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.
When Good Data Goes Bad, Part IV
Barry Devlin
In a world increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence (AI) in its various guises, the danger of good data going bad — what we might call “data rot” — is becoming pervasive and dangerous. In this fourth Advisor of my series, I consider a couple of real — and possibly unexpected — ways the rot can set in.
To Unlock the Next Big Promotion, Leaders Must Up Their Career AQ
Noah Barsky
Note from the author: While I often write about organizations and technologies, this Advisor is a bit of a (related and important) tangent, as it focuses on career advancement. Invariably, in working with executives and rising leaders, particularly technology professionals and consultants, conversations turn to career challenges. I have long wanted to author a piece that captures an effective approach that, over many years, has resonated well with business professionals aiming for a promotion and meaningful career advancement.
Agile Versus Reality: Four Common Problems
Jacek Chmiel
Many of Agile’s practices and base assumptions were and are unrealistic, and some have become obsolete in our present digital world. We need new solutions — software developers would call it a major refactoring. It’s likely you will recognize some of these suggestions as changes you’ve already made to address the flaws of the original Agile methodologies. For those who have just become Agile believers, this may come as more of a surprise. This Advisor goes through four common problems with Agile versus reality and discusses possible solutions.
Mitigating Risk in SaaS Development & Deployment
Steven Kursh, Arthur Schnure
In this Advisor, we examine the risks of software-as-a-service (SaaS) development and deployment. Specifically, we outline seven related suggestions to mitigate risk.
Methods for Evaluating Software Architecture
Simon Field
This Advisor explores the use of the ISO/IEC 25010 quality model as a software architecture evaluation method. You'll discover how this model offers a common language for describing architecturally significant quality characteristics across the organization and creates the potential for comparison across projects and their architecture reviews.
Customer Service and CX Management: IPA Can Help
Curt Hall
Organizations are now implementing more advanced intelligent virtual assistants and smartbots as part of their IPA efforts due to their ability to automate more comprehensive customer engagements. This Advisor explores the benefits and applications of AI in customer self-service applications.
How to Develop Connections Using the Customer Experience Equation
Dave Cherry
The goal of the customer experience equation is to develop a connection. Connection is achieved through two factors. The first is content and represents the product or service that you sell. The second factor is context, which represents everything surrounding both your content and your customer.
Why Do Technology Projects Fail? Is Failure a Feature or a Bug? — An Introduction
Steve Andriole
This issue of CBTJ addresses the tactical, operational, strategic, and human reasons that allow technology projects to fail and offers guidance and solutions to mitigate the possibility of failure.
Strategy by Design: Telling a Story
Scott Whitmire
Developing strategy requires all the skills possessed by competent, experienced enterprise architects, plus the ability to deal with uncertainty and ranges of responses. This Advisor explores how you can use scenarios — or stories — to describe various combinations of responses in order to work out the likely outcomes in each case.
Why Do So Many Analytics Projects Fail to Deliver?
Manjul Gupta, Carlos Parra, Brian Mennecke
Research establishing a link between analytics and business performance remains in a nascent stage, but the popular press is rife with examples of firms predicting the viewing and shopping habits of individuals, providing personalized healthcare-related services, and harnessing real-time agricultural data to increase productivity and efficiency. Nevertheless, when defined as the use of advanced mathematics to identify, explain, or predict patterns in data to improve confidence in business decision making to create value, the majority of analytics projects fail to deliver or have low success rates. This Advisor explores some of the reasons for that failure.
The Perils of Convenient Hiring in Innovation Teams
Robert Ogilvie, Jeffrey McNally
Essential team conditions need to be set up well and are tenaciously difficult to fix later. Having the right talent is one such essential condition, but not all organizations are strategically ready for the problems of finding and selecting top talent, accurately understanding what roles that talent will fill, or building up their own leadership competencies internally.
Identifying and Solving Anti-Patterns for Successful Agile Adoption
Alok Dimri, Anuj Ojha
The biggest challenge organizations face while starting an Agile transformation is not the learning, but the unlearning. This Advisor focuses on Agile anti-patterns around roles, events, artifacts, and overall cultural mindset.
