Cutter Benchmark Review

Creating and Managing the Agile Enterprise

1 Apr 2008 22:30:25 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 April 2008 | Cutter Benchmark Review

This issue focuses on the management of the agile enterprise and on understanding how organizations can facilitate and foster agile practices through investments in IT infrastructure and technology practices. As such, the survey our contributors crafted tackles issues of strategy, relative positioning and competition, as well as technology infrastructure, software development methodologies, and IT architecture.

http://www.cutter.com/content/benchmark/fulltext/2008/04/index.html

Enterprise Mashups: How to Leverage One of the Engines of Agility

1 Mar 2008 22:29:12 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 March 2008 | Cutter Benchmark Review

Mashups are one candidate gaining increasing attention. It is therefore a perfect time for us to produce an issue on this topic to provide you, our readers, with the conceptual framework, the vocabulary, and an overview of the issues surrounding this emerging approach to enterprise business and data integration.

http://www.cutter.com/content/benchmark/fulltext/2008/03/index.html

New Survey: IT Budgeting 2008

18 Apr 2008 15:41:33 GMT

Respond to our survey on IT Budgeting 2008 and receive a free copy of "Five Technology Trends That Matter: What the Early 21st Century Is Telling Us About Tomorrow."

http://www.keysurvey.com/survey/198624/2670/

New Workshop: Practical Software Estimation

17 Apr 2008 17:58:17 GMT

Mah, Michael | Training/Workshops | Cutter Benchmark Review

In a survey conducted by Cutter Consortium of more than 100 software development organizations of varied sizes, the most common method of software estimation was -- "gut feel". Software engineers pick a number for cost and schedule estimates based on rough judgment of experienced developers nearly 50% of the time, and as a result this workshop was designed to teach attendees how they can help get software development projects in their company back on track by being able to produce better and more accurate estimates.

http://www.cutter.com/workshops/practicalsoftwareestimation.html

New Workshop: How to Collect and Use Metrics in Agile Software Development Environments

17 Apr 2008 17:56:14 GMT

Mah, Michael | Training/Workshops | Cutter Benchmark Review

In this workshop you'll learn how to move from a project whiteboard to create project trendlines on productivity, time-to-market, and defects using your own data. Get an inside look at agile measurement by seeing this in action using real case studies. Learn how to replicate these techniques to make your own comparisons on time, cost, and quality. And discover how to leverage these methods to make the case for change with your management teams at your company.

http://www.cutter.com/workshops/metrics.html

Creating Solid Business Cases from Start to Finish

1 Feb 2008 15:40:25 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 February 2008 | Cutter Benchmark Review

This month we take a break from our focus on IT innovation and its many facets and return to basics. Perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of life in the IT business is the difficulty we often face in selling projects internally to the organization. There are many reasons for this difficulty. In the collective mindset, the "IT guy" is seen as a person with questionable social skills who is much more comfortable in front of a computer than an audience -- especially an executive audience speaking a blend of marketing, finance, and strategy mumbo jumbo.

http://www.cutter.com/benchmark/fulltext/2008/02/index.html

Starting Off the New Year by Looking Back

1 Jan 2008 19:46:59 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 January 2008 | Cutter Benchmark Review

As we've done for the past couple of years, we are starting off the new year of CBR with another installment of our yearly series on trends and technologies for the coming year. This is the third yearly issue of CBR where we ask our contributors to look forward to the coming year and see what technologies and IT trends we can expect to endure, which ones are emerging, and which ones seem to be losing steam. Our ability to do trending and year-over-year comparisons is strengthening with every survey and the cumulating of results. We have been very careful in keeping some of the questions consistent so that we can comment on changes over time. Our contributors offer some interesting food for thought and insight based on the data.

http://www.cutter.com/benchmark/fulltext/2008/01/index.html

Open Innovation: Open for Business Yet?

