Emerging Technologies, Innovations, & Trends

Topic 7- Evaluating Emerging Technologies, Innovations, & Trends

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Topic- 1 Road to Innovation

I’m in the field of governance and I was reading one of the reading assignment articles titled “Unleash Innovation with good governance” which I could relate to instantly  because one of our roles as governance is to be the gate keepers for any disruptive changes or new technologies within the organization. In the article it had published the below figure:

 

I think this is a very practical approach to innovation based on my experience in the field because it manages the risk of failure and alignment of value to the organization while ensuring that the organization continuously aims to innovate. I believe there are two key elements to ensure the successful implementation of the framework as follows:

  1. The Idea process- The is one of the key success factors and how to motivate your employees to continuously come up with innovative ideas. As witnessed first-hand, you can just put in a “digital box” for ideas and expect people to fill it up. This is from personal experience; I was excited to submit my ideas the first year of joining and after that I didn’t care much of making any submission and I believe this is a similar case for my peers as well. I believe organizations need to invest a little more in terms of time and effort for innovative ideas; this can be achieved through engagement with members from different departments.
  2. The Steering Committee- This is one of the critical factors as well to ensure smoother journey for the ideas. I purposely stated “smoother” because I believe the idea journey goes through resistance at different levels; however, having a steering committee that is represented by different influential departments both business and IT can go a long way. This will ensure you gain the buy in needed to shape the ideas to fulfill the value needed. In addition, the steering committee will also support getting the support needed sometimes from a higher level management level (C-Level, Board).

Topic 2- The digital mindset vs traditional

This is one of the topics I believe many management roles should revisit every once in a while, because with the day-to-day operations we tend to lose the sense of being innovative and how we can shift our mindset to be innovative and motivate our peers and employees to continuously be motivated about the subject of innovation. I attended a 5-course session, and I could easily say that the below diagram was one of the key items I took out of the session. I thought there are many characteristics mentioned below that need the balance and would really help individuals to have the innovative mindset.

 

  • The Tactician and the visionary are a very important characteristic to keep in mind, sometimes to be innovative in something you really need to have the technical knowledge while at the same time to have that visionary hat on to know what possibilities that could be achieved. This could be a challenge for some individuals, even leaders, and one of the alternatives to achieve this is to include those who are tacticians or are visionaries to the team.
  • The analyst and the intuitionist- This is another critical characteristic of innovation to have because sometimes you must have the balance to proceeding forward without having all the “data” and to go with the guts which is of course based on experience.
  • The power holder and sharer- this to be highly considered characteristic when it comes to innovation teams and empowering them to continuously develop new ideas.
Emerging Business Architecture Layer

Topic 6- Emerging Business Architecture

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Topic 1- Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

As the title states, one of the key pillars of enabling the transformation to achieve the strategy is the culture of the organization. I wanted to discuss culture as one of my topics because I believe the BA relies heavily on the culture of the business to accept the BAs as their partners in achieving goals. I have witnessed this type of culture firsthand where it took the BAs multiple times to convince the business of their role; however, the business was not accepting it and the architect’s role was transformed to a business analyst instead and limited the organization from gaining the value achieved by the architects. This new culture change will require both support and empowerment from the executive management level as well as have a shift in the mindset of those within the business to understand the role achieved by the BAs. One of the indirect roles achieved by the BAs is to ensure that the proper transformation of the culture change is in motion while strategy milestones are achieved. In addition, this will be the first milestone for Enterprise Architecture as a practice within the organization to operate. There are several tips and tricks I’d like to share to help develop the trust and getting the BA more involved:

  • Observing before contributing– One critical factor to be aware of is to make sure that you invest in observing the environment within the organization before deep diving into making changes or decisions.
  • The power of listening- BAs need to learn to be good listeners and this will eventually raise questions about the process/procedure which might contribute to developing current state.
  • Get involved to contribute not to lead- BAs need to proactively involve themselves with the business through activities to give them a better understanding and put their foot in the door in terms of contribution.

