Digital technology has a major role to play in the organizations of the future, but in order to reap the full benefits of these new technologies, organizations must continue to evolve on a daily basis. In this Advisor, we identify four strategic imperatives for organizations to consider as they continue on their journey to achieve a new digital norm, in which the focus moves beyond tactical cost reduction or operational enhancement toward the holistic enhancement of value propositions.

Co-creating value-added services requires new technical capabilities, mostly enabled by new digital technologies. Thus, interconnectivity, scalability, modularity, and interoperability are key building blocks of platforms and, consequently, need to be viewed as new design imperatives aiming at the effective reuse and integration of technical functions (e.g., authorization or display functionalities). Reuse and integration especially require new capabilities. In this context, the inside-out and outside-in openness of platforms play a key role and become a strategic mandate.

We have done reasonably well, evolving the architecture discipline over the last couple of decades to a point where we are generally able to align the architecture foundation’s progress with a system’s progress. However, a system is only one piece in the system of systems: the enterprise, as it evolves over time. We may win the battle in the finite game of a single capability. But do we have the staying power to win in the infinite game that enterprises must play in? That is the key question that this Advisor raises.

We hope the articles in this Cutter Business Technology Journal issue present perspectives and ideas on a few key aspects of smart automation and that you find the articles interesting, insightful, and practical. We also hope they inspire you to harness the innovations pushing the next frontiers in automation.

In the future, and as the technology advances, corporate, government, and military leaders will increasingly turn to advanced AI advisory systems to assist them with business strategy development. Such advanced AI advisory systems will likely function in the form of some kind of assistant. In this Advisor, IBM’s Project Debater application offers some insight into how such an advanced AI advisory system might function.

When I worked with the Air Force years ago, they had a requirement for every program to capture lessons learned when the product was delivered. The programs that I worked with faithfully carried out this mandate and developed reams of reports that were compiled as lessons learned databases. Unfortunately, there was no requirement to review these databases in anticipation of new starts or to make policy/procedure corrections. As a result, the suggestions and experience that they contained was often lost. Let’s see what we can do to fix this at each of the levels of retrospective.

It is little wonder that banking and financial services rank at the very top today among the industries AI will impact greatly, according to findings from a recent Cutter Consortium survey examining the adoption and application of AI technology in the enterprise. This Advisor explores the various trends and industry developments that are driving AI adoption in banking and finance.

When approaching an architecture representation, a key point is its decomposition into elements, usually leading to a containment-based representation structure. We might then navigate the architecture along the “containing” relations (for example, whenever a link is labeled as “part of” or “implements,” it is a “containing relation” by nature), or using predefined viewpoints. To reach the ideal balance in governing architecture, the challenge is to harmonize the intentional and the emergent architectures.

“Know your customer” (KYC), a key process for banks today, remains, in most cases, a very costly and long process. Most challenges lie in the efficiency of verifying customer-provided information. With digitally verified claims, verification can be improved, accelerated, and replicated on a large scale. KYC and digitally verified claims open new business opportunities for banks to act as validators for other organizations. This Advisor explores two case studies of KYC implementation.

As with any new technology, there are numerous myths about robotic process automation (RPA). The most prominent myth — the one that has created fear among the modern workforce — is that RPA will replace humans. This myth does not hold true; RPA implementation actually works toward the betterment of the workforce and workplaces.

Although some jobs will disappear during the AI transformation, AI was not created to eliminate jobs but to automate mundane or time-consuming tasks. This will complement and empower humans to be more effective and efficient at jobs that require human insights and judgment. Organizations that fail to pay attention to the AI digital transformation are putting themselves at risk. Employees need to understand this reality and view this required personal transformation as an opportunity to grow and tackle new opportunities. Today it is no longer a matter of what you know, but how fast you can learn and adapt.

One of the techniques people in the Agile community argue for is retrospectives. A retrospective refers to a meeting held at the end of an iteration where teammates reflect on what they experienced and recommend improvements. It is an important tool because it allows the team to take advantage of their lessons learned. The bottom line is that organizations need to put processes in place to facilitate sharing. Besides being easy to use, developers need to be motivated to use these processes, or else the databases that are provided will remain unused.

