At around 16 pages, Executive Reports offer a deep, strategic look into a cutting edge issue, and serve as foundations to developing your own approaches. Short abstracts on the cover of each report help you immediately understand how the subject matter might impact your enterprise.

Content Management in the Enterprise

Brian Dooley
Abstract

Content management represents a critical area of infrastructure for the enterprise. As content becomes digitized, managed, and accessible through portals, the advantages of bringing most if not all content under a single management scheme become more apparent.


Transitioning to Agile Project Management: A Roadmap for the Perplexed

Sanjiv Augustine, Arlen Bankston
Abstract

As agile project delivery methods have entered the mainstream, the burning managerial question has shifted from whether to adopt them to how. Switching to agile often brings swift and dramatic change, but ensuring that this transition is positive in nature requires an informed, pragmatic approach.


Business Continuity: A Business Survival Strategy

Ken Doughty

Business continuity management (BCM) is no longer a luxury but an essential element of an organization's risk management program. For an organization to have any hope of survival, the BCM process must embrace risk, emergency, and recovery planning in order to manage a "crisis" or "disaster" event. Undertaking any business continuity activity should form part of a wider planning structure; it is not an end in itself but rather a means to an end.


Artificial Intelligence: Rumors of Its Demise Were Greatly Exaggerated

Lynne Ellyn, Cutter Business Technology Council, Cutter Business Technology Council, Cutter Business Technology Council
Domain

IT technology

Assertion 167:

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology never died; rather, it became the secret sauce in many of today's most successful technologies and now offers brave IT departments the opportunity to deploy truly innovative solutions to enable business success.


A (Good) Fox in the Henhouse: Internal Consulting Meets Alignment

Steve Andriole

We all know really good business technology consultants. We also know really bad ones -- or "evil consultants," as I like to describe them.


Enterprise Architecture as a Discipline for Strategy Execution

Tanaia Parker

This Executive Report by Tanaia Parker introduces the Strategic Enterprise Architecture FrameworkSM (SEAFSM) as an approach to address the strategy-execution dilemma.


Semantic Data Models

Paola Di Maio

In recent years, with much anticipation, we have increasingly been hearing about the Semantic Web, yet it is a term whose definition continues to be rather fuzzy.


Negotiating Resources, Deliverables, and Deadlines Within the Global Organization

Moshe Cohen

A mid-level manager at a large electronics manufacturing company recently confided in me that he was experiencing difficulty with his new team. According to him, the problem was that his new team was located in several parts of the world, and that none of the people he worked with were colocated with him.


Outsourcing Success: Unique, Shifting, and Hard to Copy

Sara Cullen

The objective of this Executive Report is to provide a comprehensive framework for identifying and assessing IT outsourcing (ITO) success. Specifically, this report attempts to answer the following four questions:

What type of outcomes do organizations typically pursue from ITO?

How do these goals change over time?


Happy New Year (But Don't Count On It)

Cutter Business Technology Council, Mark Seiden
Topic Summary

From our very first security Opinion, "Pandemic I: Malicious Disruption (The Halloween Scenario)" in October of 2001, we have dealt with security problems more than any other issue. This is in part because our clients tell us it's what they worry about. And just as important, it's because the pieces of a very worrisome whole have been accumulating.


Information Technology Asset Management: Everyone Should Be Doing It

John Berry

I ask managers who have been burned by mixed or bad results and have turned a jaundiced eye to the bombardment of ideas on how to elevate IT management performance to now pause and, with an open mind, explore the virtues of information technology asset management (ITAM). What they should find are many common-sense concepts about how to optimize their large, complex portfolios of IT by treating them as the assets that they are.


Enterprise Business Integration Through IT Governance

Amit Maitra

In recent years, the advancement and proliferation of IT have generated a surge in the purchase and application of computer-based solutions to enterprise-level problems. It is commonplace today for product vendors and CIOs to gather and exchange information and data on promising products that can increase efficiency and productivity in a cost-effective manner.


