Strategic advice to leverage new technologies
Technology is at the heart of nearly every enterprise, enabling new business models and strategies, and serving as the catalyst to industry convergence. Leveraging the right technology can improve business outcomes, providing intelligence and insights that help you make more informed and accurate decisions. From finding patterns in data through data science, to curating relevant insights with data analytics, to the predictive abilities and innumerable applications of AI, to solving challenging business problems with ML, NLP, and knowledge graphs, technology has brought decision-making to a more intelligent level. Keep pace with the technology trends, opportunities, applications, and real-world use cases that will move your organization closer to its transformation and business goals.
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Our friend and colleague Ed Yourdon passed away unexpectedly on January 20. Ed was a guru’s guru. As you’ll discover in these tributes by several members of the Cutter family, Ed had a profound impact on many, many lives. We welcome you to add your stories and memories to this collection in the comments section below.
Rest in peace, Ed.
It's one thing to espouse the virtues of Agile by giving examples of young organizations such as Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, and others that are built on new architectures and tools. It's entirely another scenario when speaking to older enterprises that must manage significant technical debt, as well as business and technical architectural complexities and interdependencies, often with strict regulatory requirements, across simultaneous legacy and cloud projects. All this adds up to an environment fraught with fragility and risk.
This Executive Update examines key trends and developments affecting the market for, and the application of, data management and analytics that organizations should track in 2016.
January 20, 2016 — Arlington, Massachusetts
Figure 1 — Which categories of IoT-connected products/solutions
hold the most importance or promise for your organization or business?
hold the most importance or promise for your organization or business?
As I read through Cutter Agile Practice Director Tom Grant’s recent article on Agile frameworks (see “Agile Frameworks: Does Anyone Know What a Framework Is?“), I kept thinking of one particular word: structure. People like frameworks because they provide a repeatable structure.
Agile frameworks are an attempt at defining a standard recipe that each team in an organization can follow. This recipe comes predefined with controls and deliverables and will help set a structure around Agile that other departments can understand. Moreover, a predefined recipe can be replicated across all the teams in the organization because they will all work the same way.
At least this is what some people hope.
For the IoT to be successful, it is essential that connected devices provide a friendly user experience. This is especially important when it comes to consumer products for such market segments as smart homes, health and fitness, connected cars, and gaming. But I think it also holds true — although to a lesser degree — for the wider deployment of connected equipment and smart machines in business environments. Simply put, consumers and businesses will resist using devices, appliances, and equipment that are too difficult to set up or too confusing to operate. Consequently, for many IoT scenarios, we can expect to see connected devices increasingly utilize voice- or speech-powered interfaces that offer hands-free operation for the user. However, voice and speech will not replace other forms of UIs like touch and gesture; certainly not any time soon. Rather, they will be combined with these technologies to provide multi-modal interfaces designed to optimize interaction with connected devices.
The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to cause disruption in almost every industry. Companies need to examine how they can take advantage of connected products and services and plan for the significantly increased data workloads that will likely come with the deployment of sensor-enabled products. However, an expected surge in product innovation also means that companies should carefully consider how they will deal with the potential rise of new, more agile competitors whose business models will be based primarily on IoT products and services. Here are some points about the IoT I've been discussing with colleagues that organizations may want to consider as we head into 2016 and beyond.
IT service leaders are under constant pressure to deliver reliable and available services within the budgetary constraints of the business. They look for opportunities to optimize their support model, extracting repetitive, nonvalued inefficiencies and effort that inflate support costs. The shift-left service strategy focuses on moving issue resolution and request fulfillment to the lowest cost level in the tiered-model service organization, with a focus on "one and done" — providing the internal customer with resolution at the service desk (Level 1) or self-service portal (Level 0).