Topic 2- The Importance of Business Architecture and capabilities

Business Architecture, although it is considered an emerging practice within the EA framework, I think in today’s rapid shift in business transformation and disruptions due to technology it is a core pillar. The BA plays a vital role if it was set up to succeed correctly within an organization and empowered to deliver its value. While the business side is too focused on strategizing and operating their function, the BA’s role is to reinforce the business of ensuring they have enabled the right capabilities to achieve the strategy. One of the critical roles the BA will deliver value from is defining the capabilities. These capabilities are not only limited to functions but could also be technology or data as well. As an EA practitioner, I believe one of the steps to take before defining the future state is to define the current capabilities of the organization; this key step will benefit the organization as follows:

  • Common Grounds– Defining the current capabilities will provide insight and a common ground for everyone within the team and the organization to where does the organization currently stand.
  • Maturity– As we have defined the capabilities, the BA and business team are easily able to pinpoint the level of maturity for each and this can be achieved by defining the level of investment made financially or can be the number of automated services available within the function.

 

One of the interesting figures I wanted to share is in the image above which tells many stories about the organization in just one model and part of the vital role of business architect:

  1. Number of functions within the organization
  2. Level of maturity for each function
  3. Areas in need for investment/ elimination/ merging
  4. Identifying new functions needed to meet the future state.
Enterprise Security Architecture

Topic 5- Enterprise Security Architecture

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Topic 1- Social Engineering Killed the Cat

Social Engineering has been one of the critical topics of cybersecurity hacks and organizations fear it because us humans are the weakness. It is an interesting topic because it’s all about psychology and understanding the person you are trying to use to assist. There are endless ways of social engineering activities which can be utilized to attempt to gaining access, but I will list the 3 main ones which I continuously hear and read about repetitively:

  1. The Flash drive- this is one of many psychological tests of curiosity where the hacker leaves a USB drive laying anywhere in public or even in a cab and the curious person takes the device and plugs it into their home or even on a work computer to see what is on it. Once the unit is plugged in it automatically triggers the malware on to the computer. Some people would think they can outsmart it by plugging it into a computer not connected to the internet, so the hacker has no way of communicating with the malware; however, it usually shows that there is no activity done to the device but once it is connected to the internet, the malware is triggered.
  2. The FREE Wi-Fi- Everyone loves to get free internet access and especially those individuals who have a limited internet plan package so their attempt is to minimize the consumption from their plan and trying to connect to whatever they can get to get free Wi-Fi. This is another popular psychological trick for those individuals into thinking they are getting free internet and sometimes they are lured to desperately connect because they read the “FREE PREMIUM WIFI” and they attempt to connect to it. This is the part where hackers are monitoring your activities since you are connected to them or even may ask you to “SIGN UP” to get the Wi-Fi___33 accessibility. This is where many individuals make the simple mistake of reusing their typical password and now the hacker has an attempt to know your password to other services you use whether it is your email, social media accounts or even financial services.
  3. The QR code- This is one of the newly trending ones because we are starting to see a lot in different places that we may go to whether it may be a restaurant where the individual scans the QR code to get access to see the menu (very popular especially after COVID-19), at the gym to see the schedule for the classes offered, or even at a mall to get the list of store directory or may be offers and after scanning what usually happens is that individuals are very excited to see the “offered” services that they click “Yes” or “Allow” to any pop ups; this is where the hacker takes advantage of triggering the attack by using a pop up message to the content of the device or even has full accessibility.

Topic 2- Security Awareness

This is one of those topics that many organizations neglect and overlook because it is classified as operational expenses with no tangible value to the organization. Year on year the security team requests a specific amount to budget for security awareness for the organization staff and this is the best practice for it because as a SRM leader you have to make sure that individuals within the organization are constantly reminded about the critically of this issue and how all it takes is one individual to cause a state of emergency and may even shut down their entire operations.  These awareness activities can be as follows:

  1. Video Content or awareness message via email– This may be one of the easiest methods since it may have cost minimal or no cost at all and security leaders may create content or reuse available content to distribute using the company’s email. It may raise awareness with the right amount of recurrence frequency.
  2. Physical/ Remote Training- The recurrence of this activity might be less frequent to achieve; however, it provides the basic understanding of how and why you need to follow the protocol when it comes to cyber security to keep the organization safe.
  3. Social Event within the organization– This may be a once-a-year activity and usually achieve though a third part. In my current organization, it was achieved though one of the outsource contracts for its cyber security operation. It was a great success; it was conducted on premises and invited all the employees to go through different booths and learn about cyber security.

