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 Lineout — A Contextual Alternative to Scrum: A Q&A
Jon Ward
In a recent webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Jon Ward introduced an agile approach that uses behavioral theory, lean principles and agile wisdom to help teams create high-value solutions quickly. This Advisor shares the Q&A session that followed. Perhaps Jon's advice will spark some new ideas on how your organization can leverage Agile Lineout practices for team success.
Insights from Study Help Maximize Business Architects’ Strengths
Whynde Kuehn
This Advisor examines the findings of a Business Architecture Strengths Study from a Clifton Strengths assessment and provides a few recommendations to leverage the unique abilities of business architecture within our organizations.
The Enterprise Architect as Troubleshooter
Scott Whitmire
Every change effort requires a certain amount of troubleshooting to determine what processes and capabilities need to be altered to meet new business goals. Yet, far too little attention has been given to the skill of troubleshooting. This Advisor explores troubleshooting as a skill and a process and discusses how to apply it to enterprise architecture to identify appropriate starting points for change initiatives.
The Role of IT in Citizen Development
Dave Garrett, Ian Duncan
In the age of transformation, advances in artificial intelligence are rapidly disconnecting end users from the complexity of the technology they use. The result is a world where we can do many things without having to understand how they work. For example, Amazon’s Alexa lets users ask complicated questions using natural language input and receive immediate answers.
Challenges to Low-Code Adoption
Jacek Chmiel
With a new generation of cloud-enabled low-code tools, we can combine the simplicity and friendliness of easy-to-use development environments with the ability to deploy distributed business applications. This Advisor addresses some of the key arguments against low-code adoption.
The Importance of a Well-Defined Business Vocabulary
William Ulrich
Many organizations lack a well-defined, rationalized business vocabulary as a basis for information management. As a result, the data they rely on results in many business challenges, as discussed in this Advisor.
Enforcing Compliance as Code
Adam Swenson
Controls are only as good as their ability to be enforced. This Advisor reviews the architecture and enforcement mechanisms used to steer developers, DevOps, and infrastructure engineering staff through the use of compliance-as-code controls.
Supporting Digital Twins with Edge Computing
Sameer Kher
Cloud computing, with its scalability and relatively low cost, has traditionally been the technology environment of choice for supporting digital twins. Today, edge computing has emerged as a promising alternative. This Advisor explores the benefits of edge computing over cloud computing.
The Implications of a Transformation
Matt Ganis
A digital transformation is no less than a change in an organization’s activities, business processes, competencies, and models that allows it to fully leverage the opportunities of current and future emerging digital technologies. The effort, expense, and pain involved with this type of change may lead some to question the necessity.
On the Path to Achieve the Benefits of Agile
Cheryl Crupi
In the course of “going Agile,” you will eliminate old processes, practices, and mindsets. This Advisor offers keen advice on how to avoid marginalizing the people who are experts in the previous way of working. Success depends on everyone in your organization understanding the vision, the why, and the road to get there.
Predictive Analytics/ML and RPA High on Enterprise IPA Initiative List
Curt Hall
In a recent survey, Cutter Consortium looked into the technologies that companies are interested in using to support their intelligent process automation (IPA) initiatives. In this Advisor, we take a closer look at the top two: predictive analytics/machine learning (ML) and robotic process automation (RPA).
Architecting with Humility
Balaji Prasad
Architecting over time is even more challenging than architecting over space. Time is not just one more dimension. Time brings relative unknowns that make it difficult, even impossible, to define requirements in advance. How do we build for a universe that we cannot see?
Alleviating Bias in AI Systems with Data Profiling and Synthetic Data Sets
Curt Hall
Neural networks and other machine learning (ML) model development typically requires large amounts of data for training and testing purposes. Because much of this data is historical, there is the chance that the artificial intelligence (AI) models could learn existing prejudices pertaining to gender, race, age, sexual orientation, and other biases. This Advisor explores these and other issues around data that can also contribute to biases and inaccuracies in ML algorithms.
Quantum Software Engineering Challenges
Mario Piattini
Despite recent advances in quantum programming tools, there are two major challenges facing quantum software developers. First, there is an understandable fear of betting on a platform or language that ends up being discontinued. Second, quantum computer scientists need to understand current software engineering principles and techniques, or they will spend too much time reinventing the wheel.
Women in Leadership: Challenges and Expectations
Areej Khataybih
In this interview, transformational coach Areej Khataybih offers a psychological perspective on women leaders and what contributes to their success and their challenges. She highlights the challenges that come from internal obstacles and beliefs of not being good enough and the battle of competing with male counterparts and, in the process, denying women’s full selves, the emotional and the logical.
Quantum Computing: Gaining Speed Qubit by Qubit — An Introduction
San Murugesan
The quantum computing race is already under way. Although still a nebulous concept to many IT professionals and business executives, it’s time to examine its near- and long-term potential by placing it on strategic business and IT roadmaps. The Advisor explores the progress made in quantum computing, as well as the opportunities, disruptive potential, and challenges the technology brings.
Roadmap for Effective Portfolio Management
Brian Seitz
What are the steps in creating a successful portfolio management practice? This Advisor explores how to establish governance, conduct a maturity assessment, and take a cyclical approach to operating a practice. It also provides important points to keep in mind regarding each stage of the roadmap.
When Good Data Goes Bad, Part II
Barry Devlin
In Part I of this Advisor series, I argued that data doesn’t “go bad” in the colloquial use of that phrase; rather, it is adulterated by the addition of dubious intent on the part of its collectors and/or users. That intent usually takes the form of reusing or repurposing data already collected to drive a different goal than that for which it was originally gathered. Here in Part II, we look at a couple of examples of these practices.
Your Org Chart Doesn’t Show What You Think It Shows!
Jutta Eckstein, John Buck
This Advisor asserts that there is no “right” org chart for depicting an organization’s structure. There are only charts fulfilling different purposes, and you need to treat them within the constraints of that purpose.
Culture Crushes Digital Transformation
Sheila Cox
Most organizations launch digital transformation initiatives only to watch them die a long, slow, painful, and expensive death. Many leaders mistakenly believe that implementing new technologies will change their culture. In fact, organizational cultures are often quite strong and intransigent. When the culture abhors risk-taking, ambitious company-wide endeavors cannot survive.
An Architectural Approach to Sustainability: Why Do It?
Mike Rosen, Tamar Krichevsky, Harsh Sharma
In this Advisor, we identify the reasons, motivations, and requirements of an organization aiming to achieve sustainability and how that would be facilitated via an architectural approach.
“There Is No Spoon” — The Path to Residuality Theory: A Collection
Barry M O'Reilly
This collection of articles written by Cutter Senior Consultant Barry O'Reilly follows his journey as he strives to redefine the practice of software architecture as the bridge between complexity science and systems engineering, and reframe the decision-making role of the architect as the careful navigation of uncertainty.
How AI and ML Are Optimizing Procurement
Curt Hall
Various AI technologies, including ML, predictive analytics, NLP, and image recognition, are helping to reshape procurement operations. These developments are most apparent in the emergence of AI-powered cloud procurement platforms. This Advisor provides some example use cases of how AI is now utilized to automate and optimize procurement activities.
Culture Really Matters
Steve McMenamin, Tom DeMarco, Peter Hruschka, Tim Lister, James Robertson, Suzanne Robertson
The connections between culture and performance are complex, reciprocal, and anything but obvious. But you need to care about them. The more you care about performance, the more you need to care about culture.
The 3 Lies of Maximization
Mark Greville
In this Advisor, the author asserts that March's decision making model, maximization, is based on three foundational lies, starting with the idea of the "rational decision maker."