Advisors provide a continuous flow of information on the topics covered by each practice, including consultant insights and reports from the front lines, analyses of trends, and breaking new ideas. Advisors are delivered directly to your email inbox, and are also available in the resource library.
Ingredients for Enterprise Agility, Part VIII: Why Progression Metrics Deliver Focus for Agile Teams
Jon Ward
This Advisor explains how monitoring progression metrics can help teams see if their actions are moving toward success. Additionally, as Agile uses value throughout the definition, backlog refinement, and activity prioritization processes combined with incremental delivery, teams can determine early on if their activities are having the desired result. If not, then they can apply the Agile proverb “pivot without mercy or guilt.”
Managing Delegated Organizations with a Tenant Approach
Konrad Pfeffer, Nick Bartlett
Delegating administrative activities within a CIAM solution can allow your business products in a B2B context to grow and scale without having to worry about user management. As we explore in this Advisor, the tenant concept is one approach for managing your delegated organizations.
Optimizing Business Models for the Circular Economy
Giovanni Traverso, William Ulrich
Business model optimization plays an important role in transitioning to the circular economy. Using an example from an automotive manufacturing company, this Advisor explores how business architecture enables this transition while concurrently enabling organizations to streamline costs, increase revenues, and achieve related strategic objectives.
5 Underhyped Technologies That Could Shape the Future
Steve Andriole
Research organizations love trendy “celebrity” technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, cybersecurity, distributed clouds, and privacy technology. They’re easy to identify and hype. Many are, in fact, impactful in any given year. But what about the “underdogs”? Can they become “wonderdogs”? In this Advisor, we take a closer look at five underdog technologies that might have a major future impact on our personal and professional lives.
The Case for Environmental Intelligence Solutions
San Murugesan
Environmental intelligence (EI) is an effective combined use of data science, AI, and other digital technologies such as IoT to provide the meaningful insight needed to address these challenges and mitigate the effects of environmental change. This Advisor examines how EI can help in collecting and analyzing environmental data to understand the cause and impact of environmental changes and to predict potential environmental risks facing us.
How AI Subfields Are Advancing Product Development
Michael Jastram
There are many artificial intelligence subfields that have the potential to help us overcome the limitations of current product development approaches, each at a different development level. This Advisor explores four of these subfields: natural language processing, machine learning, interactive AI, and training data.
Changing the Way Your Business Operates with AI
Bhuvan Unhelkar
As businesses strive to maximize customer value, many are moving towards the adoption of AI to enable better organizational agility and flexibility to meet customer demands. This Advisor explores the value propositions and considerations for businesses contemplating AI adoption.
Simplifying Architecture in an Agile Environment
Avinash Malik
Many Agile processes place architects too far from the development activities. This Advisor explores the roles of engineering lead, solution architect, and enterprise architect, and asserts that if we allow some grey area between the roles of an architect and an engineering lead, two roles work better than three.
Optimizing Business Processes with Intelligent Document Processing
Curt Hall
According to a Cutter survey examining the adoption of intelligent process automation (IPA), nearly 60% of organizations identified accelerated document processing as the number one use case for applying IPA in the enterprise. If you think about it, this makes sense because document processing is a huge bottleneck for companies across almost every industry and for most government agencies. This Advisor explores the adoption of IPA including the goals, benefits, industry developments, and major automation vendors who have added intelligent document processing to their platforms
Trust in AI: Is This the Fork in the Road?
Claude Baudoin, Clayton Pummill
We have control over whether AI will be a trusted aide to humanity or a threat. But we need a number of convergent approaches to be able to choose the right path. Ultimately, this amounts to AI governance.
Citizen Development Improves IT Delivery and Speeds Strategic Development
Ronan Hughes
There are a number of ways citizen development (CD) adoption can accelerate the intended benefits of IT change programs, streamline business cases and proposals, and deliver real savings. This Advisor explores how citizen development and low-code/no-code can add value, even when considering worst-case scenarios.
Top 3 Challenges to Utilizing Enterprise IPA
Curt Hall
In a recent Cutter Consortium survey, we examined findings concerning the major challenges organizations indicate are hindering their efforts to apply IPA. In this Advisor, we take a closer look at the top three of these challenges: IPA is still an emerging technology, issues identifying applicable use cases, and the complexity of IPA development/implementation.
