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.

Reducing Methane: Cutting-Edge Developments in the Fossil Fuel Sector

Curt Hall
In Part III of this Advisor series on reducing methane emissions, we uncover new developments for mitigating methane in the fossil fuel sector.

Digital Twin Technology: Enabling Transformation in the Defense Industry

Alexander Weber
This Advisor discusses the use of digital twins in radar systems and how this technology enables the digital transformation of the defense industry. This is a good example of using digital twins to simulate products that are costly to build (especially if they are built incorrectly) and their use in addressing compliance requirements.

Equity & Equality Start with the Right Workplace Culture

Eli Doster
Eli Doster shares that having a broken culture was not only terrible for staff at his company, it was also costly and had a negative impact on business. Five years ago, the company lacked values employees could believe in, which affected their decisions and actions. Furthermore, the company lacked “diversity of cultures, ethnicity, and perspective.”

How Vertical Farming Can Contribute to Biodiversity: 3 Guiding Principles

Stefania Pizzirani, Robert Newell, Alesandros Glaros, Saeed Rahman, Lenore Newman
Food systems are highly interlinked, from production to distribution to consumption, and there are significant social, cultural, economic, environmental, and political factors that interact with those processes. Understanding how vertical agriculture fits within these larger food systems is critical to advancing more sustainable food production. This Advisor presents three guiding principles for how vertical agriculture businesses can contribute to biodiversity conservation.

Next-Level Banking with Modular Architecture

Daniel Gozman, Jonas Hedman
Modular architecture allows banks to build their value propositions into services, functionalities, and raw data while enabling new distribution and service creation. This Advisor describes a two-dimensional framework that shows how modular architecture enables four distinct roles (integrator, producer, distributor, and platform) to emerge and revolutionize traditional banking.

The Datapreneurs: A Must-Read for CIOs on Their Data Technology Journey

Myles Suer

The recently published book The Datapreneurs is an unusual read. Author Bob Muglia, a former Microsoft executive, former President of Snowflake, and a venture investor, says his new book is “part memoir and part history of the people and technologies that made the data analytics era possible.” And I would add, it is part what people in futures research call a “reference projection.” In this case, it is a reference projection for data, analytics, humanity, and artificial intelligence (AI).


How European Offshore Wind Farm Expansion Impacts Biodiversity

Rafael Sardá
This Advisor examines the potential of offshore wind farms and the challenges of balancing climate change mitigation with biodiversity protection goals. Significant advances in technology and expanded government support have led to increased development of offshore wind farms, but large-scale renewable energy projects should be planned and implemented with biodiversity considerations embedded, so that one environmental goal is not sacrificed for another.

Solving Property & Real Estate Challenges with Digital Twins for Places

Colin Dominish
The benefits of digital twins have been much debated since they first appeared in the space industry in the late 20th century. Fast adoption and benefits flowed in some industries, but many are still questioning their value, including the property and real estate industry. This Advisor looks at how digital twins for places can solve some significant challenges that exist in property and real estate.

Developing Successful Biodiversity-Focused Strategies with Mini-Publics

Simon Pek, Nicholas Poggioli
Why should business leaders develop strategies focused on biodiversity? First, businesses rely on ecosystems to produce and reproduce the variety of life that enables economic and social systems. Second, biodiversity decline (or collapse) poses reputation risks to businesses, and business leaders must anticipate and mitigate the risk of being targeted by activists. Third, life on Earth has inherent value that managers should help preserve rather than destroy. As we explore in this Advisor, biodiversity mini-publics can help managers successfully engage on all three issues.

The Biodiversity Blind Spot in the Circular Economy

Paul Dewick, Joseph Sarkis
Concerns have been raised about wider environmental and social sustainability factors being neglected in circular economy (CE)-related thinking. As we explore in this Advisor, one of these crucial blind spots relates to biodiversity.

Transforming Banks with a Systems Engineering Approach

Maik Dehnert
Currently, most of the digital transformation work taking place in banks is still managed heuristically. We argue that banks (and indeed companies in every industry) should instead pursue a systematic digital transformation using systems engineering principles. Using this approach, banks can look at value creation in a more goal-oriented manner. This will allow them to successfully transform their business models by integrating stakeholder goals and technologies across an extended partner ecosystem. Of course, this methodology must be underpinned by management optimization concepts.

What’s Behind the Push for Diversity?

David Lee
Over the last four decades, there has been a proliferation of corporate diversity policies. By one estimate, more than 95% of organizations with more than 1,000 employees have some sort of diversity program. Generally, this push toward diversity has largely been prompted by a few interwoven factors. This Advisor takes a closer look at three of those factors.

Reducing Methane: New Developments in Waste Management & Recycling

Curt Hall
In Part II of this Advisor series on reducing methane, we examine several developments designed to help reduce methane emissions originating from waste in landfills.