1 Dec 2007 17:43:14 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 December 2007 | Cutter Benchmark Review

This issue of CBR continues our series on innovation and the role of IT in enabling it. As many of you know, Cutter has a full-fledged Innovation & Enterprise Agility practice that focuses on helping clients to foster an environment for innovation and tap creative, valuable outcomes as well as to transform ideas into economic value. It goes without saying that the objective of this focus on innovation is to enable value creation and appropriation through the use and deployment of information systems. After the recession, as budgets have begun to allow for experimentation again, I went on record suggesting that it was up to us to seize the opportunity and ensure that we don't squander it.

http://www.cutter.com/content/benchmark/fulltext/2007/12/index.html

Dynamic IT Capabilities: Becoming Nimble Through IT Agility

1 Nov 2007 17:42:18 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 November 2007 | Cutter Benchmark Review Is IT innovation important for your organization? If so, the time has come to find a way to create enough slack resources in your IT shop to buy time and brain-cycles for your employees to have the best chance to succeed at it.

Sure enough, IT innovation is again a hot topic in corporate boardrooms and IT shops, and we are working hard to do our part to help you navigate it. While this issue of CBR focuses on dynamic IT capabilities, our next issue will be on the emerging topic of open innovation. In short, open innovation is the orchestration of knowledge inflows and outflows designed to speed up and improve a firm's innovation cycle (but, be patient for now, a lot more next issue.)

http://www.cutter.com/content/benchmark/fulltext/2007/11/index.html

New Webinar: Case Study: The Impact of Agile on Productivity at Five Companies

17 Dec 2007 19:55:16 GMT

Mah, Michael | Events | 17 January 2008 | Agile Project Management In this hour-long Webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Michael Mah shares with you how five companies, all ostensibly "agile," produced a range of quantitative results and what the resultant implications were on time-to-market, staffing, and quality. http://www.cutter.com/events/multimedia/agileproductivity.html

Offshoring: Lessons from Successful and Challenged Adopters

1 Oct 2007 19:48:51 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 October 2007 | Cutter Benchmark Review

This month's CBR is particularly important because what we have on our hands may be shaping up as a big crisis that, to be successfully addressed, requires joint efforts from different communities that seldom interact. I am not going to use cheesy terms such as "a perfect storm," but what we can see is, on the one hand, dropping enrollments in computer science degrees and increasingly limited number of mainframe skills being developed in universities; while on the other hand, mainframes continue to run many of the large mission-critical software applications of modern organizations. On the "third hand" (or the underhand as the famous blues song goes) is the lack of awareness and planning for the impending mass retirement of the baby boomers who hold the great majority of mainframe skills and knowledge today.

http://www.cutter.com/benchmark/fulltext/2007/10/index.html

Upcoming Webinar: Transitioning to Agile Project Management: Don't Throw the Baby Out with the Bath Water

13 Dec 2007 19:39:25 GMT

13 December 2007, 11:30 - 12:30 pm EDT, Featuring Sanjiv Augustine, Senior Consultant, Agile Project Management practice

In this hour-long Webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Sanjiv Augustine will divulge how your PMBOK-style management expertise can be best leveraged when managing Agile projects. Sanjiv, a well-known Agile practitioner, has personally managed agile projects varying in size from five to over one hundred people and coached numerous project teams; in this webinar, he shares that hands-on experience with you.

http://www.cutter.com/events/multimedia/transitioning.html

Successful Business Intelligence: Moving Beyond the Obvious

1 Sep 2007 14:38:48 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 September 2007 | Business Intelligence; Cutter Benchmark Review

BI concepts and applications appear to have matured over the past 20 years. But don't let the recent frenzy of M&A activity in this space -- a typical signal of maturation -- fool you. As editor of CBR, I pride myself in producing an issue that fosters different perspectives and competing views. You will see that Rajiv and Vince, both experts in this field, have their share of disagreements. I take this as evidence that there are no easy answers and that business intelligence remains in a state of flux. I hope you will find this issue stimulating and useful as you chart your own course.

