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.

This article takes us into another unexpected domain: production of energy resources. It is not obvious at the outset how embracing an Agile mindset might alter energy resource production rates, so his recounting of this story is especially interesting.

After outlining the benefits of his com­pany’s experiment with transparency, the author discusses the difficulties with loss of power and control, slower decision-making processes, and what he calls “frictional costs,” when ordinary workers, not specialists, are making corporate decisions. He describes his com­pany’s approach to these difficulties.

This article describes the transition from a traditional HR world to one that fits the new culture of the Agile organization. Explore the shifts in recruiting, appraisals and reviews, salaries, and career tracks, and the difficulties facing anyone embarking on the Agile path. 

This article takes agility out of its normal domain of product development into the world of research, where its use is not at all obvious. They outline the cultural blockers, note the obvious mismatches to ordinary agility, and describe how they adapted both the ceremonies of traditional agility and their own culture to form an effective final mixture.

This article describes what had to be done in a company of 2,000 people across 10 countries to introduce agility. It summarizes the company’s shift in three areas: from methods and tools to principles and mindset, from resource efficiency to flow efficiency, and from scattered experiences to continuous innovation. You will notice in the emphasis on first changing the mindset.

An ongoing challenge with big data and other secondary analytics initiatives is getting access to data. This Advisor describes a risk-based approach to de-identification, in which the data is transformed and administrative and technical controls are put in place.

During this on-demand webinar with Mike Rosen, you'll discover why your organization should use a business architecture and value delivery–based approach to digital strategy. And you'll learn why provisioning the platform based on next-generation application, information, security, and technology architectures is critical.

During this on-demand webinar with Mike Rosen, you'll discover why your organization should use a business architecture and value delivery–based approach to digital strategy. And you'll learn why provisioning the platform based on next-generation application, information, security, and technology architectures is critical.

The road to automating software development is long and full of twists and turns. No doubt, there will be potholes and detours along the way. However, getting to the end goal now seems possible, if we travel a short distance at a time.

In this Advisor, we describe some of the more popular cognitive development platforms and services that are currently available. Although some cognitive development platforms are available for on-premise deployment, the ongoing trend is for providers to offer their cognitive products in the form of cloud-based environments that give companies the opportunity to license various API-based cognitive services for use in their own enterprise applications or commercial products.

This Advisor provides an overview of the importance of using visual techniques as part of a business architecture practice and highlights the use of visual design.

For most organizations that have deployed customer experience (CX) practices and technologies, it is still too early to tell if their efforts have actually allowed them to deliver a better customer experience. However, for approximately 31% of the organizations that have deployed CX practices and technologies, their initial efforts appear to be paying off. These findings come from the preliminary results of an ongoing CX management survey we are conducting.

This Executive Update introduces a timely, new Agile event: consequence scanning. This event fits into an iterative development cadence and allows organizations to consider the potential consequences of what is being built — early and often. We explain the need to embed proactive and dedicated consideration of potential consequences within an organization’s product development and outline how best to do it with consequence scanning.