Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is a fundamental business change that also requires a rewiring of the way an organization operates. An often-overlooked discipline — business architecture — can facilitate the critical bridge between strategy and execution, as well as offer an enabling instrument for digital transformation within an organization. This article describes how the discipline can be a gateway to successful, business-driven digital transformation.

This white paper by business architecture industry leaders Whynde Kuehn and William Ulrich illustrates how business architecture can be a gateway for an organization to transform itself into an agile enterprise.

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.

Industry thought leaders Whynde Kuehn and William Ulrich teamed up to create a four-part series highlighting business architecture’s role as a critical enabler of organizations to effectively operate, transform, and compete. This is part four (with Ulrich as primary author) and focuses on the role of business architecture's role in establishing a cognitive enterprise.