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 III
Barry Devlin
The potential of information — for good or for ill — far exceeds that of mere data. This Advisor explores how we need to change our focus from data to information in order to see more clearly why and how our IT industry often colludes in the demise of truth and supports the spread of disinformation.
Tales from the Technology Crypt
Lou Mazzucchelli
A 10-month timeline, the biggest budget the company ever committed to a "programming project," and a guy who is in way over his head. Sounds like the perfect IT horror story (spoiler alert: our hero and his project survive!)
Low-Code/No-Code-Enabled Citizen Developers: A Q&A
Greg Smith, Michael Papadopoulos
A recent webinar explored how "citizen developers" can use "low-code/no-code" (LC/NC) solutions with relatively low learning curves to help their organizations expand their digital capabilities and grow the business. This Advisor shares some of the answers to questions participants asked about LC/NC solutions.
Analytics Value Now! — An Introduction
Dave Cherry
When deriving value from an analytics initiative, it is important to consider context, analytics maturity, the risk/value proposition, and the culture of your organization. This issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal, with Guest Editor Dave Cherry, provides strategies and insight to amplify analytics value.
Architect for “Real-Ability”
Marc Gewertz
In much the same way ”design-for-producibility” is key to successful hardware production, “architect-for-real-ability” is key to capability realization. Everyone involved from the beginning in the specification, development, and operation of a capability needs to perform as, an organized, integrated team.
Computer Vision and Imaging in the Insurance Sector
Curt Hall
Computer vision and imaging technology is having a considerable impact in the insurance industry. A number of developments are driving this trend. From a product/market perspective, the growing availability of cloud platforms and services — including commercial computer vision and imaging applications tailored for specific insurance use cases — has made the technology more practical for insurers to implement. This Advisor explores the opportunities, benefits and applications of AI and computer vision in the insurance sector.
The Keys to Achieving Trust in AI
Claude Baudoin, Clayton Pummill
If the ultimate goal of artificial intelligence (AI) is to efficiently replicate and exceed human thought for the good of humanity, then building trust requires that AI incorporate the multitude of sound human decision capabilities. Just reading this statement makes it clear that the journey toward AI ethics is no easy road.
Ingredients for Enterprise Agility, Part V: Coaching Transformational Change
Jon Ward
The role of an Agile coach is not to do the organizational change, but to facilitate it. More explicitly, the coach’s role is to enable the organization to change itself. This Advisor explores the role of the Agile Coach in supporting and enabling enterprise agility.
3 Essential Technologies in Enterprise IPA Initiatives
Curt Hall
In this Advisor, we explore three critical technologies that organizations are interested in using to support their enterprise IPA initiatives: natural language processing (NLP), intelligent virtual assistants/smartbots, and intelligent optical character recognition (iOCR). This data is based on a survey recently conducted by Cutter Consortium of how organizations are adopting or planning to adopt IPA.
Strategy Starts with Troubleshooting
Scott Whitmire
As industries have become completely unpredictable, modern strategic planning requires distinct skills to determine competitive environments. This Advisor explores how troubleshooting can help you identify the competitive environment for your industry, how strategy is the design of your solution, and how your enterprise is the implementation of that solution.
Enhancing Education with AI
Aswani Kumar Cherukuri, Annapurna Jonnalagadda, San Murugesan
In this Advisor, we discuss how AI impacts the teaching and learning experience and the quality of education. We also briefly explore a number of AI technologies that are being applied in education to achieve these advances.
Driving Across the Software Abyss: EV + AI = Unmanageable Complexity
Robert Charette
OEMs have recognized that their current approaches of outsourcing the requisite software and electronics to suppliers and then integrating them in ICE vehicles is not workable for EVs. What's the solution?
Leadership and the Art of the Stress Not Had
Cheryl Crupi
Leaders are often unaware of the level and cost of stress they impose on their workforce. This Advisor highlights three specific sources of organizational stress: overfocus on form, wishful thinking, and centralized decision making. It offers strategies for tackling each source, allowing you to create a virtuous, self-reinforcing cycle of time for clear thinking.
