Cutter community members are saying ...
The Information Technology revolution continues to change how businesses work and how people work in and with them. Today's demands on software to provide useful, usable, secure, and scalable services stress all aspects of systems development. These include architecture, technology selection, product development and lifecycle management. Cutter provides comprehensive coverage for these crucial topics—through research reports and customized virtual training delivered globally—helping us to understand needs and solutions that span traditional silos.
Cutter’s Virtual Training allowed us to deliver top-notch executive education to our geographically dispersed managers and teams. Participants were so engaged that the sessions ran over the allotted hour as questions and comments poured in!”
With 31 million students, 1.45 million teachers and 242,000 schools, distributed across the 32 States, the Mexican Education System is currently undergoing a landmark and complex constitutional reform aimed at improving quality and equity in education, INEE is charged with evaluating public education; using results to improve its quality; and creating an information system for informing diverse stakeholders on evaluation results and on the socio-economic and cultural context associated with education.
The task for building such information system under strict time and budgetary constraints is daunting, but has been ameliorated by exploiting our "access to Cutters experts" during all phases of project planning and implementation. One critical element for success is having access to the Cutter body of knowledge and its expertise. Rather than following complex processes and designs, Cutter experts helped us define a very simple business architecture framework, a model which was easy to follow and implement. They provided our leaders with insights for coordination and establishing partnership within the Institute and with other key actors, such as the Ministry of Education, social organizations and other stakeholders. Thanks to Cutter´s experts, in a short time we have been able to:
- Gain key insights and practical strategies for responding to challenges we face in building trust and partnerships within the organization and outside our institutional borders.
- Improve our methods for working with people and anticipating the challenges of cultural transformation within our organization.
- Have immediate access to key “experts” at critical times, who spend quality time with our teams, provide state-of-the-art orientation, and help us implement our Enterprise Class Data Integration Projects.
- Implement agile, effective and articulated innovation around a common vision for achieving quality education in Mexico.
Cutter's vendor independence (particularly in terms of funding) means that Cutter's reports don't read like commercials. The advice given by Cutter is practical and pragmatic — it draws on a wealth of experience from a wide pool of 'hands-on' industry practitioners. Their breadth and depth of coverage is reflected in the frequency and format of reports. And they don't waste time trying to predict the future — the underlying focus is on the supporting principles which enable success, not the latest fads.
Cutter publications have been invaluable to us in improving what we do, in particular software development and business technology strategy. Cutter reports are well-written, focused, succinct, and they stick to the key points and tools or information you can really use. And the Cutter Summit is a must-do event for us. Cutter seems to be unique in consistently providing information one can immediately put into action or clarify one's thinking on day-to-day problems. The service provides tremendous value for the money.
After attending the Cutter Summit, Fiserv, CBS Worldwide, used the knowledge that was shared to develop and implement software risk management processes throughout the organization. The processes provided for risk assessments that could be utilized consistently within various functions of the organization, providing consistent measures of risk globally. The online capabilities that are provided with the service are also used to provide for research and validation of processes and methodologies as part of developing Project Management Best Practices.
Cutter Consortium's reports and white papers give us an overview of what's going on and the directions things will be taking. This saves us not only a lot of time, it also increases our competence. That's business value!
I have personally been able to leverage Cutter's services since 1999. Among the attributes that differentiate Cutter from other firms, two remain at the top of my list — Thought Leadership and Real Value — executed in a practical way. Thought Leadership is driven by Cutter's experts. The advantage is that Cutter doesn't pitch a single best-practice for a given area. Instead, Cutter provides multiple good-practices/options that come from both academic rigor, as well as on-the-ground experience. This provides several benefits for Dairy Farmers of America: Exposure and awareness of proven good practices — particularly for IT, but also for overall business leadership and management; A finger on the pulse of emerging good practices and IT-impacting trends; Options for improving our performance; The opportunity to develop relationships with the experts. The last, 'Access to the experts,' drives the Real Value, letting us go beyond just understanding the options. We can develop relationships with the experts, and tailor the options so that they can be quickly and practically executed within our organization, enabling our Business Technology team to continually improve, engage and contribute to business growth.
I am amazed that this venue exists; that I can listen and interact with these individuals. I am more amazed that I have not done this before.”
Each month, there are a number of sound, informative reports that are worthwhile reading for management of our organization and that are generally well written with both business and technology readers in mind. I access the online content regularly and read all the reports as they are added to it. I also selectively recommend the reports to others.