The authors examine how a limited view of digital transformation impedes organizations from fully benefiting from the new, Agile ways of working. They attribute this failure, fundamentally, to reliance on traditional architectural stacks where multiple teams and products rely on large, shared layers, and a change in a layer to meet the needs of one product may inadvertently break other products. To support a feature team–based organization, each team must have full end-to-end ownership of its stack, which consists of smaller, decoupled parts — microservices — that are loosely bound together. The authors advocate domain-driven design and the atomic design principle as the basis for enabling reuse.

The authors examine how a limited view of digital transformation impedes organizations from fully benefiting from the new, Agile ways of working. They attribute this failure, fundamentally, to reliance on traditional architectural stacks where multiple teams and products rely on large, shared layers, and a change in a layer to meet the needs of one product may inadvertently break other products. To support a feature team–based organization, each team must have full end-to-end ownership of its stack, which consists of smaller, decoupled parts — microservices — that are loosely bound together. The authors advocate domain-driven design and the atomic design principle as the basis for enabling reuse.

Paul Pagel discusses the key importance of a modern software labor strategy for organizations hoping to remain competitive in today’s digital and innovative world. The right team is key to crafting software systems capable of supporting innovation. Software delivery talent, however, is extremely difficult to find for a multitude of reasons. The solution, according to Pagel, is to structure software teams to deal with fragility and to thrive on change.

Software evolution and changes in software development imply that software will become ever more pervasive and affordable, that firms must master disciplined autonomy in order to follow dual strategies, and that the role of IT professionals is being redefined.

Software evolution and changes in software development imply that software will become ever more pervasive and affordable, that firms must master disciplined autonomy in order to follow dual strategies, and that the role of IT professionals is being redefined.

Cutter Consortium Fellow Steve Andriole examines the extent of software’s rule in the areas of process automation, privacy and security, enterprise software, intelligent software engineering, and converged convenience. For each area, he evaluates in what ways software’s reign is good (rewarding us), bad (punishing us), or ugly (threatening us).

Cutter Consortium Fellow Steve Andriole examines the extent of software’s rule in the areas of process automation, privacy and security, enterprise software, intelligent software engineering, and converged convenience. For each area, he evaluates in what ways software’s reign is good (rewarding us), bad (punishing us), or ugly (threatening us).

Software evolves in the environment of the marketplace, where the forces of innovation, cost reduction, growth, regulation, and coevolution drive change. As with biological evolution, only the fittest will survive.

Software evolves in the environment of the marketplace, where the forces of innovation, cost reduction, growth, regulation, and coevolution drive change. As with biological evolution, only the fittest will survive.

The rise of software represents the biggest single hurdle and opportunity to business. This issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal will inspire you to conquer the fundamental challenges facing your organization today and help you unlock your full value-creating potential.

The rise of software represents the biggest single hurdle and opportunity to business. This issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal will inspire you to conquer the fundamental challenges facing your organization today and help you unlock your full value-creating potential.

It’s always interesting to examine what the big tech giants are doing because their efforts can have a significant impact on consumer expectations and trends and may serve as a wake-up call for other industries. This is certainly the case when it comes to big tech projects in fintech. And nowhere is this more apparent today than when it comes to big tech developments centering around the use of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies as a payment platform and for creating new financial services offerings.

Data science skills span a wide gamut of capabil­ities within an organization, including business analysis, Lean-Agile portfolios, enterprise and systems archi­tectures, quality assurance, and, of course, database and statistical skills. In this Executive Update, we address the issues around upskilling people for big data capabilities.

In this Executive Update, we describe the application of Scrum in the restaurant business. This environment is similar to that of Lean hardware Scrum, in that shifts are repeatedly creating and delivering products in short cycles with high quality. Process efficiency and cycle time become the key metrics for production.

The more organizations shift toward Agile, the more they need to redesign how they work with employees, how they search for new employees, and how they nurture employees’ development and careers. This Advisor describes the fundamental shift HR needs to make to support agility. Indeed, in an Agile organization, HR must shift its focus to the overall employee experience, choosing an employee-centric approach over the governance role that traditional HR departments often hold.

For decades, designers have used design thinking to develop products or services, but only in the last decade has the wider business community applied the approach. In this Advisor, we describe three overarching themes in the design thinking process and further break these down into six key steps to follow on your design thinking journey. 

In Part VII of this Executive Update series on statistical project management, we turn our attention to the dynamical and often irrational nature of projects.

In this on-demand webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Katia Passerini leads a discussion on the role of disruptive technology and how the process of innovation can drastically differ from what companies consider to be good business practices, as well as from what individuals are comfortable with.

Choosing a dissent strategy is difficult and the strategy chosen will vary from organization to organization. This Advisor helps software architects craft an effective dissent strategy.

This Advisor describes one way of establishing a non-blocking architecture governance practice for Agile development teams. 

Effective decision support requires ongoing innovation and refinement. As decisions become more complex and as data increases in quantity and variety, systems must undergo refinement and enhancement. Consequently, decision support requires a continuous and iterative design and development process.

Recently, I have had dreams of waking up in the middle of the woods in central Canada with no cellular signal, no Wi-Fi, no computers, no cell phone, nothing. And I am happy. Very happy.

In today’s competitive business environment, ethical issues arise frequently. Business partners may not respect contracts, or competitors may attempt to steal business secrets. With Industry 4.0, the situation becomes much more complex. In this Advisor, we explore some of these issues that may arise.

This Advisor looks at the top two benefits that organizations are interested in achieving with their customer experience efforts.

An understanding of the interplay of human users with automation, the underlying system actors (business applications, data, etc.), the business process, and the overall value chain is complex. What better way to keep human users at the center of auto­mation design than the use of design thinking? Design thinking has already been established as the best way to create solutions for wicked problems that cannot be solved by reasoning alone. By adapting design thinking for smart automation, we can analyze the problem space better and incrementally improve on the solution, moving toward success while considering human factors. The design thinking process has five stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Let’s investigate how we can adapt it for smart automation initiatives.