familiarity with the technology, must be recognized as part of the context (i.e., individual user characteristics). In addition, local conditions such as time pressure or uncertainty provide another construct for context (i.e., environmental characteristics). We share a model for technology embeddedness in this Advisor.

Following the popularization of Agile in tech, educators in a small New York City startup who got word about it began experimenting with creating “agile classrooms” in an effort to increase student engagement and collaboration in otherwise conventional environments. 

Regulated industries should not pull back in their quest toward digital transformation but should instead find a way to embrace it. To begin, regulated industries should consider the questions explored in this Advisor.

Innovation management processes do not follow a prescriptive, single formula. Each organization can decide and define what works. This Advisor provides a basic outline of the common elements/steps for a process to manage innovation with disruptive technologies.

The advent of big data technologies with an emphasis on the ease and speed of ingestion of large amounts of data into a data lake — as opposed to the often-complex traditional ETL processes for load­ing into a data warehouse — has meant far less focus on defining schemas or structures. The focus now shifts toward how to achieve an adequate level of governance of such data lakes. This is where the data catalog provides a central canonical reference point of business meaning to underpin any data governance activities of the data lake.

New commercial applications are now available that utilize artificial intelligence, machine vision, Internet of Things connectivity, and camera-based security technologies to detect and interdict active shooter incidences before they become deadly.

A North American energy-producing company was seeking to understand how to change its status-quo pattern of finding new solutions only when it was abundantly clear it would be unable to meet its yearly market targets. In short, it was looking for a different approach to conducting its operations organization. To that end, I encouraged leadership to focus on several areas, including the topic of this Advisor: fostering a mindset of challenging the status quo on everything.

In the digitized world of financial data, there are truly enormous volumes of heterogeneous structured and unstructured data across siloed data stores. Managing such complexity is beyond human cognitive abilities or comprehension; hence, AI-based smart machines are required to assist human cognition and decision making. We believe that if AI is to achieve its promise, financial institutions are going to have to address a range of challenges.

We don’t want to design in one large lump — ever! Instead, we want to create a layer or certain amount of architecture (services, plumbing, back-end functionality, etc.) and then build something on top of it. 

In this month’s issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal, we examine the latest advancements in technologies related to Industry 4.0 and the impact of these technologies on work, business, and organizations by featuring six articles that cover a range of topics.

This Advisor describes some of the notable challenges facing the evolution of blockchain.