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.
Can You Hear Me Now? NL and Speech Solutions for CX and Support
Curt Hall
As a result of the pandemic, we are witnessing increasing interest by organizations for utilizing natural language processing and speech recognition solutions targeted at customer engagement and support — particularly in the form of smartbots, intelligent assistants, conversational computing, and other applications designed to automate customer requests and assist human agents with contact/call center operations. In this Advisor, we examine some of the types of NLP and speech solutions available to organizations and consider some of the issues to keep in mind when it comes to employing such offerings.
When Life Gives You Lemons...
Paul Clermont
As of this writing, we have no firm idea of the human and economic toll to expect from the COVID-19 pandemic or how long painful countermeasures will be necessary. A crisis? For sure. Let’s not waste it; let’s learn from it. Our forced adaptation to a totally unfamiliar world can and should cause us to critically examine assumptions about how we live and work and conduct business. There is a broad spectrum of possibilities, but this Advisor focuses on where IT plays a major role.
Lessons in Decision Making from Wartime Medicine
Paidi O'Raghallaigh, Frederic Adam
For this Advisor, we analyzed reports from around the globe to point to dramatic changes in how leaders are making decisions to respond to the crisis of COVID-19. We expect that some of these changes are likely to become part of the “next normal” for decision making in complex environments.
Risk Management: From “Measure and Manage” to “Sense and Respond”
Tom Teixeira
The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the risk landscape for businesses around the globe. Enterprises are learning firsthand whether the business resilience and business continuity plans they put in place are proving successful or not. In light of this crisis, it’s crucial now more than ever to reevaluate your risk management process and ensure you are well prepared for what may lie ahead. As an executive, this involves adapting your leadership and facing the current crisis head-on with a proactive approach to risk management.
From Many Models to One
Christian Kaul, Lars Rönnbäck
Many organizations today struggle with a strong disconnect between their business model and their IT systems, data distributed over a large number of nonintegrated IT systems, manual interfaces between incompatible applications, or difficulties with EU GDPR compliance. We can trace most, if not all, of these issues back to an abundance of unspecific, inflexible, and nonaligned data models underlying the applications these organizations use to conduct their business. Often, these data models have been developed with insufficient business involvement and in isolation from each other — or have been purchased from vendors with little concern for the actual needs of the organization. In this Advisor, we briefly describe the origins of some of these issues.
Data Architecture — The Warehouse Lives On
Barry Devlin
In my short series of Data Architecture Advisors, “Data Architecture — Containing the Lakehouse,” and “Data Architecture — Out of the Lakehouse, Into the Lake,” I first introduced the newcomer on the block — the data lakehouse — and then discussed the life of one of its parents, the data lake. What about the other parent, you may ask. You may have heard that it’s dead. To paraphrase Mark Twain’s alleged riposte: “reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.”
Managing Remote Workers in the Time of Coronavirus
Tom Bragg
“How can I tell that they’re working if I can’t see them?” It is a common complaint, based on a centuries-old style of working that we now need to move past. My rejoinder usually is, “When you CAN see them, how do you know they’re not shopping Amazon or playing solitaire?” But, in the days of unplanned, unusual work from home (WFH), this question deserves a closer look. In this Advisor, I’ll make use of decades of remote working, and managing remote workers, in the IT industry, but these same principles apply to many kinds of work.
Meeting CX Implementation Needs
Curt Hall
One of the primary issues impeding organizations from carrying out their customer experience (CX) management initiatives is a lack of CX professionals within the organization. So how are organizations meeting or planning to meet their CX implementation needs? This Advisor provides some answers.
Finding the “Secret Sauce” in Data Architecture Management
Sagar Gole, Vidyasagar Uddagiri
Enterprises must manage their data systems to overcome challenges and leverage the opportunities and benefits of digital transformation. The “secret sauce” to achieving this lies in a practical approach that can help enterprises transition from their current state to the desired state in which they are ready for the digital era and beyond.
Project MiPasa: Integrating, Verifying, and Sharing Data for Early COVID-19 Detection
Curt Hall
“MiPasa” is an important new blockchain project to assist healthcare providers, government health agencies, public health departments, universities, and other organizations manage and analyze COVID-19 data. MiPasa is a collaboration between many of the world's major health organizations, tech companies, and research institutions to build a blockchain-based, open, “global-scale control and communication system” to facilitate fast and early detection of COVID-19 carriers and infection hotspots via accelerated information sharing among individuals, authorities, and health institutions.
Purposeful “Self-Disruption” in the Time of a Pandemic
Gustav Toppenberg
As the world comes to terms with this “new normal,” it is easy to resort to a mindset of how things will be materially different following this worldwide management and, ultimately, recovery from a significant disruption to how we live our lives. As executive technology leaders, we have a choice to make about how we react to this disruption and how we prepare for future disruptions from a data and digital technology platforms standpoint.
DevSecOps Red Flags: Avoid These Implementation Mistakes
Sridhar Jayaraman
Too many companies rely on a solo approach to handle data security management. With one team working on getting data software out as quickly as possible and another team tasked with testing software and probing system vulnerabilities (tasks that require patience and discipline, and that can’t be rushed), too often the result is missed deadlines, missed opportunities, and missed outcomes.
