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.
Improved Organizational Approaches to Strengthen Inclusion
Samin Saadat, Jim Brosseau
Having diversity is a stepping-stone in the process of effective workplace inclusion, not a conclusion. In this Advisor, we address the steps necessary to move the diversity and inclusion needle within organizations, first taking into account that organizations are responsible for the well-being and growth of their members.
Ingredients for Enterprise Agility, Part III: Mobilizing the Transformational Leadership Team
Jon Ward
This Advisor outlines the makeup of a transformational leadership team, how to form the team, how it can focus its efforts, behaviors, and expectations, and how to convert the themes and horizons established during transformation planning into objectives and key results to ground the change in metrics and reality.
Changing the Status Quo of HR Management
Salvatore Moccia, Shuming Zhao, Patrick Flanagan
In times of significant world threats, leaders have had to work closely with HR to address workers’ fear, stress, uncertainty, lack of clarity, and even panic. In this Advisor, we provide some tools to help HR management meet these challenges.
Silos Can Be Bad for Business
Whynde Kuehn
Silos can help distribute the workload but they also make it difficult to collaborate and share resources. This Advisor explores some of the challenges that silos can create.
Digital Twins: Nature or Nurture?
Jon Geater
When it comes to digital twin security, how much of the safety, security, and reliability depends on the technology built into the digital twin system, and how much is down to its deployment, operation, and maintenance? This Advisor explores these and other digital twin security issues.
Learning to Lead Collective Creativity, Part III: Entrepreneurial Leadership
Daniel Hjorth, Shannon Hessel
In this series, the authors explore leadership practices that enable teams to engage in collective creativity toward the best possible (novel, relevant, valuable) outcome. This Advisor looks at the particularly entrepreneurial qualities or acts that are part of this way of leading, and asserts that in a postindustrial innovation economy, the entrepreneurship component in leadership moves ahead of the management component.
The Evolution of Banking
Cintia Guerrero, Reema Jan, Mahesh Raisinghani
This Advisor explores the advantages and disadvantages of recent technological advancements in banking, beyond automated teller machines and online banking.
Cloud Discounts: A Risk/Reward Model
Frank Contrepois
In this Advisor, we describe some of the different forms of discounts available from cloud vendors in an effort to translate the cloud vendors’ terms into well-known financial concepts.
Architect, Abstract Artist, or Cartoonist?
Balaji Prasad
At certain rarefied levels of architecture, an architect may be operating in a mode that is closer to artistry rather than design. It involves weaving people’s mental models with the conceptual and logical models that represent things that might be on the ground today as well as tomorrow, so that architectural ideas find their way into decisions and actions that change the landscape and outcomes sought by the enterprise.
Are Organizations’ IPA Efforts Meeting or Beating Expectations?
Curt Hall
This Advisor explores the results of our recent “Intelligent Process Automation in the Enterprise” survey measuring the benefits and ROI from IPA practices. This slice of data was analyzed to determine whether or not organizations' IPA initiatives are currently meeting or beating expectations, and the reasoning behind our respondents answers.
Engage the Power of Simulation with Digital Twins
Sameer Kher
This Advisor explores how organizations can utilize digital twins to see their products in action, over time, when subjected to physical environments, as well as visualize exactly when and where maintenance is needed. This lets product developers close the loop on a product’s design simulations and helps engineers make more informed choices for future designs.
How Your Technical Perspective Can Bolster Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiatives
Nicole Price
People in technical roles are uniquely qualified to contribute to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
Digital Twins — An Introduction
Ron Zahavi
In this Advisor, the introduction to the Cutter Business Technology Journal issue addressing digital twins, you'll explore the benefits, opportunities, and challenges of this next phase of digital transformation.
Total Planning or Full Agility? In Search of the Golden Mean
Svyatoslav Kotusev
This Advisor explores how to fine-tune the processes of strategic planning, initiative delivery, technology optimization, and portfolio management/budgeting process to achieve the right balance between up-front planning and agility.
When Good Data Goes Bad, Part I
Barry Devlin
This Advisor discusses how data doesn't really "go" bad, but the use to which it was put was dramatically changed and that new use drove the collection of even more categories and volumes of personal behavior data, without a comprehensive ethical review. In this series, we’ll point out what can go wrong with data — and what to do about it.