I believe there are a lot of similarities between the practice of Cyber Security and Enterprise Architecture in terms of gaining the continues support to ensure the organization achieves a higher level of return for their investments. Both practices require continues efforts to develop their maturity levels within its domain’s fields.

Enterprise Technology Infrastructure Architecture and Assessment

Topic 4 – Technology infrastructure architecture

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Topic 1 – Manage Service Contract Renewal

I came to notice that with every blog topic reading assignment there is something relevant going on in my organization. For this week, while I was reading the article “Key Considerations When Thinking About Insourcing or Changing IT Service Providers” and this was written back in 2013 (10 years ago) majority of the points mentioned are very useful to be used in today’s operations since many organizations like mine must deal with this depending on which style of operations they are managing. For my organization, our operations’ manpower is outsourced to local vendors for both infrastructure operations as well as application lifecycle development and administration. The contracts are renewed every 3 years, and I will elaborate why it is 3 years later when I go over the interview points, I had with the Digital Transformation advisor. As I mentioned, the organization outsources its operations for many diversified reasons, and I will highlight the key reasons as follows:

  1. Government Restrictions- As a government entity, only nationals are eligible for such job vacancies if they were to recruit for the position.
  2. Financial Restrictions- To have a high available high reliability team due to the nature of organization, a lot of investment will be made toward availing the necessary manpower.
  3. Rapid technology updates- In order to ensure the organization infrastructure and applications are to date, the organization will require a dedicated to ensuring all the updates are in place without operational disruption.

As I mentioned earlier this is one of the current hot topics within the department as we are currently undergoing the outsourcing contract through tender since a contract renewal with the current vendor is not an option. I had the opportunity to meet and interview one of the digital transformation advisors who is also serving on the Bid review committee. We were able to informally discuss the following topics in relation to the subject:

  1. Outsource History- When I asked, was there ever a time where staff were hired instead of outsourced? Answer: There has never been a recruiting strategy to fulfill the position’s need, the HR attempted to convince the committee to avoid the outsourcing expense but when the numbers were calculated there was minimal difference between the two. There was an attempt during the last contract to tender the infrastructure as a different contract than the application; however, during the contract period a lot of communication related issues took place as well as taking on the responsibility of fulfilling their duties.
  2. Cost- Unable to disclose the figures but during I was informed that this figure takes a big chunk of the annual operation cost percentage and in order to maintain the high availability and high reliability, this figure will continue to stay as is if not higher when contracting with the new outsource vendor.
  3. Control- As part of the high cost, all intellectual property (IP) remains with the organization as per the contract.
  4. Change- The contract amendments enable change within the infrastructure and adapts any new changes needed technically or as driven by the business.
  5. Contract- When discussing the duration of the contract as it is currently 3 years every tender cycle, when I asked why not extend the duration to 5 years or more to avoid operational disruption? The answer was to ensure that our contract fulfills the rapidly changing field of infrastructure and applications.
  6. Alignment- Continuing from the “Contract” point # 5, the 3-year tender cycle is to ensure alignment is placed between the business needs and the scope of the contract.
  7. Frustration with Service Quality- Since the contract relates to inclusion of manpower, it is natural that every contract has a poor performer; however, the contract must ensure that such an action must be dealt with within a specific timeframe.

Topic 2- Creating a Digital Workspace Strategy

Creating a digital workplace and investing in the tools and capabilities has been one of the main areas many organizations have invested in during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. The level of investment depended on the industry type and doing so some organizations’ operational performance was boosted with remote operations while others were dependent on face-to-face interactions. A lot of thoughts and going down memory lane while I was reading the Gartner article titled “Crafting a Digital Workplace Strategy That Matches Your Technology Adoption Profile” during the early stages of the covid-19 pandemic the organization that I work for took the early initiative of ensure that all staff members have the necessary tools and capabilities to operate.  One of the early digital workspace adoptions was providing all staff members with laptop devices and collaboration management tools even though it was considered a commodity item (we were in 2020- kids in elementary school had laptops) and operational for some companies. This was a keen step for the operation and was already in the road plan to do so; however, with covid-19 this transition of moving from traditional desktops to laptops was expedited at triple the speed. Everyone in the organization had a received a laptop configured and had all the necessary business and collaboration software installed. This was all achieved within a 2–3-month time frame.

