The “Recordkeeping for Timely Deposit Insurance Determination” rule from the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), or FDIC 370, seems simple but, as we explore in this Executive Update,  it presents several challenges for covered institutions (CIs).

Being able to show that your organization actively considers and cares about its impact on the world is sure to become one of the most important levers for talent and investment attraction and retention. Expectations now go beyond having great-sounding values on your website; people want to practice those values every day and be proud of what they are creating. Investors want to know that they can count on pro­active mitigation. Users want to see those values in the products they use. Consequence scanning requires that participants know what the product or service is intended to do, be able to determine whether the potential consequences of the product or service are positive or negative, and know what their organization considers positive.

Scientific-based modeling systems contain extraord­inary amounts of data and produce mountains of output. These systems offer almost limitless options for providing the user with informed knowledge. This Advisor seeks to use the concept of technology embeddedness to delineate factors that are prohibiting emergency managers from harnessing the capability of scientific modeling systems when responding to disasters.

Ninety-two percent of executives say agility is critical for the future of their business, yet only 4% of their transformation efforts are delivering agility. The leading causes for this gap are an entrenched legacy culture and general resistance to change. Responding to these challenges and delivering business agility may require more than Agile practices. As we explore in this Executive Update, many organizations are discovering “solution focus” to be the missing piece of their transformation puzzle.

Leveraging visuals is particularly important for a business architecture practice. Visuals matter, and for a business architecture practice to be effective, it must connect with people on a human level and in ways that build true under­stand­ing. Graphic recording is the visual live capture of content for an event or meeting, which acts as a visual record of the session. With this technique, there is little to no interaction between the graphic recorder and the speaker and participants. Graphic facilitation also includes visual live capture of the content for an event or meeting, but the graphic facilitator serves as a guide throughout the entire meeting process. These visual techniques bring people together to co-create around a specific topic, challenge, or opportunity. They allow people to “see” their thinking and shape concepts together. 

The field of robotics has benefited considerably from advances in various artificial intelligence (AI) technologies — most notably deep learning neural networks, computer vision, intelligent guidance and control systems, and voice and speech recognition. The biggest advances are being realized from developments in deep learning algorithms and machine vision technologies, which are allowing the creation of robots featuring advanced autonomous navigation and intelligent object recognition capabilities.

Join Cutter Consortium Fellow Lou Mazzucchelli for this Cutter Consortium Members-only peer-to-peer discussion of the potential risks posed by machine learning applications and how to deal with them.

The growing prevalence of the Internet of Things, together with plummeting component costs, has made it possible to connect just about anything, from the very simple to the very complex, and to offer remote access, sensing, control, and monitoring. These technologies make it possible for healthcare providers and patients to work together to improve health in novel ways that were previously unimaginable. A critical element in this new model is that focusing on what is happening with the patient when they are not in front of a health pro­fessional, using sensors to deliver remote monitoring and a more complete picture of an individual’s health, is more likely to have an impact than focusing on the brief amount of time spent during in-person medical visits.

Large, non-software companies introducing Agile to their organizations tend to suffer from a cognitive dissonance of sorts: we would like to have the same look and feel across the entire company, delivering stellar-quality products, yet we want to enable high-performing, self-organizing, self-managed, and self-empowered teams to deliver (or demo) at the end of each sprint. In this Advisor, we summarize one area where this conflict becomes especially evident for large companies, particularly with non-software teams: process misalignment. We also share a potential solution that we’ve seen work in industrial practice.

Here in Part II of this Executive Update series on customer experience (CX) management, we look at survey findings covering budgeting trends for CX initiatives and the status of the “chief customer officer” (CCO) in the enterprise.

Here in Part II of this Executive Update series on customer experience (CX) management, we look at survey findings covering budgeting trends for CX initiatives and the status of the “chief customer officer” (CCO) in the enterprise.

In this Advisor, I have chosen the simple word “change” as a starting point for thinking about architectural change, rather than many of the others in rampant use — words such as “transformation,” “permutation,” “enhancement,” and so on. This choice seems appropriate because “change” is an abstract, neutral, and descriptive word without the deeper connotations that might impede the nuancing of this notion into something of a practical, if rudimentary, taxonomy that will help us grapple better with the different kinds of changes that we are compelled to deal with.