The Cybersecurity Executive Order: A Stimulus to Realign Your Model
Balaji Prasad
On 12 May 2021, the US White House issued a presidential executive order (EO) on improving the nation’s cybersecurity. The purpose of this Advisor is to point to this EO as a resource that enterprises should study in some depth as well as to use it as a context to highlight ways to think more fundamentally and timelessly about cybersecurity.
When Good Data Goes Bad, Part IV
Barry Devlin
In a world increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence (AI) in its various guises, the danger of good data going bad — what we might call “data rot” — is becoming pervasive and dangerous. In this fourth Advisor of my series, I consider a couple of real — and possibly unexpected — ways the rot can set in.
To Unlock the Next Big Promotion, Leaders Must Up Their Career AQ
Noah Barsky
Note from the author: While I often write about organizations and technologies, this Advisor is a bit of a (related and important) tangent, as it focuses on career advancement. Invariably, in working with executives and rising leaders, particularly technology professionals and consultants, conversations turn to career challenges. I have long wanted to author a piece that captures an effective approach that, over many years, has resonated well with business professionals aiming for a promotion and meaningful career advancement.
Agile Versus Reality: Four Common Problems
Jacek Chmiel
Many of Agile’s practices and base assumptions were and are unrealistic, and some have become obsolete in our present digital world. We need new solutions — software developers would call it a major refactoring. It’s likely you will recognize some of these suggestions as changes you’ve already made to address the flaws of the original Agile methodologies. For those who have just become Agile believers, this may come as more of a surprise. This Advisor goes through four common problems with Agile versus reality and discusses possible solutions.
Mitigating Risk in SaaS Development & Deployment
Steven Kursh, Arthur Schnure
In this Advisor, we examine the risks of software-as-a-service (SaaS) development and deployment. Specifically, we outline seven related suggestions to mitigate risk.
Methods for Evaluating Software Architecture
Simon Field
This Advisor explores the use of the ISO/IEC 25010 quality model as a software architecture evaluation method. You'll discover how this model offers a common language for describing architecturally significant quality characteristics across the organization and creates the potential for comparison across projects and their architecture reviews.
Customer Service and CX Management: IPA Can Help
Curt Hall
Organizations are now implementing more advanced intelligent virtual assistants and smartbots as part of their IPA efforts due to their ability to automate more comprehensive customer engagements. This Advisor explores the benefits and applications of AI in customer self-service applications.
How to Develop Connections Using the Customer Experience Equation
Dave Cherry
The goal of the customer experience equation is to develop a connection. Connection is achieved through two factors. The first is content and represents the product or service that you sell. The second factor is context, which represents everything surrounding both your content and your customer.
Why Do Technology Projects Fail? Is Failure a Feature or a Bug? — An Introduction
Steve Andriole
This issue of CBTJ addresses the tactical, operational, strategic, and human reasons that allow technology projects to fail and offers guidance and solutions to mitigate the possibility of failure.
Strategy by Design: Telling a Story
Scott Whitmire
Developing strategy requires all the skills possessed by competent, experienced enterprise architects, plus the ability to deal with uncertainty and ranges of responses. This Advisor explores how you can use scenarios — or stories — to describe various combinations of responses in order to work out the likely outcomes in each case.
Why Do So Many Analytics Projects Fail to Deliver?
Manjul Gupta, Carlos Parra, Brian Mennecke
Research establishing a link between analytics and business performance remains in a nascent stage, but the popular press is rife with examples of firms predicting the viewing and shopping habits of individuals, providing personalized healthcare-related services, and harnessing real-time agricultural data to increase productivity and efficiency. Nevertheless, when defined as the use of advanced mathematics to identify, explain, or predict patterns in data to improve confidence in business decision making to create value, the majority of analytics projects fail to deliver or have low success rates. This Advisor explores some of the reasons for that failure.
The Perils of Convenient Hiring in Innovation Teams
Robert Ogilvie, Jeffrey McNally
Essential team conditions need to be set up well and are tenaciously difficult to fix later. Having the right talent is one such essential condition, but not all organizations are strategically ready for the problems of finding and selecting top talent, accurately understanding what roles that talent will fill, or building up their own leadership competencies internally.
Identifying and Solving Anti-Patterns for Successful Agile Adoption
Alok Dimri, Anuj Ojha
The biggest challenge organizations face while starting an Agile transformation is not the learning, but the unlearning. This Advisor focuses on Agile anti-patterns around roles, events, artifacts, and overall cultural mindset.