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.
Technical Debt Is Not Debt; It's Not Even Technical
Mark Greville, Paidi O'Raghallaigh, Stephen McCarthy
Take a minute and write an answer to the question, “What is technical debt?” Then read this Advisor and reread your answer — and see if it still makes sense.
Leadership Lessons: Keys to Thriving in a Post-Pandemic Business World — An Introduction
Noah Barsky
Companies have been scrambling to respond to the upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 18 months since it began, many organizations still wonder what the post-pandemic future holds. The challenges are far-reaching, ranging from resolving daily employee work modalities to existential digital business model transformation. In this Advisor, Noah Barsky provides his perspective on the most pressing challenges awaiting business and the “future of work” and identifies some fundamental business issues that should be taken into consideration by leaders to navigate the “next normal” of the business world.
Start Small When Building a Digital Ecosystem Platform
Thomas Gossler
When contemplating transformation, you should test your assumptions in a pilot project before betting the farm on them. Such a project should be chosen to have minimal impact on the company in case of failure, should be realistic to build with a small team, and should have high potential for growth.
Anthropomorphizing Technology Leads to Failed ML Projects
Michael Papadopoulos, Philippe Monnot
A common denominator behind failed ML projects is the anthropomorphism of technology. This Advisor explores how, through our tendency toward anthropomorphism, we fail to make a critical distinction in the way humans and machines interpret the world.
The Future of Electric Vehicle Charging: Ask the Experts
Thomas Knoblinger, Alexander Krug
The electric vehicle (EV) charging market stands on the threshold of disruption. The public EV charging market is still in an embryonic stage but will offer tremendous growth opportunities in the next years. By 2030, more than 50% of all newly registered vehicles will be electric, triggering a huge demand for EV charging solutions. This will, in turn, create a multi-billion dollar business.
Where Impactful Visioning Comes In
Robert Ogilvie, Jeffrey McNally
When cultivating great innovation teams, impactful visioning addresses the central need for purpose, the strategic foresight for leveraging emotional intelligence, the balancing of goals and mission, and mindfully organizing the teams. This Advisor explores the role of impactful visioning on innovation teams.
Implementing Sustainability Initiatives with an Architectural Approach
Mike Rosen, Tamar Krichevsky, Harsh Sharma
Understanding what the transition to sustainability means for the organization is as important in the overall transition as developing the list of what to do. In this Advisor, we explore how leveraging an architectural approach for the initiative begins with understanding the business motivation and translating the motivation into new business and operating models, strategies, objectives, and tactics. The next step is to understand how the newly articulated models, goals, tactics, and so on, fit in the overall enterprise. This is one place that an architect’s big-picture view is invaluable.
What to Look for in an Enterprise Architect
Balaji Prasad
This Advisor considers a few qualities that an enterprise architect must have. The goal is to provide a starting point for using the framework of architecture quality attributes to understand desirable traits in an architect.
Cognitive Systems & IPA: Technology & Trends
Curt Hall
According to findings from Cutter Consortium’s recent survey on intelligent process automation (IPA) in the enterprise, a fairly high amount of interest exists among end-user organizations for using cognitive systems in their IPA efforts, with approximately one-third indicating they would like to do so. In this Advisor, we take a closer look at cognitive computing systems and how their use can support organizations' process automation efforts.
Design for Technology Accessibility on the Front End — Always
Meena Das
Tech accessibility is best served when there is inclusive design for people with disabilities (PWD) that starts from the design/user research phase and carries through the software development stage to the marketing cycle. When accessibility has not been embedded in the DevOps process, it shows.
Designing Software Structures in Hyperliminal Spaces
Barry M O'Reilly
Software systems are different. We know this because we make a mess of them all the time. If airplanes and flights had the same failure rates as software, there would be no aviation industry. Why they are different isn’t a question many have taken the time to ask. The answer to this lies first in understanding uncertainty.
Gain Advantage with Strategy-Aligned Portfolio Management
Brian Seitz
Portfolio management is a valuable capability for the execution of corporate strategy. However, results often fail to meet expectations. But overcoming overoptimistic expectations and poor execution is less challenging with a realistic roadmap and framework. To be truly effective, portfolio management should be an extension and execution of corporate strategy, as is explored in this Advisor.