Putting Data into SOA: Data Virtualization, Data Buses, and Enterprise Data Management

Ken Orr

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) -- a paradigm for "design, development, deployment and management of a loosely coupled business application infrastructure." 1


Emulating the "Bazaar": Open Source-Style Development Within the Firm

Joseph Feller

In late 2004, members of the Cutter Business Technology Council discussed Fellow Lynne Ellyn's assertion that "smart companies will soon borrow the best of open source practices and begin to internalize a radical new way to develop software." 1 Three years later, I'd like to reopen that conversation.


Negotiation Planning: Plan to Get Sustainable Results

Sara Cullen

There are many opinions as to the goal of negotiations and how to approach them based on experience, culture, and industry norms, as well as ideology, and in some cases, ego. This Executive Report will help you plan negotiations that focus on obtaining sustainable results through a series of planning and analysis steps.


Telepresence (Again)

Tom DeMarco, Lou Mazzucchelli, Cutter Business Technology Council, Cutter Business Technology Council, Cutter Business Technology Council
Domain

Collaboration

Assertion 166:

Telepresence is happening, but a lot more slowly than its advocates expected. Nevertheless, this now-nascent trend, when it does blossom, has the potential to be utterly transforming.


Human Capital Management: A Rare Source of Competitive Advantage?

John Berry

Perhaps one of the greatest paradoxes in management is the explicit belief that workforce quality is the driver of enterprise success while evidence from day-to-day practices shows otherwise. Some CEOs spout the virtues of their employees, yet their organizations spend little time exploring the complex and interdependent forces that drive improvements in workforce performance, which contribute directly to success in innovation, customer relationships, and financial performance.


Data Architecture and Beyond: Strategies for Improving Your Data Ecosphere

Scott Ambler

In this Executive Report, I explore data architecture in detail, putting it into the context of your overall IT architecture strategy and describing the critical aspects that should be addressed by effective data architecture. My primary goal is to make you aware of, and understand the complexities of, the issues that your data architecture must address.


Your Guide to Understanding the Evolution, Power, and Potential of Online Social Networks: Part II

San Murugesan
More in this series Your Guide to Understanding the Evolution, Power, and Potential of Online Social Networks: Part 1 Part 2

From the Ashes: Resetting Expectations and Restoring Relationships After Project Disasters

Moshe Cohen

An out-of-control project is something with which far too many of us are familiar. However, failure is far from the only outcome. By focusing your efforts on certain key areas, it is possible to turn a project disaster into a project success. This Executive Report looks at the skills you need in order to reset expectations, communicate effectively in all directions, and turn conflict-ridden relationships into joint problem-solving partnerships.


The Two-Megapixel Eye

Tom DeMarco, Cutter Business Technology Council, Cutter Business Technology Council, Cutter Business Technology Council
Domain

IT technology

Assertion 165:

The trend toward higher-resolution displays promises to be expensive but unstoppable. Its effect on the desktop may pass unnoticed, but it is likely to cause serious retrofit of anything handheld.


Five Technology Trends That Matter: What the Early 21st Century Is Telling Us About Tomorrow

Steve Andriole

We're bombarded with articles, papers, reports, and books on technology trends. Every year the major trade publications unveil their "top 10" list of technologies to watch. Even the major news magazines weigh in with their top technology picks for the year.


Measuring Alignment in Agile Architecture: Part II -- EA Program Effectiveness

Jim Watson
More in this series Measuring Alignment in Agile Architecture: Part I -- Systems Par

Your Guide to Understanding the Evolution, Power, and Potential of Online Social Networks: Part I

San Murugesan

CIOs and IT managers and professionals can no longer afford to simply ignore social networks, dismissing them as a platform for fun for young people. However, in order to harness the opportunities social networks present, you must first gain a deeper knowledge of social networks, including an understanding of how they work and their inherent power.


Requirements for Managing Requirements

Suzanne Robertson

Progressive organizations recognize that well-understood requirements are at the root of delivering relevant products. These organizations commit resources to improve skills for discovering and communicating requirements and for integrating these techniques with agile development.