Making use of Emerging Technology Trends

Post No.1- Emerging technologies Themes

The previous blog focused on how developing an EA practice that is business-outcome based is a practical approach in today’s business environment. It allows business to make quick wins by capitalizing on relevant business disruptions.

Technology is growing at an exponential rate. Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2017 shows us that we are heading towards a radical, long-term (2020 to 2025) evolution of the user experience for both customers and employees. EA experts and technology innovation leaders must support their organizations to positively respond to the disruptive technology trends to stay competitive and differentiate themselves.

Gartner suggests that the top 10 strategic technology trends fall under these three themes:

•        The intelligent theme
•        The digital theme
•        The mesh theme

The intelligent theme features trends like Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, intelligent apps and intelligent things. AI and machine learning can be useful in scenarios involving productivity and accuracy. Possible AI applications in banking are Enhanced Customer Personalization and Fraud Detection. The retail industry can use AI to build propensity-to-buy models. Intelligent apps are rapidly maturing such as virtual personal assistants, virtual customer assistants and virtual financial advisers. The world's largest companies will exploit intelligent apps along with big data and analytical tools to refine their offerings and improve their customer experience. Business is also expected to continue to seek opportunities to use robotics in automating their current manual tasks.

The digital theme revolves around blending the digital and physical worlds. Some of the growing trends in this theme is Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.  These are used by organizations to create a simulated environment that can be used to enhance the design and manufacturing processes. Digital Twins-which are dynamic software models of a physical systems- are used by the business to study systems, their applications can vary from high-value assets optimization to enhanced products development. Blockchain technologies, such as Bitcoin, facilitates secure online transactions across many computers in such a way that the registered transactions cannot be altered retroactively. It has numerous possible business use cases that can radically transform economic interactions once it get properly regulated.

The mesh theme is about exploiting connections between an expanding set of people and businesses, as well as devices, content and services, to deliver digital business outcomes. New input/output mechanisms will emerge using audio, video, touch, taste, smell and other sensory channels, such as radar, which will enable people to communicate with systems, and systems to communicate with people. This can open the door to many new digital business opportunities.  Platforms such as the IoT platform, Information system platform, Customer experience platform, Analytics and intelligence platform and Business ecosystem platform can be used together to provide an interoperable set of services that can be brought together to create applications, apps and services.

These technological trends are expected to change the business world entirely, therefore organizations must carefully evaluate which one to track and adopt.

You can find Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2017 in this link: https://www.gartner.com/document/3471559?ref=solrAll&refval=183575405&qid=2fec14f62d1620bf52c1d3

Post No.2- Assessing Key Technological Trends

In the previous post, we found out that there are too many disturbing technologies that will affect the business world. This will leave EA experts and technology leaders challenged to determine which technology trends might have the greatest impact on their organizations business models.

Gartner suggests that EA professionals should start by assessing the potential Impact of a trend specifically on four key areas:

•        The Human Experience: Analyze the needs, wants, desires and pain of individuals, and the different customer types and their interactions with the technology.
•        The Business Experience: Study which initiatives based on the trend affect business operations. Are there any opportunities to reduce expenses or improve operational efficiency?
•        The IT Experience: Determine if the current capabilities are ready and mature enough to take advantage of upcoming technology trends.
•        The Technology Market Experience: Study the opportunities and threats that is brought by the trend to the technology market.

Then EA professionals should evaluate the degree of maturity of the trend, understand its position as an emerging, growth or mainstream trend. The maturity of the trend determines the way on which the organization can respond to it. Trends that are rapidly changing and evolving require more focus because its underlying technology is changing. Trends that are offering practical solutions to help organizations take advantage of, should be considered.

The trend’s market dynamic should also be evaluated by EA professionals, questions such as what is the level of market interest the degree to which the trend is incorporated in strategical and tactical plans of other organizations, should be asked. Some risk taking organizations decide to start experimenting with a technology whenever potential use cases are validated. Others prefer to wait and watch how the trend is exploited by other business to learn from them.

Now that EA professionals are equipped with the all the needed information about a specific trend, they should start to study how this trend is relevant to their enterprise context, mainly in terms of its business model and strategy.  They may recommend to the management that they should ignore the trend, monitor it whether periodically, actively or aggressively, or they may recommend adopting it.

From there, business outcomes that support the approved list of trends should be identified and defined, accompanied with a set of business scenarios that the trend could address. Opportunities and risks should then be evaluated before finally creating a transformation roadmap.

You can find more about Gartner’s approach to identify the technology trends that organizations need to track in this link:

https://www.gartner.com/document/3649618?ref=solrAll&refval=183575405&qid=2fec14f62d1620bf52c1d3

Post No.3- Designing Innovation Centers

In this era of innovation, where business has either “to differentiate or die”, many organizations are establishing innovation centers to deliver both creative exploration and business value. In this post, I am highlighting the seven best practices to create an innovation center as suggested by Gartner.

The first recommended practice is to determine the goals for the innovation center. These goals are usually revolving around the innovation projects that the center will target, the relationships that the center will pursue with institutions and other hubs and the use of the center physical space.

Another recommended practice is to select the center’s location based on access to talent and ecosystems. However, organizations should beware of failing to retain its key talent in a highly competitive geography. At the same time, they should make the trade-off between keeping the center close to strategic decision-making power and away from the rest of the organization that can affect the progress and the culture of the center.

Gartner also suggests that organizations should ensure the center’s funding, staffing and resources match the ambitions. The nature of partnerships that the center should seek, the number of the staff and their talents range should all be carefully determined.  

Centers should also focus programs on areas of opportunity and growth that require central attention such as high-benefit, high-risk opportunities, emerging topics that benefit multiple areas of the organization and new processes and cultural norms.

