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The Boy in the Bubble was the first track of Paul Simon's Graceland, in my view, the greatest musical album released in my lifetime. The year was 1986.

Lately I find myself quietly singing Bubble's refrain.

“These are the days of miracle and wonder. This is the long distance call The way the camera follows us in slo-mo, the way we look to us all. The way we look to a distant constellation that's dying in a corner of the sky. These are the days of miracle and wonder, and don't cry, baby, don't cry, don't cry.”

The genius of Simon's lyrics is in the juxtaposition of tragedy and progress. Nearly 40 years later, the line "these are the days of miracle and wonder" comes to mind when contemplating the nature of this moment in humanity's technological progress. Yet, consider the song's final verse.

People and organizations around the world are asking, ”Can we trust artificial intelligence?”. Sure, can we trust AI to be responsible, to generate accurate, trustworthy responses to our prompts? But look more deeply and you will find that truly Trustworthy AI is about so much more. Do we trust that our investments in AI are wise, that we are not throwing effort and money after nonsense? Do we trust that we are moving rigorously, purposefully, and efficiently towards AI’s promised land?

Leaders of these organizations now face a moment of reckoning and—in the chaos of that moment—an opportunity to craft the modern, technologically nimble institutions resilient enough to continue delivering the crucial services upon which their publics so desperately depend. They must use technology to drive out cost, with the core thesis being that to emerge stronger, they must become more modern organizations that use technology to reduce cost and improve services, rather than viewing technology as an ever-expanding cost center. Those that seize the opportunity may survive. Those who let it slip away will fail.

We’ve covered the Principles of Ecosystem-Oriented Architecture (EOA) and Mapping your Cloud Ecosystem in previous articles. We’ll now make the concepts discussed in those previous articles more real in context of Public Sector organizations. To do so, let’s spend some time speaking less about technology and begin describing workloads that incorporate functions and scenarios upon which a typical agency might rely on its cloud ecosystem to perform.

"Ecosystem Map" is both one of the 25 dimensions of the AI Strategy Framework and a foundational concept in ecosystem-oriented architecture (EOA), which makes this article doubly important reading for strategic thinkers on both fronts. The “map” metaphor is instructive here. It is used to distinguish an ecosystem map from the various forms of architectural diagrams, nearly all of which tend to include more technical minutiae than a typical ecosystem map. Whereas an architectural diagram provides specific parameters for specific technical solutions, an ecosystem map presents a higher-level, more visionary view of an organization’s cloud ecosystem. This analogy is fundamental to understanding and practicing EOA.