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.
Beyond Agile: Management Methods for Solving Large-Scale Problems
John Heintz
When companies grow beyond a handful of individuals or teams, many changes will affect the organization of work and people. At small scale, and for a limited period of time, a team can organically "remember" its own history. This Advisor explores mechanisms beyond that small scale that encourage learning and sharing across the organization.
Architecting Across Organizational Boundaries
Whynde Kuehn
Working in partnership with many other teams across the strategy execution lifecycle, business architects play an important role to translate business direction into an actionable future state vision that everyone can work toward. In this Advisor, we explore a few scenarios where business architecture is being used or emerging in practice to architect across organizational boundaries.
Using Business Architecture to Build a Sustainable Future
Giovanni Traverso, William Ulrich
In a recent webinar, Cutter Fellow William Ulrich and Giovanni Traverso explored the circular economy, the strategic challenges it presents, and business architecture’s role in transitioning an organization into becoming a player in the sustainable economy. This Advisor shares the Q&A session that followed the presentation. We hope the advice will spark some new ideas for how your organization can participate in the circular economy.
4 Key Attributes of Successful Analytics Projects
Benjamin Porter
Ensuring that analytics projects create value for the business is easier said than done, and expensive, complex data projects are prime targets for (the wrong kind of) management attention. In this Advisor, we identify the four fundamental requirements for successful analytics projects (sponsor, tools, team, and project/problem). These key attributes can assist project managers in setting priorities.
Challenging the Social Context of Risk Management
Robert Charette
For many decision makers in government and industry today, practicing robust risk management is still seen within their organizations’ social context as providing little if any positive upside, but instead possessing potentially large downside consequences for them personally and professionally. Many decision makers skeptically view rigorous risk analysis as akin to future blame analysis for something that might go wrong rather than a way to increase career or organization success.
Five Communication Actions for Project Success
Shasheela Devi Karuppiah, Ezuria Nadzri, Govindan Marthandan
This Advisor explores five communication actions that will help propel a team toward project success: refine the content, select the methods, manage the velocity, review the process, and define the frequency. These insights may be useful while considering the structure of a project communication management plan.
Amid the Pandemic, IPA Adoption Accelerating in Healthcare
Curt Hall
The adoption of automation in the healthcare industry has really taken off since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this Advisor, we look at a few examples of how healthcare and medical organizations utilize IPA to enhance and improve operations.
3 Perspectives on Project Management
Vince Kellen
In this Advisor, we discuss statistical project management through three perspectives: the rational view, the behavioral view, and the complex adaptive systems view.
Measuring the Value of Enterprise Architecture
Scott Whitmire
The value provided by enterprise architecture (EA) is in the identification and understanding of the links between operational execution and strategic intent and their influence on business outcomes. This Advisor explores how to trace business outcome changes back to work done under the banner of EA.
A New Security Target: Dynamic Resilience
Jon Geater
As the security focus switches from confidentiality to integrity and authenticity, we must change our approach. Instead of trying to predict and avoid every possible threat before embracing connectivity, we must move to accept that risks are unpredictable and dynamic, and that the best defense is to be alert to changes in circumstances, adaptive to changes in risk, and resilient in the face of failure.
Ingredients for Enterprise Agility, Part VIII: Why Progression Metrics Deliver Focus for Agile Teams
Jon Ward
This Advisor explains how monitoring progression metrics can help teams see if their actions are moving toward success. Additionally, as Agile uses value throughout the definition, backlog refinement, and activity prioritization processes combined with incremental delivery, teams can determine early on if their activities are having the desired result. If not, then they can apply the Agile proverb “pivot without mercy or guilt.”
Managing Delegated Organizations with a Tenant Approach
Konrad Pfeffer, Nick Bartlett
Delegating administrative activities within a CIAM solution can allow your business products in a B2B context to grow and scale without having to worry about user management. As we explore in this Advisor, the tenant concept is one approach for managing your delegated organizations.
Optimizing Business Models for the Circular Economy
Giovanni Traverso, William Ulrich
Business model optimization plays an important role in transitioning to the circular economy. Using an example from an automotive manufacturing company, this Advisor explores how business architecture enables this transition while concurrently enabling organizations to streamline costs, increase revenues, and achieve related strategic objectives.
5 Underhyped Technologies That Could Shape the Future
Steve Andriole
Research organizations love trendy “celebrity” technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, cybersecurity, distributed clouds, and privacy technology. They’re easy to identify and hype. Many are, in fact, impactful in any given year. But what about the “underdogs”? Can they become “wonderdogs”? In this Advisor, we take a closer look at five underdog technologies that might have a major future impact on our personal and professional lives.
The Case for Environmental Intelligence Solutions
San Murugesan
Environmental intelligence (EI) is an effective combined use of data science, AI, and other digital technologies such as IoT to provide the meaningful insight needed to address these challenges and mitigate the effects of environmental change. This Advisor examines how EI can help in collecting and analyzing environmental data to understand the cause and impact of environmental changes and to predict potential environmental risks facing us.
How AI Subfields Are Advancing Product Development
Michael Jastram
There are many artificial intelligence subfields that have the potential to help us overcome the limitations of current product development approaches, each at a different development level. This Advisor explores four of these subfields: natural language processing, machine learning, interactive AI, and training data.
Changing the Way Your Business Operates with AI
Bhuvan Unhelkar
As businesses strive to maximize customer value, many are moving towards the adoption of AI to enable better organizational agility and flexibility to meet customer demands. This Advisor explores the value propositions and considerations for businesses contemplating AI adoption.
Simplifying Architecture in an Agile Environment
Avinash Malik
Many Agile processes place architects too far from the development activities. This Advisor explores the roles of engineering lead, solution architect, and enterprise architect, and asserts that if we allow some grey area between the roles of an architect and an engineering lead, two roles work better than three.
Optimizing Business Processes with Intelligent Document Processing
Curt Hall
According to a Cutter survey examining the adoption of intelligent process automation (IPA), nearly 60% of organizations identified accelerated document processing as the number one use case for applying IPA in the enterprise. If you think about it, this makes sense because document processing is a huge bottleneck for companies across almost every industry and for most government agencies. This Advisor explores the adoption of IPA including the goals, benefits, industry developments, and major automation vendors who have added intelligent document processing to their platforms
Trust in AI: Is This the Fork in the Road?
Claude Baudoin, Clayton Pummill
We have control over whether AI will be a trusted aide to humanity or a threat. But we need a number of convergent approaches to be able to choose the right path. Ultimately, this amounts to AI governance.
Citizen Development Improves IT Delivery and Speeds Strategic Development
Ronan Hughes
There are a number of ways citizen development (CD) adoption can accelerate the intended benefits of IT change programs, streamline business cases and proposals, and deliver real savings. This Advisor explores how citizen development and low-code/no-code can add value, even when considering worst-case scenarios.
Top 3 Challenges to Utilizing Enterprise IPA
Curt Hall
In a recent Cutter Consortium survey, we examined findings concerning the major challenges organizations indicate are hindering their efforts to apply IPA. In this Advisor, we take a closer look at the top three of these challenges: IPA is still an emerging technology, issues identifying applicable use cases, and the complexity of IPA development/implementation.
The Cybersecurity Executive Order: A Stimulus to Realign Your Model
Balaji Prasad
On 12 May 2021, the US White House issued a presidential executive order (EO) on improving the nation’s cybersecurity. The purpose of this Advisor is to point to this EO as a resource that enterprises should study in some depth as well as to use it as a context to highlight ways to think more fundamentally and timelessly about cybersecurity.
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.