This triggered a digital initiative within the organization to ensure minimal manual procedures are in place and that over 90% of its procedures were automated. In addition, the organization aimed to ensure the software license for all its users were available whereas previously it was limited to a few users within each department who had the license available to them. This was the trigger and start of creating the digital ecosystem environment within the organization and it was continuously building its capabilities such as infrastructure and address any security issues to avoid disruptions. The organization continues to develop the digital workplace maturity by ensuring all services are available to users whether it is on premise or working remotely anywhere globally. In Addition, it had invested in an application and services hub to encapsulate all the applications and services under one application. A year initiative is now in place and ensures that the team is on the continues look out for trends to further enhance the digital workplace.

Enterprise Data Architecture

Topic 3- Enterprise Data Architecture

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Topic 1- Data Architecture within the organization

I was originally inspired to write this blog while reading the article “Data Hubs, Data Lakes and Data Warehouses: How They Are Different and Why They Are Better Together”; however, it was more of how organizations manage their data through Data hubs, lakes, or warehouses. As a ruling principle in the activation of an ongoing EA practice and in this case, it is Data architecture, the team needs strong sponsorship and ongoing support whether it is financial, operational to achieve the goals. In our case, this sponsorship was initiated through a royal decree to establish a national data management office and their key mandate was to put in place data management policies for all government entities to ensure alignment and unification. In addition, the royal decree included the enforcement for all government entities to establish a Data Management Office (DMO) function within the organization and abides by the regulations of the national DMO. This created a high level of sponsorship support initially and led the Board to establish the office as a strategy function under the strategy department. Until last year in early 2022, the board decided to move the function under the Technology deputy. It was interesting to hear during the class session one of my classmates made a comment regarding the structure of the data department and how it was also moved to the Technology department, and I thought it was interesting to see similarities and wonder if there are similarities in the operation as well.

Moving on, I wanted to provide a high level of the

  1. Data sources
  2. How the data is structured
  3. Key challenges

 

  1. Data Sources- As you can see in figure (1) below, the data sources are divided into 3 segments:
  2. Operations’ Data– Data provided to the organization by the 6 regulation bodies.
  3. Enterprise Data– Data generated from internal operations and developments.
  4. Market Data- Data generated from entities within the ecosystem of operations’ support.

Figure 1- Internal Document- sensitive information was removed.

  1. Data Structure- As you can see in Figure (2), the structure of the data within the organization:

Figure 2- Internal Document- sensitive information was removed.

  1. Key Challenges- here are a list of key enterprise challenges in the data management which I’m sure every organization:
  2. There are different procedures used for collecting data from different departments.
  3. Lack of defined enterprise data utilization
  4. Undefined roles and responsibilities for data related decisions.
  5. Lack of resources and expertise in the field of Data Management
  6. Lack of data infrastructure availability
  7. Lack of data management awareness within the organization

Topic 2- To cloud or not to cloud

As I was reading the different research documents by Gartner, one article titled “Understanding Cloud Data Management Architectures: Hybrid Cloud, Multi-cloud and Intercloud” triggered an interest of writing this blog because I came across a presentation prepared to be presented to committee regarding the strategy of moving to the cloud at the end of month. As done by many organizations who were established before cloud storage and services became a commodity, a high amount of investment was made to build the on-premises infrastructure with a specific standard to ensure availability and reliability was in place to build the infrastructure. There is even more pressure to ensure higher-than-average standards are in place due to the sensitivity of the services provided by the organization and having those services on high availability due to the nature of the business operations.

I interviewed a few relevant stakeholders regarding the current setup and what constraints are in place and what steps were taken toward moving to the cloud and referring to the below figure:

Throughout the interview and referring to the figure above, scenario number 2 was the closer scenario of how the setup was made. Due to the criticality of the services, services were hosted on the on-premises infrastructure while the backup for those services are in the cloud; however, there were two services (unable to disclose them) are indeed fully operational with a cloud service vendor within the country. One constraint discussed previously which had a lot of influence on the moving to the cloud strategy was the regulating government body enforcing all government entities to ensure their hosting operations are within the country.  This created an obstacle for picking up the pace of moving to the cloud because there were limited-service providers available (more vendors are on their way to operate within the kingdom).  Initial capital to be invested is not the feasible choice as current available vendors have marked up cost for service knowing that the supply was low in the market; thus, the organization will continue to operate its infrastructure as is and will conduct an annual feasibility assessment toward the cloud.

