Mehmet Yildiz's Blog: Updates from Dr Mehmet Yildiz, page 5

Enterprise Mobility Challanges

Mobility is an inevitable part of our lives at home and in the workplace. Fortunately, or unfortunately, it created a solid bridge between homes and workplaces. In some ways, employers can easily access their employees; however, the privacy of employees are affected by this easy accessibility.

The reality is that we cannot do business without the use of mobile devices any more. Mobility is an essential part of the enterprise. It touches every aspect of the enterprise. We cannot have a digital workplace without proper mobility architecture in place. We cannot have a modern enterprise without including the mobility to the equation. Due to these compelling reasons, we must approach mobility from strategic and architectural perspectives to properly integrate it into the culture and ecosystem of the modernising enterprise.

Lifecycle management for mobile devices is an essential architectural consideration. Managing mobile devices can be daunting from many angles. The life cycle for mobile devices can be much more dynamic and shorter than traditional computing and telecommunication devices.

Another architectural challenge related to mobile devices is dealing with increasing quantity. In the past, there were only office phones, and people even used to share them. Nowadays, workers have multiple mobile phones. Having multiple mobile devices per person may equate to thousands of mobile devices to consider at the enterprise level. In addition to quantity, the user in the enterprise may change the mobile devices frequently. These frequent changes require consideration of applications and software updates for these devices.

Enterprise modernisation strategies must consider the challenges associated with these mobile devices. Enterprise Architects need to create dynamic and flexible governance to address the concerns related to the use and lifecycle management of these devices.

Security tops in terms of challenges of mobility in the enterprise. The security implications of mobile devices are exponentially increasing. These devices create many security vulnerabilities. Software updates can be persistent and very frequent. Frequent updates and patching can create a massive workload for the IT support departments.

Use of these mobile devices increases information consumption in the enterprise dramatically. Security control of the data can be demanding too. These security implications cross the data and application domains; hence, a collaborative effort among the Security, Data, and Application Architects are essential. Enterprise Architects can coordinate this collaboration across other architectural areas in the enterprise.

These critical challenges created by mobile devices are real, evident, and ubiquitous in the enterprise. Therefore, our enterprise modernisation initiatives must consider these challenges and find practical and innovative ways to address them. One of the approaches is to use a Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) practice. UEM includes relevant software tools and centralised management interfaces for consumers. This centralisation is necessary to improve the security capabilities and also allow a collaborative content sharing for the consumers and other stakeholders. It becomes essential to introduce UEM to our enterprise modernisation program structure.

Data Intelligence for Enterprise Digital Transformations

Data is the most valuable asset in business intelligence. Data steers and leads to business and technology transformation. One significant fact is that data, especially Big Data, is ubiquitous in every enterprise. Every enterprise generates massive amounts of data. As digital leaders, data is our bread and butter; hence, we need to understand every aspect of it in its lifecycle.

Big data differs from traditional data. The main differences come from characteristics such as volume, velocity, variety, veracity, value and overall complexity of data sets in a data ecosystem. Let me provide a quick overview of these critical terms.

Volume refers to the size or amount of data sets. We can measure them in terabytes, petabytes or exabytes. There are no specific definitions to determine the threshold for Big Data volumes. Ironically, even though it is called the Big Data, and it is a signifier, the volume is not the main characteristics of the Big Data as far as architecture, design and deployments are concerned.

Velocity refers to the speed of producing data. Big Data sources generate high-speed data streams coming from real-time devices such as mobile phones, social media, IoT sensors, IoT edge gateways, and the Cloud data stores. Velocity is an essential factor in all phases of the Big Data architecture and management considerations.

Variety refers to multiple sources of data. The data sources include structured transactional data, semi-structured such as web sites or system logs, and unstructured data such as video, audio, animation, and pictures. Variety is also a significant factor for Big Data architecture and management considerations.

Veracity means the quality of the data. Since volume and velocity are enormous in Big Data, veracity is very challenging. It is essential to have quality output to make sense of data for business insights. Veracity is also related to value.

Value is the primary purpose of Big Data to create new insights and gain business value from Big Data. We can create value with innovative and creative approaches taken by all the stakeholders of a Big Data solution.

Overall complexity for Big Data refers to more data attributes and difficulty to extract desired value due to large volume, wide variety, enormous velocity and required veracity for the desired value.

Even though architecturally similar to traditional data, Big Data requires newer methods and tools to deal with data. The traditional methods and tools are not adequate to process Big Data. The process refers to capturing a substantial amount of data from multiple sources, storing analysing, searching, transferring, sharing, updating, visualising and governing huge volumes data in the magnitude of petabytes or even exabytes. I covered these topics in my recent publications to share with my readers.

Wecome to DigitalMehmet.com

Based on insightful advice from my author mentors on the Goodreads, I established a professional author platform using my domain name digitalmehmet.com. This new site hosts relevant links to my books, blogs, and other publications.