The New Rules of Analytics: A Q&A
Vince Kellen
A recent leap forward in database and analytics technology includes streaming technologies like Apache’s Kafka, which can handle real time and can scale to handle big data movement at extremely low cost, and high-speed, in-memory analytics tools like SAP HANA, which makes mincemeat out of billion-row data sets. These and other new cloud-based approaches have changed the paradigm for 21st-century data analytics.
Avoiding the Creep
Robin Goldsmith
It's widely believed that creep — changes to requirements that supposedly have been settled — is due to unclear requirements. This Advisor looks at project creep differently, enabling us to see that most creep involves requirements that should and could have been identified but weren’t, and that this happens so often that it’s a certainty rather than a risk.
Automating Document Data Extraction
Shahane Eksuzyan, Sedrak Vardanyan, Raj Ramesh
This Advisor explores an intelligent system using AI technologies to automate data extraction to any one of many structured formats. The system performs minimal manual annotations to capture the semantics of specific sections for any particular document template. Once that has been done, millions of documents can be fed through the system to extract information automatically. This Advisor provides a brief look at that system.
A General Recipe for Creating Data Architectures
Olivier Pilot, Michael Papadopoulos, Michael Eiden
The role of data architects is sometimes vaguely defined and tends to fall on the shoulders of senior business analysts, data scientists, or database and ETL specialists. As with any kind of architecture, designing for uncertainty is a key requirement with data architecture.
Federated Learning’s Potential for Joint AI Development Efforts
Curt Hall
Federated learning is an emerging distributed machine learning (ML) development method that allows different organizations to collaborate on artificial intelligence (AI) projects while protecting their sensitive data. Federated learning is currently seen as especially applicable in healthcare/medicine and banking/finance; however, I believe it will prove important for many heavily regulated industries seeking to develop AI applications.
Ingredients for Enterprise Agility, Part II: Organizing and Planning for Enterprise Agility
Jon Ward
This Advisor outlines how using a target operating model working hypothesis may help C-suite executives understand how adopting Agile can impact them and their organization. The working hypothesis develops incrementally as the activity progresses. The author also suggests how to plan a transformation based upon outcomes, 90-day horizons and themes, and offers an Agile sundial as a means of setting direction and illustrating progress.
A New Look — The Automotive Industry, Post-COVID: A Q&A
Andreas Schlosser, Alan Martinovich, Philipp Seidel
In a recent webinar, Andreas Schlosser, Alan Martinovich, and Philipp Seidel examined the state of the automotive industry and what it might look like after the pandemic. They urged industry players — manufacturers, dealers, distributors, OEMs, and the full supply chain — to make bold decisions right now to be ready for a “new normal.” In this Advisor, we share some of the answers to questions participants asked about the actions carmakers should take now to set themselves up to win in the post-corona era.
5G Will Power the Next Evolutionary Step for the IoT
Agron Lasku, Hariprasad Pichai, Rebecka Axelsson Wadman, Sean McDevitt
The emergence of the IoT has led to a need for different characteristics and technical capabilities in cellular networks, which have continued to develop and will, with the emergence of 5G, address the key needs of the IoT. And with more and more “things” connected, leading to significantly higher connection density, the risk of interference increases. This has been another historical challenge to the IoT that 5G will address. All this means that 5G will enable an entirely new range of applications.
Getting Past Tradition: Expanding the Scope of EA in the Organization
Brian Cameron
While the goals of the traditional view of EA are still very valid today, this is not where the scope of EA should stop. If the EA organization wants to become a strategic partner with the business, the EA value measurement program must demonstrate that the EA team understands the key strategic metrics that the business values and can positively impact these key strategic metrics.
Next-Generation Analytics: Is it a Data Lake or a Data Mart?
Vince Kellen
The rise of cloud technologies and continued technical advances in computing architectures have dramatically altered how we design data warehouses, but we continue to see both IT staff and vendors continue to recreate the old data warehouse. As we explore in this Advisor, with the new technologies that are available, instead of having two architectures — one for data lakes and the other for data warehouses — a single “new rules” architecture can handle both.