An important best practice is to design the center’s activities to span the innovation process. The center’s scope should not be limited to proving out the idea or technology but they should go all the way until it is transferred to the line of business.

The sixth best practice involves clarifying relationships to internal and external partners. Internal relationships includes handing over ideas to other parts of the business, solve challenging problems requested by business executives and acting as a center of excellence. External relationships include partnerships with universities, investment companies, incubators, startups, government and industry bodies, while keeping a close eye on intellectual property issues.

The last best practice is to develop metrics to measure qualitative as well as quantitative outcomes for creativity and business value. Gartner recommends using a mix of objective and subjective metrics beyond the ROI because the results of innovation are often hard to know in advance.

The link below is an article that includes more information on the topic, it also includes links to some useful case studies:

https://www.gartner.com/document/3186721?ref=solrAll&refval=183573543&qid=eea584809fd813e481d54d

             

Posts on Business Architecture

Post No.1- The business architecture

Business architecture is an integral part of enterprise architecture. An EA without business architecture is no more than IT architecture.

Business architecture plays a great role in translating the corporate vision into actionable objectives.  It is with business architecture that we visualize the end-state of the organization while keeping all the business units aligned and focused on the strategy in such a way that improves decision making and increases operational efficiency to deliver significant business value outcomes.

In a previous blog, I have posted about how Gartner recommends that the chief enterprise architect should work with the business to build a common understanding of the enterprise context. The enterprise context will the perfect basis on which EA principles that can be used as a decision making criteria by business and IT.

Gartner stresses that the business context is not one of the viewpoints of the enterprise architecture, it should never be treated as the business architecture. It rather overlays and informs all of the EA viewpoints to ensure an effective strategic integration and a focused direction of effort.

In fact, Gartner recommends that the entire EA team (business, Information, technology and security architects) should be part of developing the enterprise context to help improving the support for the business strategy avoid creating a "tiered" architecture.

Once the enterprise context is defined, models that describe the future-state EA vision should be developed along with the long-term targets for change and how to move toward these target states successfully. The future architecture should describe all the enterprise dimensions: people, financials, organizations and processes.

A current state model is then developed to be as a baseline from which migration plans can be planned and executed.

Please refer to the following links for more information on the topic:

http://myeathoughts.blogspot.com/2016/09/understand-your-enterprise-context.html

http://myeathoughts.blogspot.com/2016/11/translating-strategy.html

http://myeathoughts.blogspot.com/2016/10/business-focused-business-architecture.html

https://psu.instructure.com/courses/1829637/files/80463919/download?wrap=1

https://psu.instructure.com/courses/1829637/files/80463887/download?wrap=

Post No.2- Business-outcome business architecture

There is no better way to demonstrate the value of Business Architecture, than focusing on the metrics that matter most to the enterprise senior executive team.

Many EA programs had failed because the EA team was very much consumed with enterprise architecture activities and practices and failed to relate to the business and to where it is heading and to show a line of sight between business vision and change that the whole enterprise can use as a guidance.

As a business change discipline, EA‘s the long-term value and impact can only be assessed through the business outcomes that were successfully achieved for the benefit of the enterprise.

Recently, many organizations realized that they need to move from their traditional EA program, to an EA program that is business outcome focused. To ensure their business architecture is mapped to the enterprise business outcomes, the following aspects are considered:      

• The relative focus on strategic business initiatives
• The capabilities of EA, given the business strategy, future vision and maturity
• The business outcome and value statements that reflect the business's direction and strategy
• Potential metrics (target results) that are derived from business key performance indicators

The figure below from Gartner demonstrates how EA can be aligned to the strategic business initiatives:

Gartner recommends that the EA team should plan their business outcome-focused architecture into iterations. Each iteration should have its set of metrics defined upfront before starting any architectural work, to ensure that EA measurement is built within the architectural process. The quick value realization will boost the support of the EA program and allows the enterprise to better cope with today dynamic business environment.

The following links includes more information on the topic:

https://www.gartner.com/document/code/247593?ref=grbody&refval=3184620

https://www.gartner.com/document/2863320?ref=solrResearch&refval=182646710&qid=ed484b2dacffe81a0c26beed6e990b46

https://www.gartner.com/document/3642517?ref=solrResearch&refval=182647328&qid=1d64e80790f7aa019270aeec97980dca

Post No.3- BA and Digital Business

We are almost living a digital world, the advancements of the technology and the number of people, businesses and things communicating, transacting through the internet is increasing, which in turn force organizations to adopt digital business strategies.

Digital business is the defined by Garner as “the creation of new business designs by blurring the digital and physical worlds.” It is very obvious that it disrupts existing business models, and the business architecture experts should be prepared to build business architecture references that will help their organizations respond to the opportunities and threats of digital business.

At the beginning the EA team should ensure that their organization has a clearly defined Digital Business Vision and Strategy. This strategy should include: Business long-term goals and policies, analysis of the digital business context and identification of the organization gaps and capabilities of business and technology.

The EA team should ensure that the technology/solutions drives the initiatives. The problem should be set around the business objectives to be achieved, and the BA team along with the rest of the EA team should act as facilitators who helps the business subject matter experts in exploring the wide range of the digital solutions.

Digital business comes with so much integration points. BA and EA team members should ensure that these touch points are safeguarded and well governed. They should also develop roadmaps to achieve higher level maturity of emerging digital business technologies.

In general, the BA team needs to understand and assess the entire digital ecosystem in which their organization may operate and identify which digital business capabilities are relevant to them, and therefore, advice on the appropriate Business models that the organization can adopt to achieve specific business outcomes.

There are information on this interesting topic, which can be found in this link:

https://www.gartner.com/document/code/272022?ref=grbody&refval=3184620