Over the last 12-16 months, we have seen more than a dozen banks and financial institutions worldwide introduce (or announce) virtual banking assistants and bots. Such apps are now available to millions of personal banking customers, and banks are also starting to introduce AI-powered digital assistants for managing corporate customers’ accounts. This Advisor explores some examples of intelligent virtual assistants and bankbots companies have introduced over the past year or so.

Data centers that support today’s cloud systems must implement extensible networks based on technology that allows them to scale in an Agile, cost-effective fashion. Market trends include customer microsegmentation analytics supported by communications service providers that leverage microsegmentation analytics to improve customer retention, revenue generation, and customer experience.

Commercial edge computing products — including hardware solutions featuring embedded analytic and AI technologies — are just now starting to become available or will be soon. Despite these hindrances, already we are seeing examples of companies developing edge computing applications.

End-to-end strategy realization requires many people to work together seamlessly across five stages; this includes teams centered on strategy, customer experience, architecture, product management portfolio management, program and project planning, business analysis, business process, organizational design, and execution. Business architecture is a relatively new addition to the ecosystem of strategy realization, but has a valuable role in all five stages.

Healthcare and medicine are ripe for applying artificial intelligence (AI), and we are seeing many projects and commercial efforts underway pertaining to using AI, including for conducting research studies along with using medical and clinical data to uncover trends in efforts to develop tailored treatment plans for patients suffering from rare diseases. 

The “one size fits all” era, where RDBMSs were used in nearly any data and processing context, seems to have come to an end.

How does a utility company connect better with its customers? Utility companies must consider strategic investments in all available tools — including soft­ware dedicated to the purpose — to increase customer engagement in and control of their products and ser­vices.

If you are with a conventional company (probably one established before 2010), it’s very likely that you have a command-and-control structure with a board dominated by shareholder representatives and operationalized starting with the CEO. There may be many levels of command, down to section- or unit-level supervisors. This structure is time-tested, beginning with the Pharaohs of Egypt! It has the advantage of clearly delineating authorities, responsibilities, decision-making roles, and accountabilities.

We call out the hardware, the software, the applications, the information, and even the business processes, as we visualize the different layers of the enterprise. However, we stop just short of defining the enterprise stack fully; what is noticeable by its absence is the most important part of the enterprise: the people.

According to the principle of yin and yang, all things exist as inseparable and contradictory opposites. In this issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal (CBTJ), we explore the relationship between architecture and organizational agility as a powerful paradox: architecture is the way to agility.

Banking and financial services companies were among the first to apply artificial intelligence (AI) in strategic applications. Initially, this took place in the mid- to late 1980s in the form of expert and knowledge-based systems for credit and loan approval and mortgage processing, and so on, and then in the early to mid-1990s, when neural network-based applications for credit and bank card fraud detection, and profitability management, began to be deployed.

Given the risk/reward tradeoff inherent in disruptive technology adoption, this Advisor aims to identify the motives, pressures, and efforts that influence continued adoption intention and usage of a disruptive technology after the initial adoption stage.

An organization is likely to base its digital disruption upon the markets and geographies in which it already operates, and the existing workforce understands the customers and needs of both the current market and the current geographies. It is therefore essential that leaders utilize their existing resource pool by providing employees with the learning and tailored development to facilitate their transition to the digital era.

In this Advisor, Sheila Cox describes how effective delegation requires determining the ability to perform the specific task at hand and using the appropriate leadership style.

Organizations should focus their attention not on integrating, storing, or even analyzing data, but on the effective use of time.

Analytics can be performed at various points in the deployment of a solution. Certainly, there are situations where “localized” analytics may be more appropriate than analytics performed in the cloud, and still others where analytics on the organization’s network might be more appropriate. The location of analytics can also determine where and when to integrate data into the analytical solution.

In this Advisor, we present a sample of core thinking — a set of practices needed to build a Lean/Agile organization — grouped under three different categories: (1) foundational thinking, (2) designing, and (3) redesigning.

With the arrival of private blockchain platforms that integrate nonfunctional requirements arising from typical market conditions (i.e., privacy, confidentiality, controlled access), the barriers to creation of a digital economy become less significant and easier to overcome.

This Advisor describes several EA techniques in an IoT context.

Agile-at-scale relates to scaling Agile methods for software development use enterprise-wide or on large software development efforts. Scaling has been key as organizations try to tap the benefits of Agile methods to deliver their software products quicker, more cheaply, and with higher quality.

In this Advisor, I describe some important AI developments we are seeing with the IoT.

The Internet offered wide access, and the smartphone offered direct and personalized access to the insurance customer. What can AI offer?

Can the same path to Agile transformation work for every organization? Does every organization need to go through the same number of steps? Do the organization’s culture, technological landscape, and customer needs necessitate a customized model of such a transformation? In this Advisor, we identify the five elements of design thinking as key principles that every Agile transformation should follow.

We have developed a simple yet powerful framework to help business leaders navigate the digital landscape based on four business-focused questions that are at the core of effective governance of digital. We call these questions the four “ares.” In our previous Advisor, we discussed the first two of the “ares”: Are we doing the right things? and Are we doing them the right way? This Advisor explores the two that remain.

When we discuss the concept of “a culture transformed,” we can draw many parallels against the way a society votes and spends, but that’s out of scope. What is not out of reach is your influence over your teams and whether you can embrace the change that is upon us all. It’s up to you to set the tone of the conversation within the organization.