Successful organizations know that no matter how good the technology, it is the people who make it work. When people come first, customers win.

For the most part, the IT function is technically capable of designing and implementing solutions that remediate technology debt (TD). The challenge lies in obtaining non-IT executive sponsorship and funding for TD projects.

If your organization is interested in exploring the nature and uses of blockchain technology, joining with others who are similarly inclined might prove a valuable way to get up to speed quickly.

Digital transformation is a journey of creating and combining specific business capabilities so that they give organizations a competitive advantage in the digital excellence domains in a way that reflects their chosen mix of strategic options. This journey is shaped also by the availability of critical resources — data, analytical skills, technology proficiency. It is very often seriously affected by the state of business and IT architecture, the style of integration, and data quality. It seems wise to focus on domains of excellence where the resources are available or can be relatively easily developed or acquired.

A passion for eliminating waste is one of the ingredients that bonds the members of an Agile software development team.

Among my first tasks after joining the enterprise architecture (EA) team at a multinational chemical company was to redefine the architecture review board (ARB), a need that was triggered by digital transformation and a review of our enterprise architecture program.

Quantifying the results of business architecture certainly has its challenges, but there are creative ways to do so, even with limited resources. This Advisor describes the benefits and challenges of measuring business architecture success and provides some practical approaches that can be used to accomplish this very important activity.

Loyalty rewards programs are considered one of the most effective means for companies to attract and retain customers, and for increasing customer satisfaction and experience overall. Blockchain initially looks promising for shaking up the loyalty rewards program industry, and a number of companies are working on solutions to try and make this happen. 

Developments in the technologies we use to share and recall life events are likely to create an explosion of business opportunities within the next one to three years.

The IT governance task can no longer be seen solely as a compliance activity. As organizational structures become flatter, and interfirm partnerships become more commonplace, the onus is moving more toward a cooperative approach to IT governance. In this Advisor, we look at using a relationship-centered approach to a common IT governance situation in an IT outsourcing relationship.

Your company likely has a portfolio of existing systems, systems currently under construction, as well as future plans, including requirements to move in new directions to keep up with or surpass competitors. Software risk and its mitigation work differently for each project lifecycle bucket, so it’s worth examining how we might analyze risks and opportunities for each type.

Can you afford not to see significant architectural changes occurring in and around your industry? Perhaps changes in other industries may also stimulate thinking along different lines? Do you have people who think about architectural changes and dominant designs? Does your organization cultivate such people and enable them? These are important questions when the ground underneath shifts rapidly, but maybe the most important questions in this Advisor are: Do you know, or do you really know? And, do you have the ability to know the difference enough to act upon it?

The key element of competitive advantage lies in access to the data.

If we don’t as an IT community start to stop excusing IT failure — or, worse, normalizing it as a success in disguise — then as IT becomes even more embedded into our daily lives with the Internet of Things, we'd better get used to living with very mediocre systems. And we had better not complain when the public decides that the reputations tech workers deserve are lower than those of politicians.

Measuring and calculating the cost of change can affect many of our decisions.

By the end of the 1980s, most AI researchers had stopped focusing on rules-based approaches and had begun to explore other approaches that seemed to offer better chances for learning and more flexible ways of storing knowledge.

This Advisor considers what kind of architecture is required to support conversational interfaces.

Blockchain technology continues to capture considerable interest among organizations and the media. But what are the major issues organizations are encountering in their efforts to adopt blockchain? The latest results from our ongoing survey on blockchain adoption identify seven key issues and concerns organizations said are negatively impacting their blockchain efforts.

The values contained in the House of Lean for the 21st Century give us guidance as to the mindset required to succeed, but it takes concrete practices to bring these values to life. Given that leadership is the foundation of Lean, the effective Lean leader needs to form habits that align to the pillars that support the goal. In this Advisor, we explore the habits needed to build a pillar of respect for people and culture.

Since the business context is continuously changing, an organization’s efforts to innovate cannot be based on rigidly defined goals; instead, they must be driven by a set of guidelines for activities that can produce business value.

To successfully support the adoption of Agile and to scale Agile throughout the enterprise, progressive EA leaders must focus on finding ways to provide just-in-time, relevant, and useful input into the process.

This issue focuses on key topics of interest for financial services organizations, namely equity crowdfunding, legacy systems migration, robo-advisors, test outsourcing, and refining the reconciliation process.

For financial institutions, regulatory reporting has become something of a jigsaw puzzle — one that must be cobbled together into a coherent picture from several boxes into which the pieces from different puzzles have been put over time, for an audience that will never appreciate the pain involved in organizing that picture or the time and manpower required to build it.

Here comes the automation of innovation. Organizations that move quickly and introduce these systems are going to be well placed to gain insights that will give them serious competitive advantages to their more staid competitors.

This Advisor identifies four actions we can take to encourage others to contribute and collaborate in a group setting.