Generative AI & the Future of Content Creation

Aswani Kumar Cherukuri, Mukul Patnaik, Sudhir Patnaik
This Advisor looks at new generative AI applications and the content they produce. It also explores the paradigm shift created by generative AI as well as its impact on the creative ecosystem.

The Promise & Risks of Generative AI: What Do CIOs Think?

Myles Suer
Recently, Cutter contributor and data business leader Myles Suer asked CIOs some important questions regarding generative AI. This Advisor shares some insights gleaned from those conversations.

Boosting Biodiversity Action with a Refreshed Vocabulary

Anna Heikkinen, Ari Jokinen, Johanna Kujala
Businesses control substantial resources and knowledge that can, and must, be harnessed for biodiversity action. Business’s response to biodiversity decline has the power to accelerate activities across our societies or, through inaction, hamper societal responses. This Advisor suggests that new phrases are needed to catalyze this biodiversity action. The term “nature-based stakeholder engagement” is discussed in this article as a potential candidate, as it connects two powerful notions.

Opportunities for XAI in the Financial Sector

Cigdem Gurgur
Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is becoming a critical component of operations undertaken in the financial industry. It stems from the growing sophistication of state-of-the-art AI models and the desire for them to be deployed in a safe, understandable manner. Responsible artificial intelligence (RAI) principles ensure that machine learning technology is applied in a transparent way while safeguarding the interest of each player in the financial ecosystem. Not surprisingly, banking and financial services regulators have shown an interest in adopting XAI and RAI techniques to help them meet the need for model governance, operational servicing, and compliance in the digital world.

Silicon Valley Bank: When It Comes to Risk, We’ve Been Here Before

Robert Charette
Amid the 2008 US housing market debacle, I offered some insight into how ineffective risk-mitigation efforts contributed to the financial contagion that spread across the globe. Given the latest banking crisis involving SVB, it might be useful to revisit some of those ideas.

Nature & Business: An Intimate, and Important, Connection

Eva Zabey, Erin Billman
Business won’t function if nature continues to decline. Resources like water, soil, food, fiber, and minerals, and ecosystem services like crop pollination, water filtration, and climate regulation all contribute to business success and human livelihoods. Take these away, and companies will cease to function effectively. The opposite is also true. When harnessed responsibly, natural abundance and regenerative natural systems translate into productive growth, both for companies and the communities they serve. Business and finance, therefore, have a critical role to play in protecting and restoring nature.

Expanding the Talent Pool in the Tech Sector

Matthew Walsh
In this Advisor, Matthew Walsh explores the results of in-depth research conducted to identify the inequities that women of color experience in the technology industry. If employers can tap into a skills-similar, tech-eligible workforce revealed by the Equation for Equality, there would be nearly 250,000 more women of color in tech jobs today, double the number currently in tech.

Study: Communication Plays a Vital Role in IT Project Success

Shasheela Devi Karuppiah, Ezuria Nadzri, Govindan Marthandan
We conducted an empirical study in Malaysia with IT practitioners and confirmed that communication plays a vital role in project success. Our study probed the influence of five communication characteristics: content, method, velocity, process, and frequency, and how they can propel a team toward success. With the exception of frequency, the findings showed that the remaining characteristics influenced project success.

Reducing Methane: New Developments in the Agriculture Sector

Curt Hall
This two-part Advisor series examines new developments in methane reduction. Here in Part I, we look at efforts to reduce methane emissions in agriculture, the largest industry contributor (from human-related activities) to methane in the atmosphere.

The Technology Agora: A Space for Collaborative Innovation in Banking

Antonios Kaniadakis
In this Advisor, we argue that disruption in banking is not being driven by technological achievements like artificial intelligence, decentralized platforms, or mobile computing. Rather, changes are the result of: (1) technology commoditization and (2) industry actors pursuing strategic interests and repositioning themselves within the sector as disruptors, innovators, and fashion-setters. Envisioning a technology agora where technological artifacts are developed and commoditized and interested parties exercise influence over innovation choices, we will see that fintechs and banks are not so much competing with each other as they are collaborating.

Flexible Work Is No Longer Just a Perk

Tony Ponton

In a previous Advisor, I talked about asynchronous-powered workplaces being both the now and the future of remote/hybrid companies’ success. In this Advisor, I talk about another element that complements this and cannot be understated: flexibility.


Tackling Business Biodiversity Challenges with Science

Jessica Deichmann, María José Andrade Núñez, Alfonso Alonso, Francisco Dallmeier, Tremaine Gregory, Reynaldo Linares Palomino, Karim Ledesma, Ximena Velez, Anna Feistner
The case study presented in this Advisor demonstrates the scientific approach to solutions for business biodiversity challenges and highlights how the resulting evidence can be channeled into nature positive management actions.