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.

Agile’s Role in AI Adoption

Bhuvan Unhelkar
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.

6 Lessons Learned from SaaS Development & Deployment

Steven Kursh, Arthur Schnure

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.


4 Key Considerations: Planning for Smart Automation 2.0

Aravind Ajad Yarra, Danesh Zaki
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.

Narrowing the Learning Gap with AI-Powered Educational Apps

Curt Hall
AI-powered educational applications hold the promise of helping to narrow the learning gap by providing educational opportunities to people of all ages regardless of gender, economic/social status, or the availability of established schools and other traditional educational resources. This Advisor examines the use of AI for personalized learning and enhanced online/distance learning platforms in the form of cloud-based and mobile applications and provides some examples of commercial AI-powered educational applications.

Replicating Innovation Across Business Units

Ben Thuriaux, Frederik van Oene, Elis Wilkins
Replicating best practice across business units is fundamental to improving innovation performance, but research shows that it happens far less than expected. Learn why this happens — and how businesses can overcome the challenge.

Ingredients for Enterprise Agility, Part VII: How Value Streams Create Enterprise Agility

Jon Ward
Enterprise agility is created by looking at value streams and optimizing them end to end. This Advisor explores how value streams work, how customer value is created, and how to remove obstacles to customer value creation.

How to “Green” Enterprise IT

San Murugesan
Green IT and green initiatives are now a key agenda for enterprises and governments and are driven by the benefits they offer and several ongoing developments, such as concerns about climate change, government regulations, and peer pressure and influence. This Advisor outlines the strategies and steps that will help you implement a Green IT approach in your enterprise.

Stakeholder Mapping Is Key to Circular Economy Implementation

William Ulrich, Giovanni Traverso
This Advisor explores how business architecture stakeholder mapping can assist a healthy circular economy implementation by specifying the value stream scenarios where different stakeholders extract value propositions across a value cycle, enabling the cycle to start and be sustained.

Why Don't We Trust AI?

Claude Baudoin, Clayton Pummill
AI certainly challenges our under­standing of what intelligence is, not to mention our belief in the inherent superiority of human thinking over machines. But the causes of mistrust go beyond these existential considerations, as are identified in this Advisor.

The Impact of AI in Education

Aswani Kumar Cherukuri, Annapurna Jonnalagadda, San Murugesan
AI can help students receive personalized lessons, pro­vide educators with deep insights into students’ learning styles, revolutionize skills improvement for professionals, and lower the cost of education. This Advisor lays out the key benefits AI-based education offers over traditional instruction modes.

What Makes Quantum Computing So Different?

Joseph Byrum
This Advisor takes a brief look at how quantum computers work. You'll discover how quantum processors evaluate multiple variables simultaneously, which means simulations can include as many interacting variables as there are qubits.

Enterprise IPA Adoption: Still Too Early to Measure Success

Curt Hall
From mid-2020 to early 2021, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey on how organizations are adopting, or planning to adopt, intelligent process automation (IPA). In this Advisor, we examine survey findings pertaining to how organizations view the success of their IPA efforts so far and whether they believe the technology will eventually live up to expectations.

3 Areas of Potential Failure in Digital Transformations

Eric Willeke
Pursuing digital transformation involves a deep focus on the nature of the data being used in the organization, the services being exposed around that data, and what business use cases are being improved and reimagined through the use and recomposition of these new services. This Advisor explores three common failure areas that emerge in transformations.

AI, Digital Identification & Fraud Prevention Trends

Curt Hall
Higher expectations of customer service and trends in online fraud are forcing government agencies and businesses alike to modernize their digital identity management systems as more people engage with online services. As we explore in this Advisor, this includes employing applications — in the form of cloud platforms and services licensed from commercial providers — that integrate machine learning (ML), machine vision, and biometrics combined with mobile access in order to automate the verification and authentication of government-issued IDs and other documents.

Using Citizen Development to Transform Your Organization: 7 Key Recommendations

Noel Carroll, Liam Ó Móráin, Dave Garrett, Arjun Jamnadass
Citizen development promises to improve enterprise productivity and accelerate value delivery, enabling organizations to achieve outcomes more quickly. This Advisor presents seven key recommendations for organizations undergoing or planning to pursue a digital transformation and adopt a citizen development (CD) initiative.

How Much Testing Is Really Needed?

Tom Bragg
Time and money are never unlimited, but failing to establish cutoffs for testing is a common mistake that relates directly to how much testing is needed. If the project does not establish cutoff dates for testing, nobody can plan defect work because new bugs will always be arriving on an unpredictable schedule.

How Business Leaders Can Adapt to the Quantum Era

Joseph Byrum
The move from conventional computing to quantum computing won’t be like a simple change in technology providers. Quantum processors use a wholly new way of solving complex problems; as we explore in this Advisor, that requires a new way of thinking about problems. Software programs designed for conventional computers aren’t going to work.

Security Architecture Coherence

Balaji Prasad
If enterprises must be agile as well as secure, there cannot be daylight between security design and the broader architecture and purpose of the enterprise. Many enterprises may need to take a step back, survey the security landscape, and evaluate the level of coherence of their security architecture.

How Cataloging Can Support the Creation of a Data Supermarket

Myles Suer, John Wills
Finding and leveraging the right data is key to achieving strategic advantage. Creating a data supermarket of usable data can help businesses make critical decisions, and a system called cataloging makes this data supermarket possible. This Advisor explores how cataloging enables the connection of different elements of a data pipeline to provide a more orderly and efficient management of data, especially as the volume and variety of data increases.

The Auto Industry: IT Needs to Check Its Engine Assumption Light

Robert Charette
The next decade in the auto industry will be intriguing to watch as the risk-reward equation between electric vehicles and internal combustion engine vehicles continually shifts. New strategic inflection points can be expected to emerge as both battery and IT improve, with the latter allowing the software-defined car to become an everyday reality.

Ingredients for Enterprise Agility, Part VI: Pointless Agile Certifications

Jon Ward
In this Advisor, Jon Ward outlines how learning is blocked by Agile certifications and explains that teams must understand Agile theory to improve continuously. He recommends developing in-house training capabilities as a more effective approach to learning.

A Focus on Hyperliminal Coupling Leads to Better Software Design

Barry M O'Reilly
Nonfunctional requirements is an overly simplistic view of hyperliminal coupling that arises from transposing the idea of functional requirements and contract certainty to the hyperliminal reality of a system’s behavior in its environment. If we let go of the idea of nonfunctional requirements and focus instead on hyperliminal coupling, we have a greater chance of actually building something that can respond to its environment, as is explored in this Advisor.

Solving the Right Problem

Scott Whitmire
Knowing the competitive environment of your company, division, department, or unit is the first step in ensuring you're solving the right problems. This Advisor explores four styles of competitive environments — classical, adaptive, shaping, and visionary — and provides guidance on determining which styles best fit your current situation.

AI's Role in Wildfire Prevention and Mitigation

Curt Hall
The application of advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), are increasingly being used to detect wildfires before they grow out of control, predict a wildfire's path, and assess the risk and potential damage caused by wildfires. This Advisor explores the application of AI and machine learning technologies to mitigate the impact of wildfires.

Is IT Late to Its Industrial Revolution?

Frank Contrepois
Commoditization has evolved as expected for end-user IT, as solutions embrace simplicity. But behind the scenes in IT there is chaos that has existed for at least 25 years. Though things may be cheaper, they are just as complex. Explore how the focus needs to shift in order for IT to experience its industrial revolution.