Enterprise Architecture

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.

This executive report, written by industry thought leaders Whynde Kuehn and Mike Clark, explores these opportunities and implications, discusses how business design can be a crucial guide for AI, and provides key recommendations for moving into action.

This article focuses on business architecture and reveals how it can be leveraged as an enabler along the strategy realization path that harmonizes the execution of business direction across organizational boundaries and initiatives.

Industry thought leader Whynde Kuehn served as guest editor for this September 2018 issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal, focused architecture as the critical enabler for achieving organizational agility. Kuehn’s opening statement provides a thoughtful commentary on the concept of business agility — the ability of an organization to continually anticipate and react to change in response to significant forces such as globalization and technology. She further constructs the idea that organizations are living organisms that must continuously adapt to today’s changing business and market environments.

The nine articles within this issue explore the contradictory idea that architecture — something perceived as structural, static, constraining, governing — is actually the enabler for an organization, which allows it to become more agile and fluid, from strategy through execution.