Fog computing can create a digital twin of difficult-to-replicate process. Let me explain, through a hypothetical example of a craft brewery. Unlike industrial production, food and beverage manufacturers work with natural ingredients, where the quality of raw materials can vary, making it more difficult to create a uniform product without waste. Producing a consistent quality product is critical to building cus­tomer loyalty. When it comes to products of nature, in particular, manufacturers face unique challenges.

In this Executive Update, we explore a promising breakthrough growth model that we have successfully applied in both B2C and B2B businesses. This model delivers major benefits in terms of speed, cost, and likelihood of success. It involves radical collaboration across the innovation ecosystem and covers the entire innovation process from idea to commercialization, including the strategic, commercial, operational, and technical aspects. We call this the Breakthrough Incubator (BI) model.

This Advisor — one in a series of “Agile Team Tips” — describes the benefits of backlogs and backlog grooming.

When it comes to delivering effective digital transformations, human behavior is often overlooked in favor of a focus on technology. In this series of Advisors, we outline how organizations can truly engage their people by understanding their behaviors and, consequently, ensure that they undergo successful digital change.

The critical role of a business architect is to understand the business needs and design the fundamental business elements that can be configured in many ways to realize what the business wants.

Over the last 12-16 months, we have seen more than a dozen banks and financial institutions worldwide introduce (or announce) virtual banking assistants and bots. Such apps are now available to millions of personal banking customers, and banks are also starting to introduce AI-powered digital assistants for managing corporate customers’ accounts. This Advisor explores some examples of intelligent virtual assistants and bankbots companies have introduced over the past year or so.

In this webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Greg Smith reveals how an organization can truly engage its people by understanding their behaviors, and how it can balance empowerment, vision, engaged leadership, tolerance for failure, tangible incentives, and the belief that transformation can actually happen into successful digital change.

Data centers that support today’s cloud systems must implement extensible networks based on technology that allows them to scale in an Agile, cost-effective fashion. Market trends include customer microsegmentation analytics supported by communications service providers that leverage microsegmentation analytics to improve customer retention, revenue generation, and customer experience.

Commercial edge computing products — including hardware solutions featuring embedded analytic and AI technologies — are just now starting to become available or will be soon. Despite these hindrances, already we are seeing examples of companies developing edge computing applications.

End-to-end strategy realization requires many people to work together seamlessly across five stages; this includes teams centered on strategy, customer experience, architecture, product management portfolio management, program and project planning, business analysis, business process, organizational design, and execution. Business architecture is a relatively new addition to the ecosystem of strategy realization, but has a valuable role in all five stages.

Value is the main interest in big data. Extraction of value from big data transcends both analytics and technologies. Value is highly dependent on the “context” in which data is analyzed and used. The Big Data Framework for Agile Business (BDFAB) is my comprehen­sive approach to big data adoption, which includes (among others) a module on business process modeling (BPM) and business analysis (BA). This module considers modeling and optimization of business processes as highly relevant and crucial in deriving value from big data. 

The “one size fits all” era, where RDBMSs were used in nearly any data and processing context, seems to have come to an end.

Agility does not come easily; it is more a question of culture and values than a question of using specific methods and tools. Using a self-assessment tool, this Executive Update describes how organizations can measure their agility.

How does a utility company connect better with its customers? Utility companies must consider strategic investments in all available tools — including soft­ware dedicated to the purpose — to increase customer engagement in and control of their products and ser­vices.

If you are with a conventional company (probably one established before 2010), it’s very likely that you have a command-and-control structure with a board dominated by shareholder representatives and operationalized starting with the CEO. There may be many levels of command, down to section- or unit-level supervisors. This structure is time-tested, beginning with the Pharaohs of Egypt! It has the advantage of clearly delineating authorities, responsibilities, decision-making roles, and accountabilities.

We call out the hardware, the software, the applications, the information, and even the business processes, as we visualize the different layers of the enterprise. However, we stop just short of defining the enterprise stack fully; what is noticeable by its absence is the most important part of the enterprise: the people.

In this webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Whynde Kuehn reveals how, through the combination of business architecture and CX design, organizations can gain more insight into where and how to align and transform their business models so they can focus on the ongoing needs of their customers while driving organizational efficiencies.

In this webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Whynde Kuehn reveals how, through the combination of business architecture and CX design, organizations can gain more insight into where and how to align and transform their business models so they can focus on the ongoing needs of their customers while driving organizational efficiencies.

Banking and financial services companies were among the first to apply artificial intelligence (AI) in strategic applications. Initially, this took place in the mid- to late 1980s in the form of expert and knowledge-based systems for credit and loan approval and mortgage processing, and so on, and then in the early to mid-1990s, when neural network-based applications for credit and bank card fraud detection, and profitability management, began to be deployed.

In this Update, we examine some of the more temporal aspects of using the ADF activities as part of a systems development process. We begin by revisiting the ADF activity structure and, by choosing an example development process, examine how the activities that comprise that process exchange information. We shall then look at the viability of a typical development sprint timescale in being able to accommodate all the activities necessary for large, complex development involving business analysis.

Join Cutter Consortium Fellow and Ivey Business School Professor Robert D. Austin for this hour-long webinar in which lay out the new digital business strategy map. He’ll talk about new rules and new realities that you need to know to proof your business against disruption in a “hub" or “platform" economy. Rob’s objective is to help you down a path toward equipping all your managers for survival in a digitally transformed world.

Cutter Consortium is conducting a series of surveys on how organizations are adopting, or planning to adopt, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. We also seek to identify important issues and other considerations they are encountering or foresee encountering in their efforts. Here in Part V, we look at findings pertaining to the industries and domains where organizations see AI having its most significant impact.

Cutter Consortium is conducting a series of surveys on how organizations are adopting, or planning to adopt, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. We also seek to identify important issues and other considerations they are encountering or foresee encountering in their efforts. Here in Part V, we look at findings pertaining to the industries and domains where organizations see AI having its most significant impact.

Given the risk/reward tradeoff inherent in disruptive technology adoption, this Advisor aims to identify the motives, pressures, and efforts that influence continued adoption intention and usage of a disruptive technology after the initial adoption stage.

An organization is likely to base its digital disruption upon the markets and geographies in which it already operates, and the existing workforce understands the customers and needs of both the current market and the current geographies. It is therefore essential that leaders utilize their existing resource pool by providing employees with the learning and tailored development to facilitate their transition to the digital era.