Agile battles significant challenges with management. Managers crave and need predictability, but Agile practitioners are adamant that firm predictions are impossible. Recognizing the need and difficulty of resolving this dilemma, we have formed a company that delivers services to facilitate the right conversations and decisions among the Agile team, its manager, and its stakeholders. Our services recognize that the solution entails dealing with probability. This, in turn, requires a combination of fast and slow thinking.

In this Executive Update, we will take a brief tour of both the strengths and weaknesses of blockchain technology in the abstract, working toward a framework for thinking about its other potential uses. It’s likely that the future will see many and varied uses for blockchain. Understanding how and when to take advantage of the technology will help your business advance into the future more effectively.

In this Executive Update, we propose a real-time enterprise (RTE) framework for one such sense-analyze-respond framework. Armed with a practical and well-oiled RTE framework, enterprises can minimize their chances of being blindsided by adverse developments, internal or external, and maximize their chances of leading disruption in their markets.

Some perceive that business architecture and enterprise architecture do not have a place in digital transformation. These perceptions are typically based on misconceptions, including that the business and technology environment changes too fast for architecture to play a role or that architecture slows or constrains the process of transformation. However, when successfully deployed and business value-focused, a business architecture practice is a critical enabler for digital transformation.

When it comes to IT systems in the customer care area, we keep arriving at the same idea: a trouble ticket reported by a customer and resolved in the scope of a customer care process. We organize all interactions around a process measured by key performance indicators (KPIs) and optimized for efficiency metrics, ignoring the fact that it is not process efficiency that our customers value. This Executive Update provides an alternative: a Semantic Web–based view of customer care solutions.

Today, the raft of truly disruptive and empowering consumer technologies is both unprecedented and, to a large extent, unpredictable in its consequences for businesses of all sizes and for society as a whole. This Executive Update charts the digital transformation of Mass Mitec, a UK-based small-to-medium enterprise, via a disruptive digital technology in the 1990s and uses the story as an illustration of the potential and dangers of digital disruption.

Organizations today are constantly executing their corporate digitization strategies, requiring CIOs and IT leaders to engage with business stakeholders to deliver specific outcomes. Such engagement must be governed by the organization’s processes, operating model, and technology governance to ensure robust, scalable architectures and roadmaps.

In this Update, we continue our discussion of mitigating business risk by examining the benefits of contextual software analysis and reviewing some of the static code analysis tools available today that can help track down defects at both the component level and the overall system level.

This Executive Update is the second in a series focusing on the role of business architecture as a critical enabler of organizations to effectively operate, transform, and compete.

This Executive Update examines survey findings pertaining to the issues organizations say are challenging their blockchain adoption efforts.

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. Fortunately, there is an array of tools and methods that you can apply across your portfolio of software assets and development projects to manage software risk, which we’ll explore in this Executive Update.

The existence of a digital backbone in an organization means that anyone aspiring and planning to transform different parts of the enterprise can leverage the digital backbone in a consistent and sustainable way, ensuring that each transformation effort connects and leverages a common platform. Digital transformation leaders are starting to realize that a powerful digital services backbone to facilitate rapid innovation and responsiveness is key to successfully executing on a digital strategy.

This Update examines survey data concerning the benefits and goals that organizations hope to gain with their blockchain initiatives.

Companies are embracing analytics to innovate and transform supply chains and alter the way they understand and react to changing market trends. They also hope to discover better opportunities to connect with customers and secure closer relationships with suppliers by leveraging analytics across the supply chain. As we explore in this Executive Update, business process reengineering (BPR), along with a suite of digital technologies, can harness the insights of improved analytics.

Every business must deal with crisis, risk, and compliance challenges. Teams chartered with addressing these challenges are often split across business units and regions, which fragments crisis, risk, and compliance management efforts. Business unit silos and related complexities obscure ecosystem transparency, which in turn constrain an organization’s ability to identify risks, assure compliance, and prevent and disarm crises. Business architecture delivers business ecosystem transparency as a basis for improving a business’s ability to collectively address challenges related to crisis, risk, and compliance. 

