This Advisor shares some easy-to-implement actions your organization can take to meet the digital transformation challenge, specifically by applying Agile and Lean concepts.

If information superiority seems to be the name of the game in your business, do not lose time. Start early and move quickly.

To transform your organization, you need to understand and model the current state, model the desired future state, and identify the work that will help your organization move toward that future.

Time is a critical resource in hypercompetition. From a business perspective, every piece of information is embedded in time, and every piece of information loses value as time passes.

Many well-managed companies struggle to establish the smoothly working engines of innovation; we observe several typical points of failure in their attempts.

Helping a shorter person put a bag in the overhead compartment, organizing neighborhood cleanups, or starting petitions to change government — these small acts of leadership happen every day, forming the glue that holds civil society together.

Sometimes what we call innovation is only creating change. We may call it innovation, though, and we may not be able to contradict our own logic. The work of architecture is to delineate the trivial from the sublime, to enable us to see those aspects of a system that have a disproportionate impact on value. The work of architecture, first and foremost, is to help us “see” the architecture.

What if we approached executing business direction from an enterprise perspective rather than in silos? What if we prioritized, architected, and planned changes from the top-down instead of the bottom-up?

Organizations are using blockchain to create new business models — exploiting its capabilities for optimizing contract management, financial transaction management, and identity management.

Enterprise architects and IT executives recognize the problem of technical debt, but what do they do without the resources and funding to deal with it? They need tools and techniques to communicate the problem to their stakeholders and engage with them.

The business value of consumer analytics and big data is not just about what you can discover or infer about the consumer, but how you can use this insight promptly and effectively across multiple touchpoints to create a powerful and truly personalized consumer experience.

The ability to “observe, orient, decide, and act” (OODA) better than peers is the cornerstone of information superiority strategy that companies playing in the digital market strive to achieve. In this Advisor, we outline our view of principles, practices, and architecture patterns that can be employed to achieve information superiority through systematically improving OODA performance.

Why are IT or innovation groups overwhelmingly responsible for bringing blockchain into the organization?

The Process of Things ensures value-added services such as developing smart applications around connected things and reaching out to more customers through adaptable things.

Through the use of the Cynefin framework, some of the challenges in IT governance become clearer.

AI systems (and robots) have the potential to make changes to our society that are as sweeping as those of the Industrial Revolution. Many jobs done today by people will become jobs that robots and AI can do better.

Successive or concurrent rollout of target business operating models leads to a continuously shifting baseline for some or all business design components, thus requiring careful planning and data-driven decision making. Having a framework that baselines the state of each business design component and facilitates continuous measurement assists in executive-level decision making.

Against the background of an evolving digital society, disruptive new concepts in information technology emerge. Cloud, big data, mobility, and social media are just a few of these technologies. Each is disruptive on its own, but as they converge and reinforce each other, the disruption is compounded. This is the new style of IT: the combination of these technologies, forcing organizations to rethink how IT is delivered and, more importantly, how IT is consumed to deliver business value. The new style of IT creates new paradigms and leaves behind the old premise that future IT developments are incremental.

To say that blockchain (a shared, distributed, immutable ledger for recording the history of transactions) is generating a lot of attention is a huge understatement. I don't think I have seen so much excitement around a new technology since perhaps the early days of the Internet of Things (IoT) or maybe big data.

This is the third Advisor in our series on combating the scourge of administrative evil. The first in this series examined three governmental IT systems — one each from the US states of Michigan, Washington, and Rhode Island — each experiencing operational failures that caused needless harm to their respective state’s citizens. In the second Advisor, we explored the idea of how poorly managed and executed government IT systems that inflict such needless harm on their citizens can rise to the level of being administratively evil. In this final installment, we discuss ways to mitigate administrative evil.

Agile methodologies, however popular they are, bring their own sets of “smells” and anti-patterns to the table, sometimes causing irreparable damage to the team. While the sources of these smells are many, one of the primary culprits is the mindset that treats Agile as “yet another methodology,” totally ignoring the cultural aspect. This article throws light on some of the prominent smells that are emerging of late in the Agile world.

Digital transformation and the new style of IT continue to evolve. How should the architecture realm then develop? More precisely, does it require us to change the way we architect solutions and interact with businesses? Are new skills required? Let’s answer these questions by considering the architecture function, discipline, and profession in that context.

Ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence, and the Internet of Things (IoT): the world is quickly transforming into one in which intelligent and networked devices will be everywhere, and everything we’ve previously viewed as dumb will be infused with connectivity and awareness. The ability of objects in our environment to interact with us on this level presents a host of social challenges, some of which we are just now facing. One key challenge is how these objects will respect the privacy of the individuals they encounter. Addressing that challenge requires an understanding of privacy and, in particular, the role that notice and consent has played in mitigating privacy risks.

The digital revolution has hit the insurance sector, with insurtech disrupting the entire value chain and customer lifecycle. New technology offers opportunities to redesign the customer experience, design new products and services, streamline processes, and increase effectiveness. The opportunities are huge; hence, they attract financial technology startups and drive investment.

In the first Advisor in this series, we examined three governmental IT systems from the US states of Michigan, Washington, and Rhode Island. Each experienced operational failures that caused needless harm to their respective state’s citizens. In this Advisor, we argue that a strong case can be made that these failures can rise to a level of administrative evil.