http://www.cutter.com/benchmark/fulltext/2007/09/index.html

The Intricacy of IT Budgeting: A Renewed Shift Toward Innovation

25 Oct 2007 15:15:19 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 August 2007 | Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Cutter Benchmark Review; Business-IT Strategies

This month's Cutter Benchmark Review is the second in our annual series on IT budgets and the IT budgeting process. The budgeting process is one of critical importance to IT and business professionals in our subscriber base. This is perhaps even more important today as we continue to see a recovery in IT spending as well as the shifting of priorities away from a narrow focus on cost cutting and efficiency (a trend that we picked up in last year's data).

http://www.cutter.com/content/benchmark/fulltext/2007/08/index.html

Making Agility Stick: What's Working, What's Not

1 Jul 2007 17:32:50 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 July 2007 | Agile Project Management; Cutter Benchmark Review

Agile programming is still very far from the mainstream, but it is now a viable and accepted practice. Among our survey respondents, results are the key driver of the Agile approach, with speed of delivery and customer satisfaction leading the way at 92% and 67%, respectively, for those embarking on Agile projects. Our results also show a substantial difference in project duration between successful and challenged projects. This result may indicate that Agile methods are applied to smaller projects. Conversely, recalling Laurie's opening vignette, they may suggest that the Agile approach is bearing some fruit and that in the "Agile ham and egg breakfast," when the pig is committed, the chicken may indeed commit as well. Of course, for many (34%), inertia is still a big impediment. If you find yourself confronting such inertia in your team, the ideas introduced in this issue may help you.

http://www.cutter.com/content/benchmark/fulltext/2007/07/index.html

Wake Up and Be Prepared: Preventing a Full-Blown Crisis

1 Jun 2007 20:27:45 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 June 2007 | Cutter Benchmark Review

In this issue of CBR, we focus on this very same question under the broad topic of emergency preparedness and disaster recovery planning. Our goal is to help you build a resilient organization -- one that will be in the best position possible to "weather the storm." That storm could come in the form of a literal storm, as was the case with Hurricane Katrina in the US or the tsunami that hit Southeast Asia, or it could come in the form of a terrorist attack of major proportions or a security breach of the firm’s infrastructure. But, as our contributors remind us, it doesn’t have to be a major large-scale event. It could be a localized flood, a protracted power outage, a fire in your building, or, a perennial favorite in my hometown of Ithaca, New York: an ice storm that cripples the town’s infrastructure.

MUVEs: Not Just Games People Play

1 May 2007 21:42:55 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 May 2007 | Cutter Benchmark Review

In this issue of CBR, we tap the expertise of three "in-world" pioneers and experts. Based on their experience both consulting with companies that have staked a claim in-world and their own firsthand experiences, they help us understand the basic characteristics and the potential of the 3D Internet and virtual worlds -- or multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs), as they are more precisely called. Given the nature of the topic at hand, and its novelty, I think you will find this issue of CBR to be more speculative than usual. But I also think that you will find it very stimulating and thought-provoking. I will consider this issue a success if, after reading it, you feel the time has come for you to bring your avatar to life and explore. If you do, make sure to come "see" us in-world -- you know who we are!

Career Isn't Over: How CIOs Are Reaching New Heights

1 Apr 2007 18:20:37 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 April 2007 | Cutter Benchmark Review

This issue provides a nice separation of focus, language, and style between our academic and practitioner contributors. Rick and Elena bring about a new and fresh theoretical perspective to the notion of CIO effectiveness and success. Get ready to put your hard-thinking hat on for their article! Their perspective introduces the role of timing for CIOs and argues that when you do things is as important as what you do. I also think you will find stimulating their notion that, while efficiency and effectiveness are not always mutually exclusive, they are temporally related and involve tradeoffs in attention.