Enterprise Application Architecture

Topic 2- Application Architecture Layer

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Topic 1- CRM solution for the services provided.

Going through the search process for choosing the right solution needed for the organization; this can be a hectic process since CRM can mean one thing for my organization and another meaning for the neighboring organization. As mentioned in the article, “The Eight Building Blocks of CRM: Customer Experience”, many CRM programs focus on the benefits of the organizations and neglect the customer experience. This statement is true, and we must be careful not to overengineer it.

I had gone through two CRM implementations for a previous organization I worked for, it was newly established and unique in its business model locally and internationally. Our focus was ensuring the field operations were smooth and needed the right CRM tool to support it. The approach we had taken was to develop in-house and customize our solution to fit the needs of automating our field operation process. One would think that automating a form and the related process would be a simple task, but it wasn’t. When I saw the CRM building blocks diagram (figure 1) from the article, there were missing focus areas which we didn’t consider in our first implementation such as the Technology, Customer Experience and Metrics.

Source: https://www.gartner.com/document/4000867?ref=d-linkShare

After a year and a half of gathering requirements and solution implementation to go live, six months after the go-live a decision was made to stop the bug fixing of the current solution and reassess the solution whether to proceed forward with the current solution or seek an alternative. The team and I had already begun to reassess the implementation and majority of the “CRM Building Blocks” were considered at the time. We had a new mind set for the new implementation especially with the technology aspect and our consideration for a commercial of the shelf (COTS) solution to avoid continues unnecessary bug fixing. The second implementation was a success and went live within 6 months of the project initiation.

As mentioned in the article (Figure 2 below), the continues support of the key roles ensured our success of the project especially having a sponsor or sponsors supporting the project. In our case, we had both the CEO support as well as the operations’ director on our side until go live. In addition, collaboration from both the end users and other engaged departments was critical to ensure the success of the project. Lastly, having the right metrics was key to guiding our success, which was another major factor. We had defined metrics at all four levels to ensure each stakeholder was involved.

Source: https://www.gartner.com/document/3999881?ref=d-linkShare

Source: https://www.gartner.com/document/4000866?ref=d-linkShare

Topic 2 – It takes two to integrate.

I can relate to a lot of what was stated in the article “Top 3 Trends in Application Architecture That Enable Digital Business”, although it was published in 2019, I can relate to the second trend mentioned in article about API Platforms. With the Saudi government’s digital transformation strategy in place and ensuring continues alignment with the country’s 2030 vision, a lot of digital initiatives such as the API platform was provided by the one of the hosting government entities to enable all the government to integrate seamlessly through a mediation layer. This platform enabled over 200 government entities to enable their services and data with close to 200 services enabled at that time and I’m sure now it is well over 250 or even 300 services. As shown in figure 1 below, this architecture has untangled a lot of non-efficient practices within many organizations and ensured the reduction of downtime for point-to-point integration, operation efficiencies and minimal human engagement.

Figure 1- https://www.gartner.com/document/3970797?ref=d-linkShare

In 2020, as part of the EA team’s practice to continue periodic studies about how the technology unit was able to be more efficient in the work efforts needed to achieve tasks or the reduction of cost for the organization. As a team, we aimed to take advantage of the services which were accessible to us, and the good news was it was FREE. We had gone through a process cycle as you can see in Figure 2 to achieve our task.  This slide was taken from the presentation delivered to the committee to approve our recommendation. (For disclosure purposes, data was removed from the slide)

Source: API Study conducted with organization X.

  • Phase 1: Defined the main sources for services available which was X.
  • Phase 2: Defined the services available.
  • Phase 3: Shortlisted the services to ensure they are available to government entities.
  • Phase 4: We had a list of standards developed by the EA team in which we had applied on the shortlisted services.

Based on the results achieved in phase 4 in recommending the services needed, we prepared a roadmap plan to achieve the enablement of these services. The recommendation provided by the study was the unit’s guide for integration capabilities in its 3-year strategy.

