The Sustainability Imperative
As organizations struggle to define a strategy that balances purpose and profit, opportunities are increasingly emerging to take the lead in sustainability initiatives. Front-line advances in areas such as net-zero emissions, AI-powered solutions for the underserved, precision agriculture, digital healthcare, and more are delivering business benefits, while simultaneously contributing to the realization of the UN’s 17 SDGs. We provide the expert thinking, debate, and guidance to help your organization reposition and transform in the era of sustainability.
Insight
Samin Saadat and Jim Brosseau take us into their workshops and their research. The authors provide meaningful context to describe the barriers to inclusion, such as the history of management and leadership, communication technologies, and the effects of addictive social media platforms. They offer practical steps for companies to include on their way to becoming a more transparent culture and also outline the costs companies will inevitably pay for failed attempts and a lack of inclusion.
This Cutter Business Technology Journal issue dives deep and looks at diversity, equity, and inclusion from different angles with the help of seven stellar voices who lend their expertise to educate, examine, enumerate, and offer solutions.
Nicole D. Price focuses on technical professionals and their underused skills, knowledge, and insights when tackling diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. She offers seven specific attributes of technical professionals and discusses how those attributes are well suited for this challenging work. Among them are logic and reason, reliance on evidence-based research for problem solving, the ability to imagine a better future, and healthy conflict.
Ebonye Gussine Wilkins challenges us to do the work. Wilkins goes beyond the data that may have us enjoy a false sense of progress and unpacks what the numbers mean when parsed by marginalized groups and their lived experiences. She goes deeper still and offers historical perspectives that further explain racial divisions and spells out why data without insight tells a partial story. Her premise focuses on knowledge, education, insight, and wisdom as necessary, yet missing, elements to achieve diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
Unfortunately, for many decision makers in government and industry today, practicing robust risk management is still seen within their organizations’ social context as providing little if any positive upside, but instead possessing potentially large downside consequences for them personally and professionally. Many decision makers skeptically view rigorous risk analysis as akin to future blame analysis for something that might go wrong rather than a way to increase career or organization success. Changing this perception is difficult but not impossible.
Cutter Consortium Fellow Bob Charette explores the current state of risk management in a world of repeated failures to adopt the lessons of the past, examining several of the most common ways in which risk management is failing and the reasons why. In his analysis, different areas of risk form a broader “risk ecology,” in which risks interact in complex ways, and isolated analysis and management of each area has the potential to increase risk in unforeseen ways.
A primary motivation of decentralized social media is censorship resistance, often achieved through anonymity. But anonymity comes with a price. Checking the reliability and trustworthiness of information is much harder with anonymous information. In this Advisor, we present a brief overview of two main underlying technologies that help in decentralization while still providing a degree of trust between networked entities: (1) P2P social networks and (2) blockchain technology.
Even those who recognize the advantages of a cloud-based remote access platform over a VPN might argue that the current WFH solution is a temporary anomaly. In that case, why not just muddle through with a VPN until things get back to normal?