Architecture stories are important to articulate so they gain visibility. For example, if you have a feature idea that you think a user would value, you might define a minimum viable product for it and whip up a quick/cheap prototype before making a final implementation decision. If the feedback isn’t positive, then you’d quickly pivot in another direction. The point is that I want the same level of thoughtful planning to occur for architecture as for features.

How can we identify and verify the often hidden working cultures that describe the rules of engagement used by stakeholders in all parts of the organization on a daily basis? This Advisor provides some answers.

To meet increasingly elevated customer expectations, organizations are implementing detailed strategies for distributing and standardizing customer experience (CX) practices and technologies across their various lines of business. In this Advisor, we explore the five most significant challenges organizations face in implementing CX strategies and supporting technologies.

Nowadays, there is a huge popular demand for Agile as a means to enable change and accelerate value. Popularity, however, is something other than reality; for most companies, the introduction of Agile requires a significant mindset shift. This almost always meets resistance from several directions in the organization. In addition, Agile adoption is often accompanied by some element of inefficiency and chaos if left unguided. The authors of this Advisor describe some specific ways organizations have combined architecture with Agile thinking and methods to improve their results.

Fintech firms are bringing to market a variety of technologies to introduce new products and compete with existing firms. However, the financial markets have a long history of regulation, meant to protect depositors and stakeholders and maintain the safety and soundness of the financial system. The industry must begin by creating an experimental space (a small market), where technology and its related products can be introduced. This is known as a “sandbox.”

Most organizations do not begin creating and leveraging business architecture until they have reached a certain size and start to encounter challenges such as poor customer experience, complexity within the business and technology environment, or ineffective strategy execution. However, if organizations instead employed business architecture from the very beginning — even in a very lightweight manner — they could likely avoid these challenges as they scale.

The year 2019 will be a time of perpetual technological innovation. A plethora of technologies will continue to evolve, improve, and become more widely adopted, with a growing set of new applications strategically applied across industries. We hope that this issue of CBTJ will help you prioritize your business technology objectives and chart your journey forward in today’s digitally competitive world.

Today’s chief data officer not only needs to rethink the relationship between data producer and data consumer but must become intimately familiar with the new requirements for predictive modeling (to unravel scenarios and identify patterns), advanced query (to follow an idea into discovery), and data visualization (to understand interconnections) — the big three for data analytics.

The technologies of this era — the postnormal era, the fourth industrial revolution, or any of its other synonyms — have accelerated society to such an extent that we have been, in effect, colonized by the future. Work is being futured at a pace driven by the advance of our fastest technologies and the consequent blurring among digital, physical, biological, and even cognitive systems. 

With twice the product in half the time™ being a generic goal for industry, what exactly is going wrong in today’s industrial environment? What stops or delays improvements in product delivery, despite embracing practices from Lean and Six Sigma? Why does it take years to get a new product out of the manufacturing plant? This Advisor seeks to demystify one of the myths that surrounds Agile product development: the myth that one way to optimize people’s time is to have them work on large batches: design the whole product, build a full prototype, test a full prototype, and design manufacturing only when the prototype passes all tests. The thinking is that this will reduce task-switching, eliminate mistakes, and achieve the desired high utilization of people. By planning the work in phases, we believe we can prevent problems in the phases that follow.

Combining the fundamentally different paradigms of Agile architecture and architectural agility can prove to reinforce one another. In a real-world case study from the consumer sector, this Advisor describes one company’s experience combining Agile and EA.

As part of a Cutter Consortium survey, we wanted to gain a better understanding of how organizations are currently designing and implementing their artificial intelligence (AI) applications: whether they are designing and building their applications in-house or whether they are also turning to AI consultancies to assist them with their efforts.

Architectures that combine blockchain and AI offer some exciting possibilities, not only for DRM, but for other applications as well — like supply chain, financial, and trading systems. These include those systems that need to provide responses to events that require a higher form of reasoning than can be practically performed using blockchain’s smart contract functionality alone. Researchers are now working out the particulars of such applications, and we hope to see commercial platforms emerging over the next few years.