Want Happy Customers? Make Your Employees Happy — An Introduction
Robert Scott
While often neglected, initiatives aimed at improving the employee experience can have an immediate and positive impact on customer satisfaction and, ultimately, the bottom line. Customer experiences do not just happen; they are the direct results of activities by the employees with whom customers come in contact. What can companies do to increase employee engagement in order to increase customer satisfaction and, ultimately, business results?
Digital Shift and EA: What Does It Take?
Samuli Pekkola, Maija Ylinen
Digitalization may be defined as using IT to improve the performance of people in organizations. These improvements may take place, for example, in business operations, the customer interface, employee experience, informed decision making, or in the form of new business models, products, and services. The digitalization of business operations involves improved business processes, cost savings, and faster lead times.
Blockchain’s Value Proposition
Pavankumar Mulgund, Ankit Sharma, Adarsh Srivastava, Lavlin Agrawal
The business value of blockchain technologies emerges in the form of business metrics, such as transaction efficiency, cost savings, and reduction of fraudulent activities, among others. In this Advisor, we explore some of the main drivers of value and potential applications beyond cryptocurrencies.
Separating Myth from Reality in Software Projects
Danette McGilvray, Masha Bykin
Historically, many projects concentrated their efforts on people, process, and technology. However, a vast amount of projects still fail to fully address the data and information aspects of their efforts. Many projects have failed due to this oversight, while others have left a wake of data quality issues that put long-term burdens on business processes and subsequent projects. It is useful to understand some of the common yet erroneous beliefs associated with projects. Believing such myths has caused many projects to fail because project teams did not account for the reality in their plans and budget. In this Advisor, we examine some of these myths and realities, along with their solutions.
Your Path to BaaS: To Build or Buy?
Timothy Virtue
Adoption of innovative business models is essential for new market entrants. In the build-versus-buy debate, I vote for buy, but it’s important that the BaaS provider be a trusted partner, not simply a commodity supplier.
Grooming the Path to Data Governance and Quality
Danette McGilvray, Masha Bykin
When effective data governance and quality processes are paired with Agile methodologies, data definitions and quality measures can help produce clear and complete user stories.
Successful Digital Transformation: Q&A with Johan Treutiger
Johan Treutiger
In the Cutter Consortium on-demand webinar “4 Key Questions: What You Need to Consider for Successful Digital Transformation,” Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Johan Treutiger addresses four key questions over four key transformational areas your organization should consider to successfully achieve a digital transformation. In this Advisor, we share four questions asked at the end of the webinar that may help you in your transformation efforts.
Service Providers Need a Reality Check
Aluru Chandra
In this Advisor, we examine the first two levels of a maturity continuum — customer dissassifaction and customer satisfaction — and discuss the associated behaviors on the part of the service provider.
Use a Common Language to Break Down Silos
Christian Kaul, Lars Rönnbäck
The process of continuous siloization found in many organizations, and in almost all organizations above a certain size, means that the data that employees need to do their work is distributed over a large number of nonintegrated IT systems within different intracompany jurisdictions. We’ve come to the realization that the solution could be to put data modeling front and center. It just has to be done a bit differently than it has been done in the past.
Some Tools in the Toolbox: RPA, IPA, and COVID-19
Curt Hall
Hospitals, government agencies, and other organizations are struggling with process management and information processing issues that have been compounded by the novel coronavirus pandemic. They are turning to RPA and AI-based solutions — including smartbots and intelligent virtual assistants — to attempt to mitigate such concerns. From a market perspective, industry providers are moving rapidly to meet their needs, including offering solutions that hospitals and other organizations responding to the contagion can license for free. This Advisor explores some of the trends we are seeing to address these concerns.
Listen Up: The “Soft” Side of Remote Work Can Work
David Coleman
Although the technology for remote working (collaborative) has been around for 30 years, the adoption rate has been slow but steady. Now, all of a sudden, the adoption rate has shot up to almost 100%, as just about all nonessential industries are working remotely to help flatten the COVID-19 infection curve. This rapid adoption of remote working technologies has had a number of challenges.
An Open Blockchain Architecture to Monitor and Manage COVID-19 Patients
Claudio Lima
COVID-19 is spreading at fast speed, and time is of the essence to share, coordinate, and take actions to mitigate pandemic propagation. Current centralized database solutions solve part of the problem, but require an overarching and time-consuming coordination between multiple government and health authorities, including the entire chain of decision makers to collect test data, analyze/diagnostic, register, monitor, and enforce regulations and policies to isolate and monitor COVID-19 cases. Blockchain DLT technology solves the coordination challenges of broken healthcare centralized data lake silos, creating an open, trusted, immutable, and decentralized data architecture framework to speed up a multi-party, end-to-end COVID-19 data-sharing coordination process, while preserving patients’ data privacy.
COVID-19: How Are Workforces Evolving Through It?
Kaushik Dutta
COVID-19 has already had a massive impact on all our lives and is on track to continue doing so for some time. In this situation, technology is playing an increasing role in moving life and business forward. This will all have long-term, and potentially positive, impacts on society and how we run our lives.