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.
Where Are Retailers Applying IPA?
Curt Hall
According to a Cutter Consortium survey examining IPA adoption in the enterprise, organizations rank retail as the sixth leading industry in which IPA will have its most significant impact. Retailers are applying robotic process automation (RPA) and other process automation tools bolstered with machine learning (ML), predictive analytics, and computer vision to a number of applications and domains. This Advisor explores how these tools help make their supply chains more flexible, revitalize the retail shopping experience, and boost customer satisfaction in both online and in-store scenarios.
Failing to Ask the Right Question
Michael Papadopoulos, Philippe Monnot
As we give in to our “very powerful tendency to anthropomorphize ML and AI, imbuing it with human characteristics,” we set our ML projects up for failure. This Advisor explores the importance of deciding on the question you are trying to answer before you embark on an ML analytics project.
Embracing the Values and Practices of Steve Jobs
San Murugesan
Steve Jobs — tireless tech visionary, innovator extraordinaire, and cofounder of Apple — died on 5 October 2011, when he was just 56. Though 10 years have passed since his untimely death, we’re still very much living in his world. To create our own lasting legacy that is meaningful and benefits the community, what sort of values and practices would we have to embrace? This Advisor shares nine key lessons from Jobs.
Survey: IPA Will Have Most Significant Impact on Banking & Financial Services
Curt Hall
Cutter Consortium recently conducted a survey to see how organizations are adopting, or planning to adopt, intelligent process automation (IPA). According to survey respondents, IPA will have the most significant impact on banking and financial services (see Figure 1). In this Advisor, we take a closer look at two areas of IPA application in that industry: customer experience (CX) and compliance and financial crimes prevention.
3 Myths About Building Diverse Workforces
Robert Scott
Why is the diversity needle not moving? What needs to happen to truly make a systemic change this time, versus the many previous attempts? In this Advisor, we debunk three pervasive myths around the challenges of building more diverse workforces.
In the Pandemic’s Wake, AI/ML Technologies Have Gone Mainstream
Steve Andriole
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are driving change on both ends of the business-technology continuum. This Advisor explores why companies should accelerate their piloting of AI/ML, deploying internal teams to assess its potential while giving special attention to the range of methods, tools, and platforms /application domains.
Look Beyond ROI in Early-Stage AI Projects
Steven Kursh, Arthur Schnure
Nearly all software projects are premised on understanding user needs and requirements. In our experience with clients, we typically address this phase by working with prospective users to develop use cases. What are some common use cases? Well, it depends on the company, but we’ve seen use cases primarily fall into four categories for early-stage, toe-in-the-water AI compared to full-scale ML efforts:
Market and consumer intelligence
Sales and marketing
Pricing and optimization
Customer care
5 Tips for Fostering Self-Directed Teams
Bob Galen
Self-direction doesn’t just happen because you adopt Scrum, Kanban, or another Agile variant. Or because you say “Agile” 20 times to your teams. It needs a fertile space to grow. It needs to be watered and fertilized. It needs an honest and open environment. In far too many cases, this is simply not happening. So, what are the elements of self-directed space? This Advisor explores five that come to mind.
Diversity in Tech: Are We Moving the Needle or Just Idling? — An Introduction
Viola Maxwell Thompson
It is through this issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal (CBTJ) that we hope to remind CEOs of the challenges that remain unaddressed and out of balance. The authors speak from personal experiences, extensive research, and a deep desire to contribute toward changing the DEI narrative. They share proven best practices and procedural changes that must be followed so that this time, the outcomes of CEOs’ commitments will look different, and those impacted will finally be able to have more equitable work and life experiences.
Architects Must Look "Beyond the Hill"
Pierfranco Ferronato
The professional life of architects is tough, often dealing with tasks typically not performed in everyday non-IT life. They always must support a “future state,” a situation not yet in existence that users or stakeholders can’t predict if not stressed with the proper questions. This Advisor explores how architects look “beyond the hill” and impose superstructures and patterns that may appear unnecessary today but are useful when things ultimately change.
Where Are Government Agencies Applying IPA?
Curt Hall
Government agencies were investing in automation long before COVID-19. But as the pandemic has dragged on, they are increasingly turning to RPA and IPA platforms whose capabilities are bolstered by artificial intelligence technologies in order to better meet the expectations and demands placed on them by citizens. This Advisor identifies some of the more popular IPA applications in government.
The Chief Product Officer: A Growing Necessity
Bhaskar Ahuja
The CPO role is emerging as the business’s product portfolio equivalent of the CTO on the technical side of an organization. The CPO leads the product development team and oversees the product portfolio. This Advisor looks at the CPO role and discusses how and when companies—even smaller ones—can benefit from establishing the CPO position.
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.