This issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal (CBTJ) takes a wide look at insurtech. It looks at trends and opportu­nities and offers a suite of solutions — from several perspectives — about how to leverage emerging technologies in insurance models and processes.

We believe that having a successful, well-connected, and respected enterprise architecture (EA) group with experienced enterprise architects is critically important in an organization’s effort to become a successful digital business. EA provides an approach for understanding and managing the complexity of digital transformation.

How do end-user organizations feel about the potential for blockchain to disrupt their industries and lines of business? A Cutter Consortium survey that asked 103 organizations about their efforts to utilize blockchain technology helps provide some insight into this question.

Today’s leaders are racing to reconfigure their organi­zations to be more adaptive and competitive. However, when looking for guidance on how to do that, they will discover two competing schools of thought in the Agile community: “First fix the culture” and “First fix the org structure.” In reality, this debate between a culture-first or structure-first strategy is misguided. Leaders need to encourage a conversation that incorporates both perspectives. Through this two-sided conversation, they can guide an organizational transition that is both meaningful and sustainable.

In this Advisor, we report on research carried out at the State Street/University College Cork Advanced Technology Centre in Cork, Ireland. The challenge we address in our work is how to leverage and nurture the diversity of the crowd while still ensuring the crowd behaves in a safe, responsible, and informed manner.

There are several key challenges that prevent companies from pursuing innovation effectively by using emerging and disruptive technology trends. In this Advisor, we explore these challenges and offer some key strategic questions for innovation planning.

In this Advisor, we discuss the conceptual reference model, which provides the foundation needed for any “connection” architecture, capability, or project. A conceptual reference model defines the terms and concepts used by the enterprise and the communities in which the enterprise operates. It is referenced by other strategic, operational, and architectural assets as a way to federate and pivot between different processes, communities, schemas, and systems without coupling them together.

This Advisor examines the way the data collected over the IIoT ecosystem of interconnected humans and machines can be collected, managed, and exploited. The authors focus particularly on a concept they call "enterprise personal analytics" (EPA) and provide a digital transformation roadmap companies can use to adopt EPA.

This Advisor provides a framework for scaling up innovation so that new ideas are not presented by just one team or segment of the organization, they are accumulated from every nook and corner. 

Businesses judge innovation in terms of the value it provides in either handling existing problems or tapping into new opportunities. A frameork such as BDFAB is most helpful in channeling an organization’s innovation efforts.

Analyzing your own team’s maturity is often difficult. It is tempting to inflate one’s team skills and capabilities in multiple areas. Therefore, before you conclude that you know the stage of your program, I urge you to measure conservatively.

The customer experience (CX) design and business architecture (BA) teams receive mutual benefit from working with each other. There can and should be a direct relationship (or “cross-mapping”) made between the artifacts produced by the CX design and BA teams. One of the most common and beneficial approaches is to cross-map customer journeys (at the phase level) to value streams and capabilities.

Companies across various industries — including manufacturing, medical, electronics, defense, construction, and retail (among others) — are investigating the potential for applying blockchain technology for proving the provenance of parts and materials used in assembling products or building new structures.

The IIoT risk is real. A strategy to manage this risk is a must, and the components discussed in this Advisor can help.

Being in a project management office (PMO) is tough. In many ways it feels like the ultimate corporate middle man role. What we are really trying to do is fundamentally change the role of the PMO. At the end of the day, perhaps even the name of the role will be altered: from PMO to Change Agents.

There are no silver bullets to adopting an enterprise architecture in your startup, but the aim is to enable your culture to accept it so as to drive the organization’s digital transformation.

Data science is essential in extracting value from big data but it is not sufficient. It makes use of technical, management, and business analysis skills. Data science also deals with the enterprise architecture of the organization. Astute leadership is essential and an imperative for value extraction from big data.

In this Advisor, we propose a maturity framework that addresses the data management challenges for organizations seeking to develop and deploy IoT platforms.

Effective digital IT strategies and successful execution of long- and short-term plans enable organizations to realize the goals of digital business strategies and provide guidance to enterprise architecture.

Discover how pilot projects for digital innovations can benefit from adopting an Agile development approach. 

Business architecture provides the transparency needed to proactively avoid crises through risk and compliance management — and to respond in kind when crises do arise.

Based on the demand for Agile skills in the workplace, it is quite clear that leaders across the globe are coming to rely more and more on Agile principles and practices to achieve their goals. What makes some of these leaders successful with their Agile adoptions while other leaders seem to struggle?

Blockchain is expected to see considerable application in insurance, including for claims management and processing; P2P insurance; managing policy, documentation, and other insurance information; automating sales and underwriting; and for supporting compliance efforts.

Peer-to-peer financing in the form of crowdfunding is increasingly filling a funding gap for companies that are unable to obtain traditional financing or are too early in their lifecycle to attract angel investors and venture capitalists.

Driving business risk down is just smart business. Software-related business risk is an increasing portion of business risk, so knowing how to assiduously reduce software risk has become part and parcel of today’s business reality.