Senior leaders are feeling the push from shareholders to continue driving their organizations forward, but is AI the answer? Just because AI is front-page news, is it right for your organization? Are the implications truly understood? These questions and more are crucial for leaders as the AI evolution continues to shape the next wave of work. Clearly, AI will profoundly transform our lives in the years ahead. Finding the balance between opportunity and implications is key to our success as well as to our future. The accompanying Executive Report explores these opportunities and implications, discusses how business design can be a crucial guide for AI, and provides key recommendations for moving into action.

Here in Part II of this Executive Report series on the rise of cognitive computing, we dive into the commercial cognitive products, including cognitive development platforms, domain- and industry-specific cognitive platforms, and cognitive-powered solutions

This Executive Report explores the hypothesis that the risk of losing out on an initial competitive advantage by not innovating as soon as possible can outweigh the risk of possible failure arising out of immediate adoption. Thus, it is imperative to begin adopting the disruptive and emerging technologies most relevant to your current and future business models as quickly as possible — the idea being to try soon, fail fast to learn fast rather than wait to be disrupted.

The accompanying Executive Report is the second of two in a Cutter series on smart service automation. It provides rich insights into 20 client organizations and how they achieved high performance in their adoption of robotic process automation (RPA) and cognitive automation (CA) tools.

Can a method like EVM, developed to control projects with well-defined objectives, be applied to control product development initiatives that evolve continuously toward a “moving target”? In an Agile environment, we are faced with the dynamic evolution of a finite boundary of integrated scope, cost, time, and resources; this finiteness — essential for business management and decisions — is the cradle for project management techniques, tools, methods, and frameworks. The EVM method was first developed to help with managing complex R&D projects mostly characterized by an unstable, volatile, and evolving scope. It is therefore no surprise that EVM applies to Agile projects.

Many enterprise architecture (EA) teams struggle with creating a program that demonstrates the level of strategic value that they believe EA should have. Even after following all the advice in frameworks and online articles, chief architects and CIOs still struggle as EA programs fail to reach their potential as an influencer of strategy execution across the enterprise. There are five steps that your EA team must do to go from a tactical technical program to a strategic role.

There has been a big escalation in the media profile of service automation over the last three years. With the introduction of robotic process automation (RPA) and cognitive automation (CA) tools, potential adopters of these new types of service automation tools remain skeptical about the claims surrounding their promised business value. Potential adopters want to know why organizations are adopting service automation, what outcomes they are achieving, and what are the practices that lead to achieving multiple business benefits.

To answer these questions, we conducted two surveys of 143 outsourcing professionals along with interviews of 48 people, including service automation adopters, providers, and advisors. From the interviews, we identified 20 adoption journeys. The benefits include doing more work with fewer humans, improving service quality, executing services quicker, reducing service costs, extending service coverage to 24 hours without shiftwork, increasing work team flexibility, increasing compliance, and, most surprisingly, increased employee job satisfaction. 

Everyone loves to negotiate from a position of power. It is satisfying, easy, and fun to play the game when you hold all the aces in your hand. It is much more challenging to try and negotiate effectively when you have a disadvantage in power, when the other party is bigger, better funded, and more experienced or has access to information that you cannot obtain. In such circumstances, it is easy to be intimidated by your relative lack of power and give up on trying to meet your objectives in the negotiation, effectively surrendering the little power you still have to the other side. The accompanying Executive Report begins by looking at how power perceptions can affect the outcome. The report then details the factors that affect your actual negotiating power position. It concludes by presenting six principles you can use to exert more influence on the matter and meet your interests more effectively.

Cognitive computing promises to transform information-intensive industries with its ability to ingest, analyze, and summarize massive data sets and facilitate self-service analytics, intelligent decision support, and smart advisory systems via the application of natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and intelligent reasoning capabilities.

In today’s business environment, it’s rare to speak with an enterprise leader who is not adopting some form of Agile development practice. Indeed, global companies of every size are adopting Agile practices and principles. However, traditional Agile does not consider enterprise architecture (EA) as a key part of the process and only assumes that architecture guidance is being provided in the background. As we explore in the accompanying Executive Report, EA leaders who have identified the need to change in light of the emergence of Agile have significant opportunities to help Agile projects move more quickly and be more effective.

