Business Strategy

Businesses Banking on Breakthrough Innovation

by

Post co-authored by Rob Shelton, PwC’s Global Innovation Strategy Leader Last year if you asked a CEO what he or she is doing to achieve growth, the answer would have been investing in China. This year the answer is innovation. Business executives are banking on bold innovation to meet aggressive growth targets, so they are taking innovation more seriously than ever before. In the spirit of Peter Drucker who said, “innovation is work,” business executives […]

Cognitive Dissonance

by

I was reading this today: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/ea-matters/is-there-an-enterprise-architect-paradox-surely-is-57728?rss=1 It is a good analysis of the cognitive dissonance between what Enterprise Architects should be doing and the role and situation they often actually find themselves in. The term Enterprise Architect has been hijacked for far too long. An Enterprise Architect should indeed be a senior leadership role, ideally reporting to […]

What is a Digital Disruptor?

by

In the short time it takes to develop an app, digital disruptors can force well-established companies to change the way they do business. Even worse, they can put them out of business all together. Who are these digital disruptors? How do they think? What drives them? How do they pull off the coups they do? Business and technology executives would be wise to dive inside the minds of digital disruptors to anticipate threats to their […]

Enterprise Architecture Lifecycle

by

The Enterprise Architecture team has a lifecycle of its own, but doesn’t operate in a vacuum. The Enterprise Architecture capability fails if it is seen too much as blue sky thinking in an ivory tower. The Enterprise Architecture team will interact closely with all the other management processes in an organisation, especially the IT management […]

Outside In

by

How often do you see customer journeys, customer events and scenarios modelled in an Enterprise Architecture model? Not often, if at all I suspect. In my opinion, the ‘Enterprise’ in Enterprise Architecture should include all those stakeholders that are engaged with an organisation. This include all those suppliers and service providers to the left hand […]

Emerging Technology and Disruptive Technology – What’s the Difference?

by

Some people question my use of the word “emerging” to categorize technologies such as social, mobile, cloud, analytics, sensors and others.  They argue that these technologies are already here and aren’t emerging anymore.  Some suggest using “disruptive” to describe them instead.  Now is a good time to distinguish between these two labels and make sure that we are using each to help us better understand technology’s impact to our businesses. Emerging means to come into […]

Is Your CIO Your CDO?

by

One analyst reports that by 2015 25% of companies will have a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) who resides outside of the IT department and is responsible for driving the digitization of research and development, marketing, customer service and the creation of new products and services. Before you create this new role and contact your favorite executive recruiters, take a step back and ask a few questions: What is the scope of digital transformation for your […]

Business Architecture

by

Tom Graves recently participated in an Open Group TweetJam on Business Architecture. You can read about the results of this at http://weblog.tetradian.com/2013/03/20/opengroup-on-bizarch/ Unfortunately I didn’t hear about this in time to participate but I thought I’d record my own thoughts here. The questions were: How do you define Business Architecture? What is the role of the business architect? What real world business problems […]

Strong CIO, C-suite Relationships Drive Growth

by

Your ability as a CIO to cultivate strong relationships with your C-suite peers is paramount to your professional success in an environment where IT is expected to generate revenue and enhance the customer experience. But more than your career longevity is on the line. The profitability of your company is at stake. As part of our 5th Annual Digital IQ survey, we asked more than 1,100 business and technology executives from 12 countries to rate […]