Some of you might have caught my webinar last week ‘Sketching a Roadmap for EA in the Age of Digital Disruption’. If you didn’t you can check out the recording and download the slides from Slideshare in this post.
Will Digitization Disrupt Your Career?
Have you stopped to think what impact digitization is likely to have on your career?
Transformational Change in Higher Education
All organisations are constantly under pressure from various change drivers, but many industries are currently going through massive and disruptive changes. When organisations face such pressures, the response is often to initiate bold but complicated organization-wide transformations. ‘Architecture thinking’ can help plan and manage change, especially in such large-scale efforts. Enterprise Architecture can take a capability-based approach to change that aims to understand which capabilities are strategically significant in order to inform decision making.
Architecture can be Agile
As disruptive innovation continues to reshape industries many business leaders are forced to generate new business models to create new or complementary offerings. Market competition puts immense pressure on businesses, often requiring them to act more like a start-up. Businesses need to balance quick decision making, partnerships and process adoption with the appropriate level of business governance to meet the corresponding growth phase. Departmental areas like legal, finance, and procurement must also respond and react in a timely fashion.
Creativity is the Next Competitive Advantage
Do you value creativity in your organisation? In his book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-brainers will Rule the Future, Daniel Pink says we have entered the ‘Conceptual Age’ of creators and empathizers, where creativity will become the competitive difference. He outlines six essential elements: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play and Meaning.
A short-time ago I spent 3 days with a swarm of highly creative business people in Amsterdam at a Business Models Inc event
What’s Under the Hood of Digital Capability?
It’s everywhere, people swiping and tapping on smartphones doing all number of wondrous things, from paying bills in real-time, ordering cut-price designer clothes, to working out the most cost effective way to arrive in Zanzibar via Rio. This is where the myth begins, where your average punter believes they cannot live without their smartphone and all its wonders. The reality, however, is that the phone is just a digital portal. It’s a small cog in a digital machine where the big cogs in the background are actually responsible for all the smarts.
Architecture for the Masses: A New Approach
It might seem counter-intuitive to see established institutions like MIT, Harvard and Stanford jumping on board the MOOC bandwagon – in case you’ve just crawled from under a rock that’s Massive Open Online Courses; the wave of technology innovation sweeping across the Higher Education and Training sectors. After all – these education mega-brands have long been regarded as bastions of exclusivity, patronised by the world’s best, brightest and most privileged. Why would they decide to give away their courses for free?
Well – they’re not the only ones getting on board…
Cloud? – Just Let the Business Decide!
The other day I was discussing matters of cloud strategy and adoption with a major client. Quite proudly the chief architect tabled a recently produced cloud policy document. Authored by a reputable global consultancy it well exceeded the thud test and gave all the impression of a bespoke policy.
EA Effectiveness – ONE Measure that Matters
Today I saw on one of the Linked-In Architecture Forums a variation on the classic question of measuring Enterprise Architecture value and effectiveness. The member wrote: “……..So what are the most useful ways in which you have measured the effectiveness of architecture efforts/outcomes in organisations you have worked for”?. Of course this elicited a stream of predictable responses and suggestions relating to levels of compliance, investment alignment, productivity improvement, sourcing effectiveness, blah, blah, blah.
The Open Group APAC Conference Highlights
Well the dust has settled now with the conclusion of The Open Group ‘Enterprise Transformation’ Conference held in Sydney, Australia for the first time on April 15-20. Enterprise Architects is proud to have been recognised at the event by The Open Group as being pivotal in the success of this event. A number of our clients including