E-Learning Tools and Approaches: How to Reap the Benefits

1 Mar 2007 19:46:42 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 March 2007 | Cutter Benchmark Review

Even without the dot-com days' hype and exuberance, there is no doubt that e-learning, as defined in this issue, is the next frontier of organizational knowledge and competence building. There are no silver bullets on the road to success, but I believe that the ideas and guidelines offered by our contributors will be instrumental in focusing your attention where it matters most: on the learners.

Web 2.0: A New Approach to the Web ... Or Not?

1 Feb 2007 19:27:06 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 February 2007 | Cutter Benchmark Review

In an effort to take stock of this growing phenomenon -- and the surrounding propaganda -- and in an effort to provide you with some unbiased no-hype analysis and guidance, we focus this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review on Web 2.0. Our academic contributor on this installment is Joseph Feller, a Senior Lecturer of Business Information Systems at University College Cork (Ireland). Providing our view from the trenches of business is Tom Welsh, a Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium's Enterprise Architecture advisory service and former Editor of Cutter Consortium's monthly Web Services Strategies. Together, Joe and Tom pool their years of experience and do a great job dissecting the Web 2.0 phenomenon in all its facets.

Trends for 2007: Looking Back to Look Ahead

1 Jan 2007 22:18:27 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 January 2007 | Cutter Benchmark Review

This month's installment of Cutter Benchmark Review is the second in our annual series on trends and technologies for the coming year. But before we move on to talk about this issue and the findings in it, let me take a minute to pat the CBR crew on the back -- after all, what better time than the first issue of the year to do so! I readily admit that I am not very comfortable tooting my own horn: I staunchly subscribe to the notion that you should let others tell you that your work is good, rather than go around proselytizing about it yourself ("proselytizing"... I start self-praising, and I begin to throw out erudite and smart sounding words -- what have we come to!). The truth is that there is a big team behind every issue of CBR, and I am only the frontman of this band. However, since I hold the microphone, it falls on me to thank the many players and sing the praises of the group.

Mass Exodus: Can the Next Generation Maintain the Mainframe?

1 Dec 2006 17:02:31 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 December 2006 | Cutter Benchmark Review

This month's issue of Cutter Benchmark Review presents another great example of what we truly aim to do here -- identify and tackle emerging issues of interest to you and, using fresh data and expert contributions, develop actionable guidelines to manage them. As with most focused issues of CBR, I am not a firsthand expert on the topic. Be that as it may, I do read the press and a variety of publications and typically am familiar with emerging trends. I can say, though, that until we contacted our expert contributors for this issue, I had not thought or heard much about what is shaping up as an impending crisis in the availability of mainframe skills -- and it seems that many of our respondents hadn't grasped the potential of this problem either.

Alignment: The Never-Ending Balancing Act

1 Nov 2006 18:23:44 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 November 2006 | Cutter Benchmark Review

This issue of Cutter Benchmark Review focuses on a topic of great interest to both information systems (IS) professionals and executives in other areas: strategic information systems alignment. For the purpose of this issue, we define alignment as the fit, or correspondence, between business and information systems strategy.

Service-Oriented Architecture: Old Wine in New Bottles or a Critical Tool for the Organization?

1 Oct 2006 18:45:07 GMT

Piccoli, Gabriele | Journals | 01 October 2006 | Cutter Benchmark Review

This issue of CBR nicely follows our September issue on best practices in enterprise systems. Both the ES and SOA trends have as one of their principal drivers the need for integration. They approach it very differently, of course, but they both cut across the organization and therefore engender similar dynamics and problems - both technical and organizational - that must be proactively managed. (Hey, here is an idea! Maybe we should begin to create themed CBR collections by bringing together and reissuing installments with similar or related focus. OK, I'll pass this idea on to Cutter headquarters ... ) In the meantime, I hope that you will find the frameworks, ideas, data, and guidelines in this issue of CBR to be helpful in your quest to evaluate and possibly implement a service-oriented architecture in your organization.