End-to-End Strategy Execution

For better or for worse, AI is taking on more and more human stakeholder roles at organizations, a trend that is not only likely to continue but to escalate. Does your organization have a strategy for which stakeholders will be supplemented or replaced by AI agents? And if so, is your strategy informed by a clearly defined, cross-functional stakeholder mapping that specifies where human workers engage today and where automation opportunities make the most sense. Synthetic Stakeholders in the Age of AI is a follow-up to last week's podcast episode, which was titled "Dynamic Value Stream Realization". One important topic that I covered in that episode was the need for an architecture-informed transposition between human stakeholders and synthetic stakeholders. If you're looking to define an AI agent deployment strategy that moves beyond trial-and-error approaches and has the ability to scale, check out this episode as I discuss synthetic stakeholders in the age of AI.

This podcast episode brings together three important focal points: the customer experience, formally defined value streams, and AI as an enabler of value delivery. Today, these focal points exist as three separate, disconnected disciplines. By bringing them together, customer and related stakeholder value delivery can be evaluated and improved in real time. Integrating these three disciplines allows organizations to build and maintain strong customer brand loyalty while leveraging AI to reduce the related costs. Dynamic value streams also establish a framework for defining and deploying synthetic stakeholders in the form of AI agents. If you're looking for ways to leverage business architecture to improve the customer experience while maximizing your AI investments, check out this podcast.

A transformation roadmap is a synchronized collection of initiatives that work in consort to transition an organization towards its long-term vision, meeting priority goals and objectives along the way. Aimlessly wandering into the future, where a random series of disconnected initiatives are pursued in the absence of what's next, with no means of maximizing the collective value of related investments, is a high risk, high-cost proposition that does little to move an organization towards its strategic vision. This podcast episode lays out the importance of having a strategic transformation roadmap as a means of bringing clarity and cohesion to the road ahead. A coordinated set of initiatives that share strategic goals and objectives, with a clear understanding of how the collective investment in these initiatives, will lead to fewer false starts, missed targets, and outright failure. Listen in to understand what goes into preparing for, drafting, and delivering a transformation roadmap and leave those disjointed, hit and miss investments behind.

According to "Business Process Management Market Size & Share Analysis: Growth Trends and Forecast (2026 - 2031)", global spending on business processes will grow from $18.68 billion in 2026 to $30.26 billion in 2031. Most medium to larger organizations spend millions of dollars a year on business process work. This podcast episode discusses why runaway spending on this archaic practice is not only wasting money, but undermining the very value BPM purports to deliver. Too many organizations have fallen into the trap of assuming BPM practices must continue because they deliver ongoing value that benefits to customers, technology teams, and the business as a whole - a premise that does not hold up under scrutiny. In addition to shutting down this risk, this podcast episode will also promote a BPM alternative called dynamic rules-based routing that, when framed in context of business architecture provides a more agile approach to work management design that not only accommodates knowledge workers but delivers cleaner automated solutions using traditional or advanced approaches, like AI. Check out this episode to learn why your organization may be wasting millions annually on a practice that not only delivers little if any value, but undermines the very benefits it purports to promote.

Organization design is a long-standing discipline that has historically been described as the alignment of a company's structure, roles, workflows, and culture with its strategic goals. What does it mean when artificial intelligence (AI) introduces the ability to reinvent structure, change people's roles, and go beyond traditional workflow-based thinking. According to some sources, hierarchies need to flatten, roles that used to exist will be redefined or eliminated, and traditional process flows, which for way too long have constrained agility, need to give way to flexible real-time decision making.

Much has been written on how to rethink organization design in the age of AI. Some of these writings sound very much like the cognitive enterprise I describe in my latest book, End-to-End Strategy Execution: From Inception through Solution Deployment. What has not been clearly articulated in much of the literature is what roles do business, data, and solution architecture play in enabling the shift towards a highly adaptive, learning organization. This podcast episode will explore these areas and see what organization design looks like in the AI-powered, cognitive enterprise built on formal architecture. It will also examine how AI itself can be provided the information to redesign outdated organization hierarchies, work management, and the roles people play. Join this podcast for a look into where organizations may be headed in the not-too-distant future.

There is growing concern and even more disappointment in the inability or unwillingness of business leaders to recognize the value of architecture and the teams responsible for defining and helping capitalize on those architectures. While not an entirely new phenomenon, the number and scope of situations where I hear of architecture teams being disbanded, disbursed, or just laid off entirely seems to be escalating. Those remaining keep getting cut out of the planning, impact assessment, future state envisionment, and initiative scoping work where they can make real impact. There are common threads in many of these situations but also enough variation to know it's a universal trend that is escalating in the worst of ways at the worst of times. This episode will address problematic architecture trends at a time when organizations need architecture more than ever. It will also provide specific guidance on how best to address these issues, before architecturally unconstrained deployments drive your organization into an even deeper hole.

According to a recent survey, over half of customers say they stopped using a product or buying a brand because of a bad experience. Only four in ten customers say that their brand loyalty has grown over the years. Yet nine in 10 executives think that customer loyalty has increased during that same time frame. The survey found that there's more than a 50-point gap between executive perceptions of customer loyalty and the reality of the customer experience. This podcast will exam some of the root causes for this disconnect, including the widely propagated myth that "Order to Cash" is a value stream. When collecting customer payment is perceived as a customer value, it corrupts everything from the culture of the organization to the software that implements this false and unrealistic premise. Customers are unhappy. It's time to face reality and invest in ways to shift towards a customer experience that prioritizes how to maximize customer value at every touchpoint.

In this episode, William Ulrich and Charles Bowman outline the "cognitive vision", something that appears to be lacking as organizations struggle to articulate a strategic direction on AI, even as they spend millions of dollars annually pursuing its benefits. The episode charts a path forward that defines the role of cognitive computing in streamlining strategy execution while concurrently making progress towards the cognitive operating environment. The discussion provides examples of cognitive operating model focal points, common practices to avoid, and a streamlined path towards deploying a digital twin.

In this week's episode, William Ulrich and Charles Bowman welcome Seth Earley, author of "The AI-Powered Enterprise", for which he received the Axiom Silver Medal for AI and Business. Seth's work covers artificial intelligence, cognitive computing, knowledge engineering, data management systems, taxonomy, ontology, and metadata governance. The discussion examines the role of AI in corporate strategy, the importance of architecture, formal design paradigms, and high-quality data, the concept of synthetic stakeholders, and ways in which organizations can maximize their AI investments.

This episode features an interview with Joe Cerasani, a senior solution architect and development lead. Our discussion breaks down a topic that most business professionals and even IT professionals see as a black box. Topics include the ideal team setup, the role of business, data, and related architecture perspectives in software service design and development, and best practices that support the viability and scalability of the deployed solutions. A key topic involves the importance of event-driven, state-based solutions and the value of the state machine as a key component of these solutions. The discussion also covers how in-house solutions can serve as a superior approach when compared to vendor constrained approaches.