Don’t Throw the Baby Out With the BathwaterERM has received its share of the blame for the current financial mess. While there are some problems with current practice, it needs a bit of fixing, not wholesale renovation. | Chuck the Baby, TooAs currently practiced, ERM is useless at best and creates increased enterprise risk at worst. The role of ERM in organizations requires a complete rethinking. |
This month's installment of CBR takes a look at a trend that we see emerging, even though it may not be a reality (yet) for many of our readers. This topic, that my colleague Rick Watson and I call the “digital data genesis capability,” represents the notion that organizations must, in order to stay competitive in the future, develop the ability to embed digital computing equipment and IT in organizational processes to serve goals other than transaction processing, thus creating data in digital form and capturing it at its inception.
This month's installment of Cutter Benchmark Review is the fourth in our yearly series on IT trends and technologies for the coming year. As you know if you have been following CBR, at the beginning of every year we ask our practicing and academic contributors to take stock of current trends. Based on our benchmarking survey of investment priorities, we ask our contributors to explain the results and look ahead to extrapolate these to create some guidelines for our readers on how to tackle the new year in the IT shop.
Companies that have adopted agile methods have realized faster throughput and higher business customer satisfaction on individual projects. Yet despite undeniable wins at the project level, sustained large-scale adoptions of agile methods are fewer and further between. What is preventing more comprehensive adoption of agile within organizations? Many agile experts point to a significant misalignment between the way agile projects are run and the way IT projects are governed in general. IT program and portfolio management, in particular, seem to be at the root of many of these alignment issues.
In this issue we'll explore ways to scale agile methods beyond individual projects so that their associated programs and portfolios can thrive. Hear how one agile consultant saved a failing 100-person company by introducing an agile portfolio planning game - and convincing the company to stop acquiring new customers (a much tougher sell)! Learn effective methods for ranking your projects - and the equally important lesson that "ranking isn't forever." Discover how to blend the adaptability of agile with the context and focus of traditional portfolio management to begin to deliver not just functions, but new organizational capabilities. Are the agile teams in your organization ready to level up?
The Gap Is Between Business Architecture and IT ArchitectureBusiness architecture requires alignment with IT architecture. Concurrent alignment efforts must focus on the gap between these two architectures. |
