IT service leaders are under constant pressure to deliver reliable and available services within the budgetary constraints of the business. They look for opportunities to optimize their support model, extracting repetitive, nonvalued inefficiencies and effort that inflate support costs. The shift-left service strategy focuses on moving issue resolution and request fulfillment to the lowest cost level in the tiered-model service organization, with a focus on "one and done" — providing the internal customer with resolution at the service desk (Level 1) or self-service portal (Level 0).

Enterprises and organizations are hybrid "sociotechnical" systems of people, along with the things made by people. They consist of complex collections of physical things, software things, and the mental states of human minds.

It is interesting to explore some ideas from knowledge management (KM) on how people and organizations respond when faced with new knowledge or ideas. Studies that look at how innovations diffuse within an enterprise suggest that the process follows four simple steps. Here are a couple KM ideas to help gauge progress along these four steps.

The most important development I see taking place in 2016 (and beyond) concerning analytics and decision support is the growing commercialization of cognitive systems. Cognitive systems are now having an impact on the consumer and the enterprise worlds by changing the way data is analyzed, and the way that people interact with computers.

A train is only as good as its fastest carriage. Agile can claim to have increased the speed and quality of solutions development through the Agile Manifesto, the Agile principles, and the many popular Agile practices (e.g., user stories, daily standups, and the wall). However, an important discovery by many of us in practice is that faster and higher-quality development in itself is not enough. In fact, faster time to development can lead to problems.

While theoretical discussions of decisions involving IT-related ethics are interesting, this past year highlighted the real effects of ignoring IT ethics in business decisions.

The prevalence of smartphones and other mobile devices is dramatically transforming how healthcare is delivered to consumers and how medicine is practiced in general. Consumers are increasingly using their mobile devices to arrange for a healthcare professional to come to their home, or to engage in a virtual doctor visit via real-time video consultation. Healthcare practitioners are employing mobile devices to assist them with various practices, ranging from collaborating with colleagues to remotely monitoring patients.

I have seen — and am sure that many of you have, as well — architecture cartoons, cost-benefit numbers, and trade-off-matrices that look pretty but lack the integrity that we need from these artifacts. This is not to say that these representations do not hold potential. They do, if we are able to tease out the signal from the noise, and if we are able to bring out the nuances related to where on the fact-to-fiction spectrum a particular data point lies.

Emerging technologies continue to challenge IT as the pace of innovation and introduction of disruptive new platforms continues to accelerate. We are on the verge of huge changes across every area of technology and society. Dominant themes include mobility, interconnection, agility, and global participation. The technologies that support these trends involve Cloud computing, artificial intelligence, big data, the Internet of Things (IoT), mobility, modularization, Internet connectivity, and the digitization of everything.

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the most intriguing articles published by the Agile Product Management & Software Engineering Excellence practice this year for today's Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients and those that created controversy among Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows.

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Business Technology & Digital Transformation Strategies practice this year for today's Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients and those that created controversy among Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows.

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Business & Enterprise Architecture practice for today's Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members. Your questions and comments not only make it possible to create lists like this, they help focus Cutter's Senior Consultants' research on the areas that are most important to organizations like yours. So please keep your feedback coming.

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Cutter IT Journal this year for today's Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients and those that created controversy among Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows. Your questions and comments don't only make it possible to create lists like this — they help focus Cutter's Senior Consultants' research on the areas that are most important to organizations like yours.

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Data Analytics & Digital Technologies practice this year for today's Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients and those that created controversy among Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows.

In this series of Advisors, we share a conversation among Cutter colleagues of the Agile Product Management & Software Engineering Excellence practice. In this installment, Practice Director Tom Grant shares his thoughts on Agile frameworks.

Question leadership is a question-based management principle not a bumper sticker. Most brilliant, innovative leaders know that leading by asking questions is a more powerful leadership style than just having the “right” answers, and gets you not only better business and organizational outcomes, but also more widespread employee — and customer and stakeholder — commitment. Moreover, asking the “right” questions, in the right order, communicates the goals you want to achieve.

Jelly molds come in all shapes and sizes. You can get ones in the shape of a rabbit, pig, cat, or butterfly, and dinosaurs are really popular. In addition to animal shapes, there are airplanes, castles, or a traditional pudding shaped–mold. But the key thing about jelly molds is that every time we pour jelly into the mold, it will produce the same shape. And that is true of architectural jelly molds as well; they force outputs into a specific shape or pattern. If we look at enterprise architecture today, there are a small number of jelly mold styles that get used over and over again.

With this issue of Cutter IT Journal, we aim to bring more perspective to the question of how to digitally transform. All the contributing authors agree that digital transformation will be profoundly complex, but this complexity does not prevent them from bringing useful perspectives to the table and suggesting approaches for how to frame and launch transformation. This issue does not glorify startups, big-bang disruption, or Silicon Valley; it does, however, investigate what lessons incumbents can take from digital natives. It also broadens the scope to include historical framing of the challenge, as well as the authors' rich experience and expertise in working with incumbent organizations.

Last week, IBM launched the Watson Internet of Things (IoT) business unit. The goal: apply the natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and other advanced analytic techniques of its Watson cognitive computing platform to capitalize on helping clients develop IoT applications tailored to specific industries and applications. The initial focus will be on automotive, electronics, healthcare, insurance, and industrial manufacturing.

Tomorrow's problems and the innovation needed to solve them are likely to require multiple disciplines. One person with multiple domains of knowledge becomes increasingly valuable. 

While Agile is pretty mainstream by now in Web and app development, it is still a major challenge in system design, where software plays only a part of the game, although that piece is steadily increasing. Whether we're talking about manufacturers of cars, chips, or medical devices, they all need to respond to the increasing pace in the market. Only one or two decades ago, these industries were content with product cycles of three to five years. Today, some chip manufacturers are capable of delivering a new version of their product every second month, causing excitement for their customers and despair for their competitors.

At the heart of the psychological contract is a philosophy — not a process, tool, or formula. This philosophy reflects the contract’s deeply significant, changing, and dynamic nature. It is the spirit of the agreement.

Our survey findings strongly suggest that the security solutions providers are going to have to develop new technologies and methods to support IoT applications. This includes better threat detection and prevention technologies for embedding within the connected devices themselves as well as for deploying within the networks and platforms intended to manage them and all the data they generate.

A method is essentially a pattern. Just as a design pattern abstracts and encapsulates knowledge of many experts which, in turn, can help fast track new designs, similarly a method provides guidance for new initiatives based on collective past experiences. Agile as a method (notably Scrum, but also other methods under the Agile umbrella such as XP) brings to us the experiences of practitioners who discovered that visibility, honesty, cross-functionality, and iterations can help a software project immensely.

One of the descriptions of EA often heard is that it provides a bridge between strategy and implementation. Fair enough, but what does that actually mean?