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.

For your EA program to “climb the ladder” to strategic relevance, one of the most important investments is in an integrated business architecture practice.

In the so-called traditional scenario of “stable requirements,” we can address this need using the earned value manage­ment (EVM) method, nowadays globally acknowledged as the most complete and rigorous approach.

I predict that within the next three years the market for blockchain solutions will have progressed to the extent that the key infrastructure components will be available, security issues will be identified and mapped out, and experts available in applying the technology to specific applications and industries will start becoming available, thus providing the support for implementing and running blockchain applications on a daily operational basis.

This Advisor presents an overview of improving Agile techniques and practices by using design thinking within the Agile space and describes three techniques from design thinking methodologies that tend to yield benefits to Agile practitioners.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are a borderless means for indiscriminate global economic participation. This will make it a significant part of the financial industry.

Several trends and developments — stemming from advances in IT and rising consumer/social expectations — are driving the application of cognitive computing for commercial and enterprise use.

This Advisor discusses how scaling architectural process and artifacts to suit Agile practices enhances the value of the architect's role.

Innovation's potential is brought to fruition only when it is complemented by back-end cloud technologies.

There is no technology that will allow us to generate more time or produce a substitute for time, but technological advances do enable more efficient use of time, thus maximizing its utility.

The EVM method was first developed to help manage complex R&D projects, which are mostly characterized by an unstable, volatile, and evolving scope. It is therefore no surprise that EVM applies to Agile projects.