 

Enterprise Information Technology Stack

Topic 1 – Digital Disruption and Stack overview; Cloud technologies influence

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Post 1- The Devil within the EA Stack

While I was reading the article titled “Back to Basics- The Enterprise Architecture (EA) stack simplified”, it took me back a couple of years to when I was first introduced to EA and how simplified it was described and written. Later, during the TOGAF course which I had signed up for I came to realize that there is plenty of information flowing in and is required to be managed for each of the 4 main domains (Business, Data, Application and Technology). In addition, you have the information and data flowing in between the phases to ensure that you are aligned with your original scope of EA.

In the article, they had defined the EA stack in figure 1 in a descriptive easy layout to understand the context for each building block as well as showing the flow of information in between. This is by far the best descriptive architecture in a “simplified” way.

Figure (1): Source- https://dalbanger.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/back-to-basics-the-enterprise-architecture-ea-simplified/

In figure (2) below is another way of looking at each of the domains as described using the TOGAF framework which is a bit vague but gives a representation of the flow:

Figure (2): Source- https://pubs.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf8-doc/arch/chap03.html

Lastly, the figure 3 which was sourced from GARTNER, as you can see the framework uses a very high level of information of the EA stack:

Figure (3): Source- Gartner Research Brief. 2008. Gartner Clarifies the Definition of the Term ‘Enterprise Architecture.’

The point my post aims to make is that the EA stack is not a to-do list where architects simply define one domain and move on to the next. In a complex environment, defined information requires frequent verification and updates as needed. As simple as it looks the EA stack requires a team and based on my experience in the past couple of years in the field, to successfully run an EA program it will require a minimum of four architects for each to focus on their area of expertise and ensure the information is up to date for decision making purposes and investments. All the information defined need to fit to connect with the other domains appropriately to ensure value is delivered to the stakeholders or in most cases to the C-Suite management to continuity receiving their support (I will the management support context for another post because I believe it is critical for the success)

Lastly, I wanted to emphasize how to approach the stack, this will be based on the organization’s current state and the key is defining the maturity level for each level. Also, as seen in all frameworks, it is always a good starting point to begin with business layer. This will lay out the organization’s blueprint for architects to make sure they support making the right investments.

Post 2- Bots are not for everyone

As I was reading through the Hype Cycle for Application Architecture and Development article from GARTNER and reading about the different solution enablers in the hype cycle, one solution that I recalled a lot of discussion and engagement work around the same time the article was written which was in mid-year 2020. At the time I had only joined the organization a couple of months ago and kept hearing about a lot of engagements about reaching the GO-LIVE phase of the chatbots. This was going on for months until it finally saw the “Soft launch” of the service by the end of 2020; however, it never made it past that phase and the project was killed off for many reasons but mainly management didn’t see the value solution that served 2-3 people each day.

For such projects to be successful, there must be a fulfillment requirement check list prior to considering and budgeting for it. Although it was at the peak of the hype cycle (see figure 1 below), this is a solution which can be classified as a nice to have capability and if not implemented to deliver a specific benefit can turn into a bottleneck for the users.

I want to share my high-level analysis of why the solution never successfully launched:

  1. Lack of POC- I’m a big believer of POCs especially in such projects where the value expected is what the value is being received. Reference implementation can be supportive; however, since the organization is unique in its business operations, you can’t rely only on references. This was highlighted as advice, and I believe it to be true and should have been in place but wasn’t.
  2. The narrow scope covers very specific services which only received 3 request/inquiries and on a good day only received 5. The business requirements gathered weren’t in the right place, perhaps the solution implementation would have been successful if it was for external users instead.

I had asked around about the project to get some insight from technical perspective and did a short interview engagement with person X to get some insight and lessons learned after the chatbot project was shut down. The interviewee responded to say that the root cause of the project failure was due to the following two main reasons:

  1. Project/Initiative Ownership- The project since initiation didn’t have official ownership to it; although, the IT team oversaw the implementation, but it didn’t have a business owner. This caused a continuous bottleneck due to the nature of the project, data had to be continuously fed to the database to raise the level of accuracy in the “bot” response.
  2. Corporate Culture- Resistance to fancy tools within the organizations. The organization has a very stringent culture and has low tolerance for inaccuracy of any information which the “bot” may respond. As I have mentioned in point #1, since there was no ownership of the project, no one wanted to take the responsibility of the information or responses the “bot” might provide users.