Through a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of your architecture and organization, Cutter's maturity assessment program provides a relative comparison of the organization to industry norms and identifies strengths and areas needing attention.

The Architecture Review and Action Plan provides an in-depth evaluation of your enterprise's architecture. It takes an architectural approach to addressing specific questions and concerns that you may have. It is intended to clarify business, application, and technology discussions and help your organization make specific technology decisions.

Every IT project should deliver business value. The challenge is that traditional project management and PMOs focus on "on time" and "on budget," not achievement of business value. Cutter's Value Project Portfolio Management (Value-PPM) approach ensures organizations achieve all three goals.

This engagement equips business executives, CIOs, IT executives, IT financial managers, and CFOs with the tools and processes they need to answer the following questions:

Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows are experts at facilitating both business and IT strategy sessions.

The Optimization Review, typically two days, is designed to identify the most promising opportunities for change by identifying what separates a company from the norm. This unique approach, developed by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, is designed to finesse change resistance, and has proven repeatedly to be both a tremendous morale-builder and an extremely effective change mechanism.

Cutter Consortium is available for risk assessments, network assessments, application reviews, security-oriented design reviews, site and facility surveys, and configuration or source code reviews.

Rebecca Herold will create Security and Privacy Policies, Procedures, Standards and Guidelines policies, procedures, standards and guideline for your organization.

We can help you install and configure applications, deploy security systems as well as intrusion detection systems. Our operations support services include firewall and critical infrastructure management, incident response, system administration. If desired, we can even serve as acting-Chief Security Officer (CSO) while you conduct a search.

Create an information security and privacy program for your organization that is not only designed solely upon your its specific concerns, but takes into account the learners needs of those in your organization: their expectations, learning styles, time commitments, job responsibilities, learning levels and objectives.

It is critical to know that the organizations to whom your organization has entrusted its data handling and processing functions have sound and effective information security and privacy programs.

In this one-day workshop, Cutter Senior Consultant Claude Baudoin alternates between short presentations on specific sub-topics and open, guided discussion, thus bringing out specific concerns and ideas that audience members may have.

Let Cutter help you with vetting potential partners, understanding and quantifying schedules, requirements, specs, and risk management before signing contracts, to successfully prosecuting or defending against an IT-related lawsuit.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the loss of the shuttle Challenger. It also marks the 39th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire that claimed astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chafee, and Ed White. It is also the third anniversary of the loss of the shuttle Columbia. The last week of January is always a bit sad at NASA.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the loss of the shuttle Challenger. It also marks the 39th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire that claimed astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chafee, and Ed White. It is also the third anniversary of the loss of the shuttle Columbia. The last week of January is always a bit sad at NASA.

You may have missed the 30 November announcement about service component architecture (SCA) or perhaps you've read all the press releases but you're still trying to figure out what it is and whether or not you should care. Since I've been noodling on this for awhile, I hope I can shed some light on the subject.

Several leading software vendors -- including BEA, IBM, IONA, Oracle, SAP, Siebel, Sybase, and Xcalia -- have worked together to make implementing SOA easier (on Java at least). To quote from the press release:

Security is an underestimated risk to corporate success (or even in some cases, survival). Among the salient points are:

Security is an ongoing process, not a state of affairs, a set of policies, or a product.

IT security is an organic part of an integrated enterprise security strategy and cannot be effective in the absence of appropriate security regimes for physical assets, staff, intellectual property, and so on.

Security is an underestimated risk to corporate success (or even in some cases, survival). Among the salient points are:

Security is an ongoing process, not a state of affairs, a set of policies, or a product.

IT security is an organic part of an integrated enterprise security strategy and cannot be effective in the absence of appropriate security regimes for physical assets, staff, intellectual property, and so on.

Forecasting the future - or more precisely, attempting to forecast the future - is an exercise as old as mankind itself. The ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, for example, engaged in all kinds of rituals and propitiatory sacrifices to ensure good fortune in their future endeavors. Back then, as it is still today, there were all sorts of individuals whose role was to "peer into the future" for the benefit of the uninitiated. More often than not, these foretellers offered up more questions than answers.

Information systems (IS) managers face a challenge. They must manage a set of technical and human resources, in a rapidly changing environment, to deliver value to an organization that is also in a state of change. For an effective manager -- one with good general management skills, a strategic "big picture" view of the organization, and good communication skills -- this would be a test. However, for the CIO without these traits, the task of managing the IT organization can be perilous.