Navigating the Prospects and Perils of AI — An Introduction
Michael Eiden
The immediate future of AI isn’t about building entirely autonomous systems, but about augmentation; helping experts see the bigger picture and giving them the ability to react to it more quickly. This Cutter Business Technology Journal issue considers the opportunities as well as the unintended consequences of AI technologies.
Mistakes to Avoid When Creating a Business Architecture
Amit Temurnikar
Creating a business architecture is a sustainable option to design and implement transformation opportunities. Once an organization decides to take this path, it needs to ensure that the journey is smooth. This Advisor identifies
10 mistakes organizations can avoid when starting up the business architecture function.
LC/NC Development Environments in RPA and Intelligent Automation
Curt Hall
The appeal of LC/NC environments in the RPA world primarily stems from their ability to shield the user from the complexities of RPA application development. The goal is to enable business users to automate low-level RPA and other simple workflow automation tasks using visual, point-and-click/drag-and-drop interfaces. This Advisor explores the benefits and applications of LC/NC in an RPA environment.
Leadership in the Digital Age: Use Metrics to Know Your Path
Cristina Popescu, Danish Aziz
The growing availability of product, service, and vendor choices across the board means that organizations need a balance of metrics to provide accurate, timely insight for decision making and continuous improvement.
Using Objectives & Key Results to Measure What Matters
Cristina Popescu, Danish Aziz
How do we identify the metrics that matter most? This Advisor explores the goal-setting system and approach known as objectives and key results (OKRs) and identifies where it complements business agility efforts.
Motivation Management: 3 Core Principles
Robert Ogilvie, Jeffrey McNally
Flow psychology research reminds us that work is our best chance for a peak experience since it is the best place for us to deeply use our best skills, be challenged, and learn. But motivation is composed of many elements — short- and long-term goals, personal and contextual reasons, essential and hierarchical levels — so finding ways to boost engagement and motivation is a huge, ongoing issue with several dimensions (hence, it’s a complex adaptive system).
A Lesson in Top-Down, Business-Driven Data Architecture Specification
William Ulrich
This Advisor tells the story of two similar organizations with initiatives to derive and define data models. The first organization had a business architecture in place, which included a well-defined capability map, value streams, and information map. The second organization did not.
Data Strategy's 4 Dimensions: A Q&A
Richard Veryard
Making an organization more data-driven doesn’t always entail a large transformation program, but it does require a clarity of vision and pragmatic joined-up thinking. To achieve all or some aspects of vision, there are four dimensions that need to be addressed in your data strategy: reach, richness, agility, and assurance. In this Advisor, we share some questions that Veryard answered at the end of the webinar.
Quantum Computing Applications & the Potential for Quantum Advantage
Muhammad Usman
One of the most pressing questions for the quantum computing community today is: when will quantum computers beat a classical supercomputer by solving a real-world problem of practical interest? This is commonly referred to as “quantum advantage,” which is different from quantum supremacy. The simple answer is that no one knows.
Agile Lineout — A Contextual Alternative to Scrum: A Q&A
Jon Ward
In a recent webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Jon Ward introduced an agile approach that uses behavioral theory, lean principles and agile wisdom to help teams create high-value solutions quickly. This Advisor shares the Q&A session that followed. Perhaps Jon's advice will spark some new ideas on how your organization can leverage Agile Lineout practices for team success.
Insights from Study Help Maximize Business Architects’ Strengths
Whynde Kuehn
This Advisor examines the findings of a Business Architecture Strengths Study from a Clifton Strengths assessment and provides a few recommendations to leverage the unique abilities of business architecture within our organizations.
The Enterprise Architect as Troubleshooter
Scott Whitmire
Every change effort requires a certain amount of troubleshooting to determine what processes and capabilities need to be altered to meet new business goals. Yet, far too little attention has been given to the skill of troubleshooting. This Advisor explores troubleshooting as a skill and a process and discusses how to apply it to enterprise architecture to identify appropriate starting points for change initiatives.