One-off innovations are moderately easy to take advantage of, but to create a pipeline of innovative ideas that materially impacts the growth of an organization, it is critical to nurture an innovation management process that can be sustained and that can remain flexible and adjustable to accommodate changes in the competitive environment.

The current market for IoT implementation platforms is still very much developing. Consequently, IoT cloud products and services are evolving steadily and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future as the market for connected platforms and services accelerates over the next few years in response to the demand from end-user organizations for practical IoT implementa­tion and data management and analysis tools. That said, a considerable number of products are available from a range of vendors, and here, Curt Hall surveys them.

Design thinking — a method for spurring creativity in innovation and problem-solving in business — has gained popularity among managers over the past few years. The method is inspired by the way in which professional designers work and can be applied by professionals with backgrounds other than design. The idea is that the traditional, highly analytical ways of thinking in business are not very effective for coming up with new and original approaches to tackle specific problems, or to renew a company's strategy, processes, or products. Instead, we can learn much from the way designers think. So what happens when design thinking meets business? What are the key mechanisms — or activity and thinking patterns — that the method seeks to promote in the teams practicing it? And how can a company implementing design thinking enable its teams to execute the design thinking process successfully?

Patterns are incredibly useful in so many situations -- from knitting to economics to software engineering and architecture. Indeed, we can express business operating models and value chains as patterns. The accompanying Executive Report explores business patterns and, in particular, how they inform the work of enterprise architects.

This Executive Summary and its accompanying Executive Report provides a case description of how a Danish bank managed to create a mobile payment application that has now been installed and activated by more than 60% of the adult population in Denmark.

Based on the success that software development has achieved with Agile, enterprises are extending these practices beyond single software projects to increase innovation, responsiveness, and efficiencies for portfolios and enterprises. This has led to the expansion of Agile methods for enterprise projects and the expansion of Agile methods for portfolios. Existing techniques that support both "Classic Project Agile" and portfolio management form a foundation for Organizational Agility.

Knowledge management (KM) and enterprise architecture (EA) are both children of the late 20th century. The fact that they both emerged as distinct disciplines around the same time might suggest that they have a lot to share.

This Executive Summary highlights the various psychological and social aspects of transitioning to (and rendering) an Agile organization.

The ability to recognize different levels of complexity and to distinguish perceived increased complexity versus actual increased complexity is helpful for enterprise planners and strategists. There are different approaches to handling complexity across a whole spectrum of attitudes, from ignoring it entirely (after all, things tend to sort themselves out by themselves) to either overengineering (theoreticians who do not have many real-world constraints can be particularly good at making complex things look even more so) or the opposite, oversimplification.

The critical 20th-century management skill -- making things and people fit into systems that execute efficiently -- will inevitably be transcended by a different 21st-century critical management skill: creating the conditions in which people of widely varying backgrounds, behaviors, and inclinations can maximize their particular contributions to economic value. This is certainly happening in most firms in developed economies, yet most managers (especially IT managers) have not yet come to grips with it.

Agile development began its evolution at the development team level. However, the growing visibility of Agile methods has created a new set of issues that focus on the question, "How do we move from Agile projects to Agile organizations?" Today's executives must understand how Agile development affects their organizations, methodologies, and overall project governance.

Along with enterprise architecture (EA) ontology and frameworks, metamodels are one of the most important tools available to the enterprise architect. The potential of a good metamodel compromises a dependence on a range of metamodels provided by vendors, EA modeling tools, or those that form part of an architecture framework. Typical metamodel sources include The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), ArchiMate, and The Essential Project, while tool vendors include Troux and Sparx Systems. Although there are many commonalities between these diverse sources, there is plenty of scope for improvements and consistency. The accompanying Executive Report examines current best practice to highlight effective metamodeling techniques and suggest ways that EA teams can improve their metamodels and metamodeling.

The growing use of personal fitness trackers, smart watches, connected medical devices, and a myriad of sensor-enabled apps running on smartphones is also generating vast amounts of health data about consumers. For the most part, this data has not been used to any real extent by healthcare providers, clinicians, and researchers to promote the overall health and well being of patients and consumers. This is changing, and we are seeing a revolution in healthcare with the application of mHealth ("mobile health") technologies and practices.