Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

Robotic process automation (RPA) has emerged as a popular technique to automate routine and repetitive human-system interactions across functional domains such as finance, marketing, human resources (HR), and other transaction-processing areas. Adopting such intelligent automation techniques allows businesses to enable efficiencies without major system transformations. Business leaders may find it compelling to invest in RPA tools and resources but should be aware of the foundational work required before rolling out the initial robots. This Advisor surveys the RPA vendor landscape, highlighting intelligent automation adoption across industries with a few user stories.

In this on-demand webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Jon Ward, describes how an Agile team was able to cut time-to-market in half and reduce the cost to deliver by 60%. He addresses how AI could have been used to even further enhance the team's productivity, where AI might inhibit it, and he outlines where AI can be used to improve your productivity.

We are increasingly hearing about the rise of the “Chief Customer Officer” (CCO), who has the position and the authority to ensure that the organization provides a unified and seamless customer journey/experience (CX) across all customer channels. But just how standard is the role of the CCO among organizations? According to preliminary findings from our ongoing CX management survey, current use of CCOs — or someone with an equivalent title formally charged with overseeing the adoption of CX practices into the organization — is relatively popular, with approximately 27% of the organizations we have surveyed indicating that they have made such an appointment.

Synthetic data provides a privacy protective mechanism to broadly use and share data for secondary purposes. Using and sharing data for secondary purposes can facilitate innovative big data initiatives and partnerships to develop novel analytics solutions. This Executive Update provides an overview of the use cases for synthetic data, how to generate synthetic data, and some legal considerations associated with synthetic data’s use.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) — is it hype, a new industrial dawn, or simply a means to increase leisure time? We are putting AI into nearly everything, including our refrigerators and other domestic appliances. So what about Agile teams — how should they use it? AI in project management tools is not new; indeed it has been a decade since global enterprise software company Planview introduced the optimization engine for capacity and demand. However, it is only now that this AI feature is becoming more widely used. This Advisor explores how organizations can use AI to increase the performance of Agile teams by supporting the product owner.

Robotic process automation (RPA) has emerged as a popular technique to automate routine and repetitive human-system interactions across functional domains such as finance, marketing, human resources (HR), and other transaction-processing areas. Adopting such intelligent automation techniques allows businesses to enable efficiencies without major system transformations. Business leaders may find it compelling to invest in RPA tools and resources but should be aware of the foundational work required before rolling out the initial robots. This Advisor explores some of challenges facing organizations looking to adopt RPA.

In my years of implementing SPM across different teams and organizations, the notion of an object can be distressing. Unlike its sibling hierarchy, phases, the object concept is not well understood or even implemented much of anywhere in other project methodologies, setting aside enterprise architecture methodologies, which often model objects more extensively. IT people accept the idea of a project phase without question. When confronted with the notion of an object, however, the apparent simplicity of the definition of an object transitions quickly to difficulty upon further probing. 

We can characterize the fourth stage of automation, smart automation, by intelligence embedded across customer channels (stores, call centers, websites, etc.), processes, systems, and platforms. Smart automation builds on the previous stages and uses intelligent means to bring automation to all aspects of a business value chain, from customer experience (CX), worker experience, internal processes, and operations to partner collaboration, covering all types of systems. As we explore in this Advisor, however, it is important that smart automation design carefully consider the subtle interplay between humans and machines to understand the nuances of those activities humans are good at and those for which machines are efficient and reliable.