I also put links to Goodreads on my author platform to make it easy to find my books listed on the Goodreads site. This site is expected to allow easy access to my books for honest review and rating by my readers. Upon request, I can provide hard copy or ebook formats of my books for review.

You can contact me via digitalmehmet.com. I look forward to meeting new readers and authors using my author platform.

Fail Fast and Cheap to Modernise Enterprises

Agility is one of the primary pillars in our enterprise modernisation framework. As Enterprise Architects in this economic climate, we must be agile, act quickly, and think on our feet at all times. This agility can help us be more influential, competitive, and productive to create expected business value.

Our key question is how to make our IT footprint more intuitive, responsive, and agile day-to-day. This approach is a foundational requirement of modernisation initiatives. Whist dealing with legacy IT footprint to understand it in an agile manner, as Enterprise Architects, we also need to have the vision of well-functioning modernisation and put our energies on rapid-paced iterative modernisation initiatives.

It is not feasible to undertake successful modernisation initiatives with old methods. As this became a reality, many organisations embraced agility and matured in delivering rapidly. Agility became a particular concern for modernisation and digital transformations as consumer demands are increasing based on fast-paced delivery requirements.

Speed to market is one of the most fundamental requirements of businesses nowadays. Agile became the new norm in modernising enterprises. Products are expected to be released faster than they were in the past. Security updates and bug fixes are required more frequently. Agility affects all aspects of enterprise modernisation. Besides, Enterprise Architects need to act, behave and approach in agility to every aspect of the modernisation solutions.

Promoting agile in enterprises nowadays is reasonably easy due to its nature and compelling reasons. Agile is a particular interest to the new generations as they grow with agility in all walks of life. However, the older generation still has a sentimental attachment to waterfall methods. There appears to be some comfort zone created for using waterfall methods.

There is a common perception that Agile methods cut things short hence reduce the quality; however, this is not true, or at least context-specific. An Agile approach increases the quality due to iterative approaches and checking quality more frequently in every iterative milestone.

Enterprise Architects can articulate the benefits and compelling reasons to use the Agile approach, especially for modernisations leading to digital transformations. It is not feasible to wait and see the end of gigantic digital transformation projects. There are many unknowns; hence, it is not possible to see the end product without experimentation and constant trial and error in smaller scales for modernisation.

An agile approach allows the team members to test their ideas iteratively. If they fail, they fail fast and cheaply without costing lots of funds to the initiatives. This business value needs to be understood well and needs to be embedded in the culture of the organisations striving for modernisation goals. Enterprise Architects must be the catalyst for conveying the message and making the necessary cultural adjustments effectively.

From Complexity to Smart Simplicity for Enterprise Transformation

I don't know you, but I strive for a simplicity mindset in all walks of my life. As an Enterprise Architect, it has been critical in my professional life. Simplicity is an immutable requirement to be fulfilled for the success of digital transformations and enterprise modernisation goals. Simplicity is also one of the mandatory attributes of digital leaders and content creators. Digital leaders must be capable of turning complexity to simplicity effectively. Let’s point out the reasons briefly.

Simplicity touches almost every angle of enterprise modernisation and transformation solutions because these solutions can incredibly be complex. Simplicity, in sophisticated enterprises, is a paradoxical topic. Enterprise modernisation and transformations are complex tasks and require sophisticated intelligence such as in-depth knowledge, varied skills, unique capabilities, and extensive experience. We must simplify the complicated processes, systems, tools and technologies leveraging our digital intelligence.

Paradoxically, to create simplicity, one needs to deal with a lot of complexity, complications, and sophisticated matters. This is where digital intelligence plays an important role. Obtaining the required knowledge, acquiring advanced skills, gaining substantial experience, and displaying unique capabilities are challenging and not indeed trivial activities. We need to deal with tremendous setbacks, constraints, limitations, and obscurity to create simplicity by using our digital intelligence.

From my observations, digitally intelligent leaders who deal with complexity and sophisticated matters can have extraordinary attributes to simplify things for other people. One primary focus area is effective communication. The other key areas are consumer-centric simplicity, design simplicity, and specifications simplicity. There are more of course, beyond the scope of this article, as I pointed out in my recent publication titled Digital Intelligence .

Simplicity is a well sought-after characteristic in digital services and products. The modern digital enterprises aim to offer simplified solutions to consumers. As opposed to complexity, simplicity is favourable by consumers. In other words, consumers expect easy-to-use products and services; they certainly discard convoluted ones. Therefore, digital service creators are expected to simplify complex situations and complicated problems and offer simple solutions to delight their consumers.