Agile’s Role in AI Adoption
Bhuvan Unhelkar
Agility initiates and accepts changes to business processes, and artificial intelligence (AI) further enables agility by providing timely updates on the status of a business to facilitate decision making. This Advisor explores Agile principles and their corresponding impact on technology-driven change management.
6 Lessons Learned from SaaS Development & Deployment
Steven Kursh, Arthur Schnure
Mitigating the risks of developing and deploying SaaS carries with it similar challenges to on-premises implementations. In this Advisor, we highlight six lessons learned.
4 Key Considerations: Planning for Smart Automation 2.0
Aravind Ajad Yarra, Danesh Zaki
In most enterprises, business processes are automated in isolation, creating “automation silos” — a major barrier to realizing the fuller potential of enterprise-wide integrated automation. Businesses must take a more strategic approach if they are to break automation silos. This Advisor identifies four key considerations that should go into planning for smart automation 2.0.
Narrowing the Learning Gap with AI-Powered Educational Apps
Curt Hall
AI-powered educational applications hold the promise of helping to narrow the learning gap by providing educational opportunities to people of all ages regardless of gender, economic/social status, or the availability of established schools and other traditional educational resources. This Advisor examines the use of AI for personalized learning and enhanced online/distance learning platforms in the form of cloud-based and mobile applications and provides some examples of commercial AI-powered educational applications.
Replicating Innovation Across Business Units
Ben Thuriaux, Frederik van Oene, Elis Wilkins
Replicating best practice across business units is fundamental to improving innovation performance, but research shows that it happens far less than expected. Learn why this happens — and how businesses can overcome the challenge.
Ingredients for Enterprise Agility, Part VII: How Value Streams Create Enterprise Agility
Jon Ward
Enterprise agility is created by looking at value streams and optimizing them end to end. This Advisor explores how value streams work, how customer value is created, and how to remove obstacles to customer value creation.
How to “Green” Enterprise IT
San Murugesan
Green IT and green initiatives are now a key agenda for enterprises and governments and are driven by the benefits they offer and several ongoing developments, such as concerns about climate change, government regulations, and peer pressure and influence. This Advisor outlines the strategies and steps that will help you implement a Green IT approach in your enterprise.
Stakeholder Mapping Is Key to Circular Economy Implementation
William Ulrich, Giovanni Traverso
This Advisor explores how business architecture stakeholder mapping can assist a healthy circular economy implementation by specifying the value stream scenarios where different stakeholders extract value propositions across a value cycle, enabling the cycle to start and be sustained.
Why Don't We Trust AI?
Claude Baudoin, Clayton Pummill
AI certainly challenges our understanding of what intelligence is, not to mention our belief in the inherent superiority of human thinking over machines. But the causes of mistrust go beyond these existential considerations, as are identified in this Advisor.
The Impact of AI in Education
Aswani Kumar Cherukuri, Annapurna Jonnalagadda, San Murugesan
AI can help students receive personalized lessons, provide educators with deep insights into students’ learning styles, revolutionize skills improvement for professionals, and lower the cost of education. This Advisor lays out the key benefits AI-based education offers over traditional instruction modes.
What Makes Quantum Computing So Different?
Joseph Byrum
This Advisor takes a brief look at how quantum computers work. You'll discover how quantum processors evaluate multiple variables simultaneously, which means simulations can include as many interacting variables as there are qubits.
Enterprise IPA Adoption: Still Too Early to Measure Success
Curt Hall
From mid-2020 to early 2021, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey on how organizations are adopting, or planning to adopt, intelligent process automation (IPA). In this Advisor, we examine survey findings pertaining to how organizations view the success of their IPA efforts so far and whether they believe the technology will eventually live up to expectations.
3 Areas of Potential Failure in Digital Transformations
Eric Willeke
Pursuing digital transformation involves a deep focus on the nature of the data being used in the organization, the services being exposed around that data, and what business use cases are being improved and reimagined through the use and recomposition of these new services. This Advisor explores three common failure areas that emerge in transformations.