Cutter gets teams to the Agile starting line as quickly as possible. Cutter offers basic Agile training for teams who are new to Agile, as well as those who want to sharpen their Agile edge.

This executive-level workshop provides answers to typical questions that arise during an Agile adoption, such as: How do we ensure the Agile teams are working in alignment with strategic objectives? How long does it take to start seeing results? What kind of executive-level support do Agile teams need?

Buy-in has been the mantra for consultants for as long as I can remember. Besides “walk the talk” and “be the change,” “getting buy-in” has been the most overused and misguided principle ever to haunt the halls of organizational development. If I sound jaded, I am. I’m tired of the blame game. I’m tired of fixes that are more simple than possible.

Technology backlash is as old as technological innovation. It is inevitable that people will grouse about new technologies and adopt them with varying degrees of acceptance. Yet, with one caveat, the cool stuff will take hold and prevail on the basis of its functionality and actual worth to people. The caveat is that this will happen only if these products do not give people some absurd reason to do a double-take and say, "What? You didn't tell me this amazing product" -- and here, take your pick -- "uses triangulation to share my location with perverts," "shares my aimless meandering around department store aisles with marketers," "leaves my television camera running," or "records my child babbling away to a beloved toy."

Agile as a concept and as a "method" is invaluable. But have you ever wondered how Agile itself was developed? Did the signatories to the Agile Manifesto use an "Agile approach" to arrive at the manifesto? The science of methods has this age-old conundrum: which method was used to develop a method? And how was that method validated? I share my thoughts with you in this Advisor.

In a recent Cutter IT Journal (CITJ) article ("Leveraging EA to Incorporate Emerging Technology Trends for Digital Transformation"), Cutter Senior Consultant and esteemed colleague Bhuvan Unhelkar and I presented our practical experience in leveraging EA to incorporate emerging technology trends for digital transformation. In the article, we shared the following steps that EA as a discipline can use in facilitating digital transformation:

Content management is a fundamental building block of your digital business strategy. Digitization and the potential it offers for streamlined, efficient, and lower-cost management of content is extensive and largely untapped. Enterprises that want to ride the wave of digital transformation must develop a robust model for content management. The roadmap outlined in this Executive Update is a key enabler for enterprises to implement healthy digitization and simplification. 

Digital transformation continues to change the financial sector. The increasing use of smartphones and tablets has changed customers’ behaviors and fueled adoption of mobile banking. Wearables capable of storing and processing data allow us to integrate better with the technology and incorporate electronics into every domain of our lives. The question arises whether the wearables can follow that success and become a new disruption for the financial sector. And if so, will they replace or supplement the mobile devices that are currently in use?

Organizations have worried about how to protect sensitive data in big data platforms since they were first proposed for enterprise use. This is because big data environments have typically lacked the extensive security features available with the more traditional relational data warehouses that companies have become accustomed to.

In this on-demand webinar, Sheila Cox she leads you through the tricky human factors that could spell success (or failure) for your organization's digital transformation. 

In a well-functioning team, collaboration and knowledge transfer are simply byproducts of the team’s work. The fact is that embracing a business process management system (BPMS) results in a certain amount of culture shock for the uninitiated; the learning curve from a technical and business process modeling standpoint is considerable. All of these elements should be discussed at this review meeting.

As part of our shift to cloud and open source platforms, we chose to introduce a number of culture changes. Early in the process, we decided to make the cloud migration a rallying cry for the technology organization. Specifically, we challenged senior technology staff regarding the fundamentals of what our systems did and how well they served the business. This resulted in key changes in the way we addressed the fundamentals of our multi-petabyte, big data problem. In this process, new high-potential technology leaders were identified and elevated in the organization. The hiring and staffing effort that accompanied this effort also provided an opportunity to further reshape the technology profile of the company.

The architecture of the Web is elegant, and it delivers value. Is it possible to have complex, convoluted architectures that are inelegant, but that enable value? Maybe. But my intuition and experience suggest otherwise. I think that architecture needs to be as close to invisible as possible to be valuable. Architecture needs to be the invisible hand that guides the enterprise and the people within in and around it.

The MMVM project, a collaboration between Cutter Fellow Bob Benson and my­self, was developed on the premise that traditional IT evaluation methods, which focus mainly on technical aspects such as technology performance, availability levels, and monetary cost-benefit relationships, are unable to deliver insights into the business value delivered by IT investments. Given this premise, we determined that it was necessary to build a new model — discussed in this Executive Update — that could go beyond the usual constraints, while at the same time allowing us to better understand the following aspects of each organization:

In Part I of this series, I explored the data lake and other metaphors for data storage in use today. Leaving technology platforms aside (which I strongly urge you to do, at least for now), understanding what a data lake could or should be starts, unsurprisingly, with knowing what the business needs from it and that it cannot get anywhere else. That understanding comes from a conceptual architecture, which therefore must have a much broader scope than its central topic. A conceptual architecture is a picture that forms the basis for conversation, understanding, and agreement between business and IT. It doesn't have enough detail for IT to build it. It must be simple enough for business people to take it in and understand what's going on.

A complete assessment of an organization's use of agile methods, its software engineering practices, and its project management skills and capabilities can be a significant undertaking, particularly for a large organization. Cutter's team is exceptionally skilled at performing the assessment you need.

The potential of gamification as a business transformation and performance improvement tool is immense — if done right. The focus of this Executive Update is enterprise gamification: gamifying business scenarios and processes to derive more value.

The potential of gamification as a business transformation and performance improvement tool is immense — if done right. The focus of this Executive Update is enterprise gamification: gamifying business scenarios and processes to derive more value.

No enterprise big or small should fail to think about what digital transformation can do for — or to — them. Within commonsense economic limits, current technologies should be exploited. Further, it's important to envision potential technological changes a few years out and think through how to prepare for and exploit them. Obviously, that's not easy.

In his keynote address on NoSQL key value stores at the 2014 Velocity Conference, Brian Bulkowski discussed "in-memory" mechanisms and how they can be handy in electronic advertisements and similar situations. He mentioned during the keynote that "in-memory key value is Agile" is significant. This very thought opens up opportunities to consider the technologies of big data as enablers of business agility.

To achieve pervasive, sophisticated, wide, deep, joined-up architecture descriptions, we need to develop a new generation of EA tools and techniques. The fact is that in an enterprise of any complexity, the architecture of roles, processes, applications, flow of work and data, data stores, and data sources quickly exceeds the ability of any of us to hold in our minds effectively. We need powerful ways to capture, map, navigate, and trace linkages, interfaces, and change initiatives.

In the November-December 2015 issue of Cutter IT Journal (CITJ), I shared “Five Steps to Digital Transformation.” This Executive Update picks up where that discussion left off and dives deeper into the front end of the transfor­­mation process.

In the November-December 2015 issue of Cutter IT Journal (CITJ), I shared “Five Steps to Digital Transformation.” This Executive Update picks up where that discussion left off and dives deeper into the front end of the transfor­­mation process.

I have mixed feelings about the FBI/Apple iPhone standoff. On the one hand, due to all the data collection and spying activities revealed by former US National Security Administration (NSA) contractor Edward J. Snowden, it seems like Apple has a pretty good argument for not wanting to comply immediately with a federal court order demanding that the company develop a specialized version of its iPhone operating system (iOS) that would enable the FBI to unlock the on-device security features of the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino, California, terrorists.

This workshop provides an overview of busines architecture that will help you gain executive sponsorship, practice setup, achieve acceptance and utilization, and build out your business architecture baseline.