The accompanying Executive Report is the second of two in a Cutter series on smart service automation. It provides rich insights into 20 client organizations and how they achieved high performance in their adoption of robotic process automation (RPA) and cognitive automation (CA) tools.

Upper management is starting to take a real interest in blockchain technology, and they are asking their technology and innovation people, “Hey, what can we do with this?”

Software-related business risk is an increasing portion of business risk, so knowing how to assiduously reduce software risk has become part and parcel of today’s business reality. Fortunately, there is an array of tools and methods that you can apply across your portfolio of software assets and development projects to manage software risk, which we’ll explore in this Executive Update.

The existence of a digital backbone in an organization means that anyone aspiring and planning to transform different parts of the enterprise can leverage the digital backbone in a consistent and sustainable way, ensuring that each transformation effort connects and leverages a common platform. Digital transformation leaders are starting to realize that a powerful digital services backbone to facilitate rapid innovation and responsiveness is key to successfully executing on a digital strategy.

One individual must align the value stream to enterprise strategy and orchestrate the activities within each value stream with a complete end-to-end perspective, engaging consumers and keeping their value clearly in view. In this way, everyone engaged in the value stream shares a common purpose and can quickly spot obstacles to flow, so that they can prioritize and continuously improve together as one.

Leading companies recognize that digital disruption presents multiple growth opportunities, including delighting their customers with convenience and personalization, leveraging the wealth of data trails from digital activity to get even closer to the customer, and using technology to operate faster and better.

For your EA program to “climb the ladder” to strategic relevance, one of the most important investments is in an integrated business architecture practice.

With constantly faster innovation cycles, turning digital artifacts into digital capital for better understanding of internal and external innovation performance is critical. To seize these chances, managers should rely on three key principles.

How can we improve how we govern our IT investments through a better understanding of the business relationships that it encompasses?

Start with acknowledging how much your beliefs affect your leadership behavior and then continually work on what it takes to bring those beliefs into practice.

This Update examines survey data concerning the benefits and goals that organizations hope to gain with their blockchain initiatives.

This Update examines survey data concerning the benefits and goals that organizations hope to gain with their blockchain initiatives.

Companies are embracing analytics to innovate and transform supply chains and alter the way they understand and react to changing market trends. They also hope to discover better opportunities to connect with customers and secure closer relationships with suppliers by leveraging analytics across the supply chain. As we explore in this Executive Update, business process reengineering (BPR), along with a suite of digital technologies, can harness the insights of improved analytics.

Companies are embracing analytics to innovate and transform supply chains and alter the way they understand and react to changing market trends. They also hope to discover better opportunities to connect with customers and secure closer relationships with suppliers by leveraging analytics across the supply chain. As we explore in this Executive Update, business process reengineering (BPR), along with a suite of digital technologies, can harness the insights of improved analytics.

Getting to the heart of IT portfolio governance is the strong connection between principles, processes, people, and performance.

Organizations face several challenges when it comes to protecting sensitive data in Internet of Things (IoT) devices, platforms, and applications.

Can a method like EVM, developed to control projects with well-defined objectives, be applied to control product development initiatives that evolve continuously toward a “moving target”? In an Agile environment, we are faced with the dynamic evolution of a finite boundary of integrated scope, cost, time, and resources; this finiteness — essential for business management and decisions — is the cradle for project management techniques, tools, methods, and frameworks. The EVM method was first developed to help with managing complex R&D projects mostly characterized by an unstable, volatile, and evolving scope. It is therefore no surprise that EVM applies to Agile projects.

Agile adoption often goes hand in hand with abandoning the so-called traditional methods of project management and software engineering. This comes from the idea that Agile approaches originated from a point of rupture with traditional methods and, hence, must not inherit any of their characteristics. However, most traditional methods, tools, and techniques were devised to address legitimate and universal management questions, which happen to be present in Agile initiatives as well and therein continue to require a project management answer. This Executive Report discusses how the earned value management method can be adapted to fit into an Agile product development process, and thereby deliver the required controls essential to achieve business value and stakeholder expectations.

In recent years, visual analytics (VA) has been introduced to represent massive multidimensional temporal data with various visual encodings. VA combines automated analysis techniques with interactive visualizations to enable effective understanding, reasoning, and decision making on the basis of very large and complex data sets. 

In recent years, visual analytics (VA) has been introduced to represent massive multidimensional temporal data with various visual encodings. VA combines automated analysis techniques with interactive visualizations to enable effective understanding, reasoning, and decision making on the basis of very large and complex data sets. 

In this article, the authors make detailed comparisons of the most notable robo-advisors in the US — namely, Betterment, Wealthfront, and Schwab Intelligent Portfolios. Although they are quite similar, they have their own features. Betterment uses smart financial models, such as a downside-risk optimization model, to make sure that each of its four primary investing goals (retirement, safety net, general investing, and major purchase) is based on a different stock allocation path. Wealthfront is more like a technology company, making sophisticated financial advice and investment strategies available to every individual investor at low cost by combining financial theory and machine learning. Schwab, as a traditional financial services firm, uses more traditional investment strategies in asset allocation.

Internationalization and localization are important steps in distributing and deploying systems to different regions of the world. Internationalization refers to the process of engineering a system such that it can support various languages and regions without further modification. Localization refers to the process of adapting an internationalized software system for a specific language or region. 

Ontologies have been explored as alternatives to traditional relational databases for some time, particularly in sectors such as manufacturing and microbiology. Their application in finance could possibly be game-changing due to several key benefits of an ontological approach.

It’s a pleasure for me to introduce the first of two special issues of Cutter Business Technology Journal (CBTJ) showcasing the thought leadership and cutting-edge research and development (R&D) being done in State Street Corporation’s Advanced Technology Centres in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) and Asia Pacific (APAC), in partnership with University College Cork (UCC) and Zhejiang University (ZJU), respectively. The articles in this issue represent a small sample of the output from the R&D undertaken in these centers, which combine academic excellence with real industry impact.

It’s a pleasure for me to introduce the first of two special issues of Cutter Business Technology Journal (CBTJ) showcasing the thought leadership and cutting-edge research and development (R&D) being done in State Street Corporation’s Advanced Technology Centres in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) and Asia Pacific (APAC), in partnership with University College Cork (UCC) and Zhejiang University (ZJU), respectively. The articles in this issue represent a small sample of the output from the R&D undertaken in these centers, which combine academic excellence with real industry impact.