Although recent advances in computing user interfaces for decision support tools make the tools much easier to learn, understand, and manipulate, some decision makers may be reluctant to adopt and use a new decision support tool. Potential users with greater IT knowledge and expertise often find it easier to learn new systems than those who are infrequent users and hence lack knowledge and expertise. Thus, developers should strive to build a decision support capability that targets potential users, matching the design to user needs, abilities, and skills.

In this on-demand webinar Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Brian Cameron explores the ways you can structure your business architecture to effectively facilitate strategy execution.

In statistical project management (SPM), we simplify the project management approach by eliminating many concepts that the dominant project management methodologies consider central. Objects represent a repeatable thing that non-IT people can wrap their minds around. They are supposed to be concrete, like a balance sheet report in an accounting system or an employee demographics data-entry Web form. Since objects are supposed to be repeatable, project managers and the IT organization would find it very helpful to know how long, on average, it takes teams to create and operate related objects. Thus, objects become an important list of deliverables and one that is crucial to estimate accurately. Objects represent, from the user’s perspective, the list of things that are delivered to them — a kind of a bill of materials.

The financial industry is currently focusing on AI solutions using ML and NLP technologies. Software, fintech, and regtech vendors are developing and improving models using data and supervised (training) and unsupervised learning. This proves more effective than previous AI approaches. This Advisor explores the current state of practice in the financial industry’s application of AI.

Software architecture requires balance. During the 20 years I’ve been leading technology organizations to build products, mostly via Agile, I’ve learned some rules that have helped me — and my teams — successfully strike the right balance. These aren’t technically focused rules; they’re more generic, so they apply to monolithic, layered, service-oriented, and microservice architectures equally well. One of these rules is the subject of this Advisor.

Continuous dissent is necessary and extremely valuable — but also incredibly tough for the architect to participate in. This Executive Update seeks to find a balance that allows architects to engage in dissent while preserving their careers — and their sanity.

According to our latest research, one of biggest issues impeding organizations from carrying out their customer experience (CX) management initiatives is a lack of CX professionals within the organization. So how are organizations meeting or planning to meet their CX implementation needs?

During this two-day workshop at your organization, Cutter Senior Consultant Mike Rosen will explore the requirements for the new digital economy and describe the new “Digital Business Platform” necessary to meet those requirements and sustain success. He'll lay out the overall architecture needed to create that platform and go into detail about the new business, information, application, technology, performance, and security architectures that comprise it. A detailed case study is woven throughout the workshop to illustrate the platform, architectural tradeoffs, and a wide variety of work products across all domains.

Understanding data storage requires under­standing data. Data sources, data types, storage sophistication, the structure and format associated with data, volume and velocity, meaningful processing, and, eventually, presentation of the results are all aspects of understanding data. Coupled with security, privacy, and quality, these factors play a pivotal role in delivering business value. This Executive Update investigates the relevance of NoSQL databases in providing business value.

Design thinking is an elegant framing of problem-finding and -solving with a strong focus on delightful outcomes for the customer, while Agile practices focus on delivering the value envisioned in the design phase. This implies the two are equally essential to the team’s creative process. This Advisor describes the four steps in creative problem-solving that comprise the building blocks of innovation.

Many companies are unsatisfied with their innovation efforts and part of this is undoubtedly due to challenges around ideation and idea management. The required contribution of breakthrough innovation is ever-increasing, adding to this pressure. However, it is clear that some companies have developed strong processes and are reaping the rewards. The best practices outlined in this Advisor can help.

Agile is spreading and changing at such a rate that we are devoting a second issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal to the topic. As with our first issue on cutting-edge Agile, the articles come from a diverse group of authors, both male and female and from different countries.

Smart automation is most effective when humans and machines work together to deliver desired outcomes. Effective design for automation is not only about how much can be automated but should also consider how automation works together with humans to deliver value. Several fallacies observed in smart automation initiatives across indus­tries can lead to failed initiatives that never see the light of day or that never deliver the promised outcomes. One fallacy that has led to such failures is the belief that all human activities can be automated.