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.

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.

The Role of IT in Citizen Development

Dave Garrett, Ian Duncan

In the age of transformation, advances in artificial intelligence are rapidly disconnecting end users from the complexity of the technology they use. The result is a world where we can do many things without having to understand how they work. For example, Amazon’s Alexa lets users ask complicated questions using nat­ural language input and receive immediate answers.


Challenges to Low-Code Adoption

Jacek Chmiel
With a new generation of cloud-enabled low-code tools, we can combine the simplicity and friendliness of easy-to-use develop­ment environments with the ability to deploy distrib­uted business applications. This Advisor addresses some of the key arguments against low-code adoption.

The Importance of a Well-Defined Business Vocabulary

William Ulrich
Many organizations lack a well-defined, rationalized business vocabulary as a basis for information management. As a result, the data they rely on results in many business challenges, as discussed in this Advisor.

Enforcing Compliance as Code

Adam Swenson
Controls are only as good as their ability to be enforced. This Advisor reviews the architecture and enforcement mechanisms used to steer developers, DevOps, and infrastructure engineering staff through the use of compliance-as-code controls.

Supporting Digital Twins with Edge Computing

Sameer Kher
Cloud computing, with its scalability and relatively low cost, has traditionally been the technology environment of choice for supporting digital twins. Today, edge computing has emerged as a promising alternative. This Advisor explores the benefits of edge computing over cloud computing.

The Implications of a Transformation

Matt Ganis

A digital transformation is no less than a change in an organization’s activities, business processes, competencies, and models that allows it to fully leverage the opportunities of current and future emerging digital technologies. The effort, expense, and pain involved with this type of change may lead some to question the necessity.


On the Path to Achieve the Benefits of Agile

Cheryl Crupi
In the course of “going Agile,” you will eliminate old processes, practices, and mindsets. This Advisor offers keen advice on how to avoid marginalizing the people who are experts in the previous way of working. Success depends on everyone in your organization understanding the vision, the why, and the road to get there.

Predictive Analytics/ML and RPA High on Enterprise IPA Initiative List

Curt Hall
In a recent survey, Cutter Consortium looked into the technologies that companies are interested in using to support their intelligent process automation (IPA) initiatives. In this Advisor, we take a closer look at the top two: predictive analytics/machine learning (ML) and robotic process automation (RPA).

Architecting with Humility

Balaji Prasad
Architecting over time is even more challenging than architecting over space. Time is not just one more dimension. Time brings relative unknowns that make it difficult, even impossible, to define requirements in advance. How do we build for a universe that we cannot see?

Alleviating Bias in AI Systems with Data Profiling and Synthetic Data Sets

Curt Hall
Neural networks and other machine learning (ML) model development typically requires large amounts of data for training and testing purposes. Because much of this data is historical, there is the chance that the artificial intelligence (AI) models could learn existing prejudices pertaining to gender, race, age, sexual orientation, and other biases. This Advisor explores these and other issues around data that can also contribute to biases and inaccuracies in ML algorithms.

Quantum Software Engineering Challenges

Mario Piattini
Despite recent advances in quantum programming tools, there are two major challenges facing quantum software developers. First, there is an understandable fear of betting on a platform or language that ends up being discontinued. Second, quantum computer scientists need to understand cur­rent software engineering principles and techniques, or they will spend too much time reinventing the wheel.

Women in Leadership: Challenges and Expectations

Areej Khataybih
In this interview, transformational coach Areej Khataybih offers a psychological perspective on women leaders and what contributes to their success and their challenges. She highlights the challenges that come from internal obstacles and beliefs of not being good enough and the battle of competing with male counterparts and, in the process, denying women’s full selves, the emotional and the logical.