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.
Insight
Agility initiates and accepts changes to business processes, and artificial intelligence (AI) further enables agility by providing timely updates on the status of a business to facilitate decision making. This Advisor explores Agile principles and their corresponding impact on technology-driven change management.
Cutter Consortium Fellow Robert Charette starts off the issue by looking at failure through an incredibly intriguing lens: what if failure is "the desired outcome of an IT project development and that success is inadvertent"? He then proceeds to set the “conditions” necessary for the pursuit of failure. He then goes on to test — and largely confirm — his “cynical theory.”
Ralph Menzano takes us directly into the C-suite through a series of discussions he had with CIOs and other executives about why so many damn technology projects fail. His article probes some of the causes of failure often ignored by the research community.
The authors focus on the role that communication plays in technology project management. They suggest that many conventional problems as well as some more strategic ones can be reduced, if not solved, by developing a communication plan that spans the entire project lifecycle, beginning with the stakeholder communication strategy.
Sridhar Deenadayalan offers a playbook in the form of five keys to a successful technology project. The strength of this article lies in its two-step approach to failure management. Problems are identified, then followed by specific actions, or “keys to success,” to address them.
Anjali Kaushik attempts to unfold the mystery of failed technology projects, with her examination dropping into the trenches. Her analysis is anything but conventional. She begins by looking at the necessity and meaning of process redesign. Kaushik’s advice to match technology projects to complementary assets and capabilities is especially helpful.
Mitigating the risks of developing and deploying SaaS carries with it similar challenges to on-premises implementations. In this Advisor, we highlight six lessons learned.
In most enterprises, business processes are automated in isolation, creating “automation silos” — a major barrier to realizing the fuller potential of enterprise-wide integrated automation. Businesses must take a more strategic approach if they are to break automation silos. This Advisor identifies four key considerations that should go into planning for smart automation 2.0.