Erasing Blind Spots in Enterprise Transformation Initiatives

We all have blind spots every now and then. It is a natural and inevitable situation posed by the limitations of our brains. Blind spots can be perilous in many circumstances in life. In our context, blinds spots are prevalent in complex enterprise transformation initiatives. The owner of the blind spot cannot see his or her blind spot unless using specific tools, methods, or getting assistance from someone else who is more experienced and observant.

Habits and habitual thinking patterns are common causes of blind spots. For example, focusing on technical details without seeing the big picture in our architecture can cause cloudy thinking and ultimately dangerous blind spots. However, Enterprise Architects can be astute observers of blind spots at all times for modernising their enterprise. They look for big pictures from multiple angles, and deep dive to validate their vision and mission when needed hence can quickly identify potential blind spots and detrimental weaknesses experienced by technical team members.

Enterprise Architects need to articulate situations caused by blind spots with constructive feedback, empathy, lots of clarifying examples, metaphors, and similes. This type of influential articulation and focus can help people see and accept their blind spots effectively, understand their weaknesses, and turn them into strengths. Related to blind spots, identifying potential hidden agendas and hidden costs are critical for enterprise transformation initiatives.

Taking necessary measures matters for any enterprise transformation initiative. We need to focus on both qualitative and quantitative measures for team success. To this end, we can manage across complex matrix structures. As metric oriented and data-driven professionals, we need to use KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). For example, we can use a team dashboard fed by multiple data sources to see the trends, qualify and quantify progress in visual formats.

We can transform the enterprise into a data-driven organisation to measure the progress of modernisation goals structurally and methodically. It is a common phenomenon that inexperienced technical people can lose focus on business value and client needs. One of the key measures that we need to take is laser-sharp client focus.

To conclude, while providing technical excellence, we also need to ensure a customer-centric outlook is provided, focusing on continually improving client experience with measurable business results. To this end, as metric oriented professionals, Enterprise Architects need to use KPIs empowered with astute observations, methodical approach, client empathy, and enriched data-driven approaches depicting business value.

My Journey to Digital Intelligence

Like many of you, I am passionate about intelligence. More than anything else, as a personal interest, intelligence is a thrilling and uplifting subject for me. Strangely enough, I am attracted to intelligent people, animals, and machines. It became such an obsession that I couldn’t hold my burning thoughts to myself anymore and wanted to share them with my readers, hoping that this constructive madness can add some value to others in this journey.

My cravings to understand human and machine intelligence started in earlier years of my tertiary studies in informatics and intensified with my doctoral studies in cognitive science which covered both natural and artificial intelligence. I am still obsessed with this fascinating topic hence would like to reach out to a broader audience to further extend it.

Extending human intelligence using technology intelligence can be a game-changer. Therefore, I continued my research in the area and chose a profession to deal with both human and machine intelligence in a broader sense and pursued it in an integrated context in personal and professional life.

Our brains love structures and patterns. This notion motivated me to be a technologist and particularly an enterprise architect dealing with people, technology, process, tools and integration of heterogeneous systems. These engagements required a considerable amount of integrated intelligence and mental stimulation to achieve successful outcomes in business and commercial settings.

Like the universe itself, then out of nowhere, digital intelligence came into the picture to extend my intelligence to a different perspective. With this serendipitous awareness, I keep swimming in the digital ocean daily and find it quite refreshing even though it may be risky and harmful for my health at times; but I love it. Now you may ask it rightly, where is the intelligence in this paradox.

This extended perspective to the digital arena with passion helped me to deal with complex and inevitable change. Embracing and adapting to rapid change made me a more flexible and nimbler person in life. Dealing with digital matters day to day expanded my horizons and enabled me to engage in fascinating intellectual activities at global settings.

Large organisations that I work for are substantially challenged with rapid change in technology and increasing demands of consumers in this digital era. Every large organisation that I served had some digital transformation and modernisation programs to some extent at the enterprise level. These organisations needed passionate leaders to transform them. Admittedly, I was in the right places in the right times.

Digital technologies in enterprises have multiple dimensions spanning to many domains. These domains are tightly interrelated; hence, a minor change in one domain can reflect in many others. Dealing with these interconnected domains and their challenging components require substantial digital intelligence.

In my recent book titled "Digital Intelligence", I attempted to explain these challenges in the most straightforward format methodically and provide insights based on practical architectural thinking approach to deal with them effectively. Some of the points may sound trivial or boring from outside, but each point I raised can have critical implications and make a significant impact on the success or failure of the digital endeavours especially when looked at in a granular level. How about your digital journey?

