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.

In this week's The Cutter Edge: Find out how business architects play a vital role as guides in an organization’s transformation story, explore the common elements/steps organizations should consider to deliver value to core businesses or to new markets, and identify the current and future state of disruption among industries.

In this week's The Cutter Edge: Find out how business architects play a vital role as guides in an organization’s transformation story, explore the common elements/steps organizations should consider to deliver value to core businesses or to new markets, and identify the current and future state of disruption among industries.

This Advisor focuses on the quest for explainable AI and examines some current tools and techniques for addressing transparency and fairness in machine learning applications.

The cognitive enterprise relies on a business knowledgebase, framed by its business architecture, and cognitive computing technologies. In this on-demand webinar, you'll discover what it takes to evolve to become a highly adaptive enterprise — one that is increasingly efficient, effective, and responsive to customer demands; one that can respond quickly to whatever comes its way.

The cognitive enterprise relies on a business knowledgebase, framed by its business architecture, and cognitive computing technologies. In this on-demand webinar, you'll discover what it takes to evolve to become a highly adaptive enterprise — one that is increasingly efficient, effective, and responsive to customer demands; one that can respond quickly to whatever comes its way.

In Part IV of this Executive Update series on customer experience (CX), we review the CX practices and techniques that organizations are interested in adopting.

Instead of seeking expertise from the beginning, accepting emergence of expertise over time may be the best way to combat a crisis that possibly exists more in our perception than in reality.

Despite society’s push for transparency, when we move the discussion of transparency outside the public sphere to the domain of individual corporations, there does not appear to be a common understanding of what transparency means, whether it’s actually needed, or if it has any benefits at all.

In this Advisor, we examine some current trends in the API space, including API platforms and moving beyond REST-based APIs.

Organizations that hope to survive in the digital age must utilize a systematic and solid corporate performance management process. A crucial part of that performance management process is metrics.

In this Advisor, we look at how some specific Industry 4.0 technologies can create advances within regulated industries.