Defining Business Architecture Information Maps
William Ulrich
Some people might argue that their data architecture team has defined their data. This may be true, but even in the best of cases, existing data definitions rarely reflect the breadth, clarity, and rationalized business perspectives required to fully represent information as it is viewed by the business as a whole. But there is a discipline that if applied properly can help.
When Good Data Goes Bad, Part III
Barry Devlin
The potential of information — for good or for ill — far exceeds that of mere data. This Advisor explores how we need to change our focus from data to information in order to see more clearly why and how our IT industry often colludes in the demise of truth and supports the spread of disinformation.
Tales from the Technology Crypt
Lou Mazzucchelli
A 10-month timeline, the biggest budget the company ever committed to a "programming project," and a guy who is in way over his head. Sounds like the perfect IT horror story (spoiler alert: our hero and his project survive!)
Low-Code/No-Code-Enabled Citizen Developers: A Q&A
Greg Smith, Michael Papadopoulos
A recent webinar explored how "citizen developers" can use "low-code/no-code" (LC/NC) solutions with relatively low learning curves to help their organizations expand their digital capabilities and grow the business. This Advisor shares some of the answers to questions participants asked about LC/NC solutions.
Analytics Value Now! — An Introduction
Dave Cherry
When deriving value from an analytics initiative, it is important to consider context, analytics maturity, the risk/value proposition, and the culture of your organization. This issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal, with Guest Editor Dave Cherry, provides strategies and insight to amplify analytics value.
Architect for “Real-Ability”
Marc Gewertz
In much the same way ”design-for-producibility” is key to successful hardware production, “architect-for-real-ability” is key to capability realization. Everyone involved from the beginning in the specification, development, and operation of a capability needs to perform as, an organized, integrated team.
Computer Vision and Imaging in the Insurance Sector
Curt Hall
Computer vision and imaging technology is having a considerable impact in the insurance industry. A number of developments are driving this trend. From a product/market perspective, the growing availability of cloud platforms and services — including commercial computer vision and imaging applications tailored for specific insurance use cases — has made the technology more practical for insurers to implement. This Advisor explores the opportunities, benefits and applications of AI and computer vision in the insurance sector.
The Keys to Achieving Trust in AI
Claude Baudoin, Clayton Pummill
If the ultimate goal of artificial intelligence (AI) is to efficiently replicate and exceed human thought for the good of humanity, then building trust requires that AI incorporate the multitude of sound human decision capabilities. Just reading this statement makes it clear that the journey toward AI ethics is no easy road.
Ingredients for Enterprise Agility, Part V: Coaching Transformational Change
Jon Ward
The role of an Agile coach is not to do the organizational change, but to facilitate it. More explicitly, the coach’s role is to enable the organization to change itself. This Advisor explores the role of the Agile Coach in supporting and enabling enterprise agility.
3 Essential Technologies in Enterprise IPA Initiatives
Curt Hall
In this Advisor, we explore three critical technologies that organizations are interested in using to support their enterprise IPA initiatives: natural language processing (NLP), intelligent virtual assistants/smartbots, and intelligent optical character recognition (iOCR). This data is based on a survey recently conducted by Cutter Consortium of how organizations are adopting or planning to adopt IPA.
Strategy Starts with Troubleshooting
Scott Whitmire
As industries have become completely unpredictable, modern strategic planning requires distinct skills to determine competitive environments. This Advisor explores how troubleshooting can help you identify the competitive environment for your industry, how strategy is the design of your solution, and how your enterprise is the implementation of that solution.
Enhancing Education with AI
Aswani Kumar Cherukuri, Annapurna Jonnalagadda, San Murugesan
In this Advisor, we discuss how AI impacts the teaching and learning experience and the quality of education. We also briefly explore a number of AI technologies that are being applied in education to achieve these advances.
Driving Across the Software Abyss: EV + AI = Unmanageable Complexity
Robert Charette
OEMs have recognized that their current approaches of outsourcing the requisite software and electronics to suppliers and then integrating them in ICE vehicles is not workable for EVs. What's the solution?