Cutter Consortium has been conducting a survey to gain insight into how organizations are adopting — or planning to adopt — blockchain technology. We are also seeking to identify important issues organizations are encountering or foresee encountering in their blockchain efforts. This Update examines survey findings pertaining to budgets for blockchain in the enterprise.

I ended my previous Executive Update in this series of articles on creating new possibilities through data virtualization by asking whether the case study company featured could have unknowingly introduced the “perils of parallel processing” into its computing environment by using data virtualization to initiate multiple applications simultaneously. To answer that question, I need to begin by reconstructing the chain of events that led the company’s IT organization to implement a solution resulting in this contingency.

This Executive Update describes nine specific workarounds that two global, multinational ITSPs used in their endeavors to reap the payoffs of cloud-based business models. We present these workarounds as key lessons learned from an in-depth study of these two organizations. 

The best way forward in handling the challenge of big data application in practice is to approach it from a business rather than technology (or analytics) viewpoint. Such an approach is strategic: multidisciplinary, holistic, and with a long-term focus — something that may not always be at the forefront of issues confronting struggling businesses. Big data adoption in a strategic manner requires financial investment, senior management involvement, understanding of risks, and a certain level of process maturity in the organization. This Executive Update presents the outline of a strategic, holistic approach to big data adoption in an organization that helps overcome the current lacuna in the strategic space. This approach is based on the Big Data Framework for Agile Business (BDFAB).

For technology-dependent products, companies, institutions, and even societies, sustainability depends on learning how to manage technical debt. Like most transformations, incorporating new practices into our organizations will likely be an iterative process. We already recognize the problem, and researchers are making progress, albeit mostly on technical issues. This Executive Update proposes a policy-centered approach to the problem. It begins with a principle that can serve as a guide for constructing technical debt management policy, and then shows how to apply that principle to develop nine recommendations that enable organizations to manage technical debt effectively.

Today’s organizations are constantly growing and reshaping as they implement new strategies and business model changes to react to the external world and internal pressures. While the ability to translate business direction into action is critical for any organization’s survival, most need to recognize there are significant opportunities for improvement. This Executive Update will cast a new vision upon strategy execution, an organizational capability that not only helps to ensure survival but can also be a source of competitive advantage.

While other strategies can to some extent be seen as alternatives, information superiority is different; it should be implemented in combination with any of the other options, serving as a “booster” of competitive advantage. In this Executive Update, we propose possible scenarios for the implementation of information superiority strategy, which provides relatively high sustainability without introducing too much complexity.

In this Update, we explore a firm that adopted decoupling as a strategic principle and discovered not only the advantages of this approach but uncovered yet another underutilized capability of data visualization: response redirection.

When everything connects to everything and new value systems emerge, a number of things will start to accelerate disruption in society: the speed of change, the growth of data, and the number of innovations. For businesses, traditional models may suddenly be swept away by disruption, but this disruption can also introduce new opportunities. The proliferation of technology and the new value systems that emerge from it are driving changes in business strategies and IT strategies. A new style of IT has come to the forefront, and it is becoming one of the main drivers of change.

Digital transformation requires investing early in digital technologies and involves organization-wide changes that pose significant challenges and uncertainties to business leaders. There are many research reports available today on digital transformation technologies, business models, and potential strategies. This Executive Update complements such efforts by assessing the enabling factors, organizational readiness, and skills gaps in Asia-Pacific for 2017. This research was undertaken in conjunction with the IT Conclave organized by the SP Jain School of Global Management in Mumbai, India; Dubai, the United Arab Emirates (UAE); Singapore; and Sydney, Australia, in February 2017. The survey involved more than 150 leaders and business professionals from over 120 organizations. The results were further discussed at IT Conclave events, and inputs were considered in drafting this Update.