Magic of Fusion for Digital Transformations

The term fusion refers to joining different things with different attributes or functions together to co-create a single new entity or form. The notion of fusion relates to business compelling concepts such as integration, blending, merging, amalgamating, and more importantly bonding. Fusion relates to collaboration from several angles. It is an enhanced form of collaboration designed for specific and advanced missions such as digital transformation for large organisations.
Fusion principles aim to bring individuals from various backgrounds, small groups with different purposes, multiple teams with differing capabilities, communities of practices with uplifting missions under a single umbrella for serving a mission.
By undertaking many tasks to initiate and maintain fusion, the strategic technical leaders keep repeating these activities multiple times with multiple teams and integrate these teams to aggregate mass collaboration. The magic of collaboration starts with these repetitions to larger scales. Successful repetitions make ripple effects leading to the more desired success. In a relatively short time frame, these teams create a fusion culture aligned with the organisation’s ecosystem and strategic goals.
This collaborative culture at work can be invaluable from many facets. When collaborative culture starts flourishing using fusion principled collaboration, a desirable phenomenon called innovation flourishes naturally. Fusion and innovation are tightly coupled processes in digitally transforming enterprises.
Innovation is one of the exciting results provided by a collaborative culture fed by diversity, inclusiveness and implementation of fusion principles. The power of connected people from diverse backgrounds for the same goal generates new ideas and insights. Some of these ideas and insights may touch people from different angles and further motivate them even to take more responsibilities in transforming ecosystems. This shift causes the emergence of new leaders with the ignition of the initial strategic technical leader. Innovations enabled by fusion culture are highly desirable for creating new business, growing established companies, and transforming legacy businesses.
This magical aspect of fusion causing innovation is an ideal situation for digital transformations. Excellent technical leaders take advantage of this desirable situation by creating, maintaining, facilitating, and making further advancements. More about the astonishing characteristics of exceptional leaders can be reviewed in my recent publication titled A Technical Excellence Framework for Innovative Digital Transformation Leadership.

Magic of Fusion for Digital Transformations

The term fusion refers to joining different things with different attributes or functions together to co-create a single new entity or form. The notion of fusion relates to business compelling concepts such as integration, blending, merging, amalgamating, and more importantly bonding. Fusion relates to collaboration from several angles. It is an enhanced form of collaboration designed for specific and advanced missions such as digital transformation for large organisations.

Fusion principles aim to bring individuals from various backgrounds, small groups with different purposes, various teams with differing capabilities, communities of practices with uplifting missions under a single umbrella for serving a mission.

By undertaking many tasks to initiate and maintain fusion, the strategic technical leaders keep repeating these activities multiple times with multiple teams and integrate these teams to aggregate mass collaboration. The magic of collaboration starts with these repetitions to larger scales. Successful repetitions make ripple effects leading to the more desired success. In a relatively short time frame, these teams create a fusion culture aligned with the organisation’s ecosystem and strategic goals.

This collaborative culture at work can be invaluable from many facets. When collaborative culture starts flourishing using fusion principled collaboration, a desirable phenomenon called innovation flourishes naturally. Fusion and innovation are tightly coupled processes in digitally transforming enterprises.

Innovation is one of the exciting results provided by a collaborative culture fed by diversity, inclusiveness and implementation of fusion principles. The power of connected people from diverse backgrounds for the same goal generates new ideas and insights. Some of these ideas and insights may touch people from different angles and further motivate them even to take more responsibilities in transforming ecosystems. This shift causes the emergence of new leaders with the ignition of the initial strategic technical leader. Innovations enabled by fusion culture are highly desirable for creating new business, growing established businesses, and transforming legacy businesses.

This magical aspect of fusion causing innovation is an ideal situation for digital transformations. Excellent technical leaders take advantage of this desirable situation by creating, maintaining, facilitating, and making further advancements. More about the astonishing characteristics of excellent leaders can be reviewed in my recent publication titled A Technical Excellence Framework for Innovative Digital Transformation Leadership

Innovative Mindset for Modernising Enterprise

Harnessing and driving creative thinking daily can result in the desired innovation. For Enterprise Architects, innovation must turn to habit or more precisely a lifestyle, while maintaining the core rigour of technical governance. A delicate balance between innovation and governance can be challenging due to the conflicting nature of these two essential roles.

To ignite innovation, we must consider market conditions, client needs, and map them organisation's capabilities then define the focus areas for innovation agenda to enable digital transformation. One of the methods we can use is the design thinking activities which take place daily in the team interactions. Design thinking allows the team to be intuitive and logical at the same time. Design thinking enables team members to be more creative to recognise new patterns. As design thinking is closely associated with the Agile methods, the design thinking professionals progress their ideas iteratively. Enterprise modernisation initiatives require the adoption of design thinking to its core culture.

As Enterprise Architects, we need to have a growth mindset to ignite innovation. We must help our team members with a fixed mindset to convert to a growth mindset as it is an essential factor to survive and thrive in modernising enterprise.

Metaphorically, innovation is like air and water for our survival. In addition to survival, we need to use innovation for thriving. We not only need to create innovation at a personal level but also through collaboration with the immediate teams and extended teams. We must keep asking how to deliver innovative experiences moment by moment continuously.