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.
Aviation: The Future Is Reinvention
Mathieu Blondel, Francesco Marsella, Jan Heile, Akitake Fujita, Richard Eagar
It is clear to all that COVID-19 has dealt a devastating blow to the economy. The aviation industry, in particular, faces a new reality. While aviation, pre-crisis, was thriving from the waves of globalization and travel commoditization, it was already facing threats such as environmental pressures, unbalanced profit sharing along the value chain, and multiple constraints on operational and business agility. Thus, the recovery phase will be extremely challenging, and we believe future growth will involve nothing less than reinvention of the industry, something that is true of many industries post-pandemic.
Making the Network Organization Work
Jon Ward
I recently received an email from a colleague seeking advice by way of suggestions for his focus for 2021. In this Advisor, I share a glimpse into our correspondence as well as my thoughts on aligning value stream priorities.
Data & Digital Architecture — An Introduction
Gustav Toppenberg
In this issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal (CBTJ), we explore how enabling successful digital transformations through data and digital architectures can facilitate the enablement of the value streams and customer journeys companies build to stay in touch with changing client expectations and user experiences, all while building out the organization’s digital backbone.
Focus on Key Uncertainties to Let Good Architecture Emerge
Olivier Pilot, Michael Papadopoulos, Michael Eiden
It is a given that architects need to find ways to address the “absolutes” around a solution — the things that we know to be true for sure — in an effective, efficient, and elegant manner. Yet solving problems that truly matter generally involves a high degree of uncertainty. Unfortunately, the more ambitious the objectives, the more unfamiliar the context, and the bigger the unknowns, the greater the likelihood that those uncertainties — when unaddressed — will impede the emergence of a good architecture.
Create Market Insight with Textual Analytics
Joseph Byrum
No human could possibly read everything, but a machine can. The best you can do with old-fashioned methods is to hire experts to sample a subset of the relevant data and produce written market insight reports. While these studies can be extremely useful, the resulting analysis is constrained by the amount of data sampled. Many companies already use forms of automation to sort through the data with machines, but, in the end, humans still have to read the data and decide what it means.
Top Intriguing Business Agility & Software Engineering Excellence Articles for 2020
Karen Coburn
As has been our tradition for the last several years, we’ve compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Business Agility & Software Engineering Excellence practice for today’s Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members. Your questions and comments not only make it possible to create lists like this, they help focus Cutter’s Senior Consultants’ research on the areas that are most important to organizations like yours. So please keep your feedback coming.
Top Intriguing Business Technology & Digital Transformation Strategies Articles for 2020
Karen Coburn
As has been our tradition for the last several years, we’ve compiled the five most intriguing articles published by Business Technology & Digital Transformation Strategies this year for today’s Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members. Your questions and comments not only make it possible to create lists like this, they help focus Cutter’s Senior Consultants’ research on the areas that are most important to organizations like yours. So please keep your feedback coming.
Top Intriguing Cutter Business Technology Journal Articles for 2020
Karen Coburn
This Advisor takes a look at the most intriguing articles of 2020 from the Cutter Business Technology Journal.
Top Intriguing Business & Enterprise Architecture Articles for 2020
Karen Coburn
As has been our tradition for the last several years, we’ve compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Business & Enterprise Architecture practice for today’s Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members. Your questions and comments not only make it possible to create lists like this, they help focus Cutter’s Senior Consultants’ research on the areas that are most important to organizations like yours. So please keep your feedback coming.
Top Intriguing Data Analytics & Digital Technologies Articles for 2020
Karen Coburn
As has been our tradition for the last several years, we’ve compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Data Analytics & Digital Technologies practice this year for today’s Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients and those that created controversy among Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows.
IT Development as a Production Line? A Q&A
Jon Ward
In a recent webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Jon Ward explained how shifting to IT development production lines, managed in the same way as car manufacturers manage their vehicle production processes, can improve delivery in an organization. In this Advisor, we share some of the answers to questions participants asked about how the concept of an IT development production line enables organizational learning and greater delivery efficiency.
What’s the Holdup? Digitization in the Financial Services Industry
Bhavik Pathak
The information-dominant financial services (FS) industry has witnessed fractional, fragmented, and transactional digitization compared to entertainment, transportation, travel, lodging, and retail. The FS industry is heavily regulated, consolidated, and has already-built digital capabilities; while the fintech pure plays have shown efficiency, many are built on the same business models as the traditional FS businesses. Thus, a genuinely disruptive model challenging the prominent incumbents of the FS industry has not yet emerged.
Measuring Culture Change for Successful DevSecOps Implementation
Kristin Curran, David Lipton, Steven Woodward
How does one measure culture? How can measures and metrics be used to influence positive culture change? Cultural measurement needs to focus on evaluating outcomes and processes that reflect behavior change. Two major types of measures that provide valuable perspectives are business outcome and enabling metrics, and we can apply both measurement types to culture change.
How Would an Industry Reference Model Help Me?
Serge Thorn
My previous Advisors referred to the use of business capability modeling and heat maps to better focus on business areas that require attention for an IT rationalization. In this Advisor, I expand on the use of reference models, what they are, and why to consider them.
Big Data, ML, and Geo Mapping for Real-Time Traffic Monitoring and Analysis
Curt Hall
Increasingly, government agencies, businesses, universities, and other organizations are working together to build AI systems that analyze geo-mapped and other location-based data. One such impressive new ML application uses Uber driver data to track and alleviate urban traffic congestion. It is designed to give urban transportation analysts and traffic engineers access to information about city traffic patterns in order to relieve bottlenecks, chokepoints and other problems.
Navigating Workplace Employment Toward Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Ebonye Gussine Wilkins
Even when responses to diversity, equity, and inclusion disparities are obligatory, we’re still missing the mark. Truth is, we have most of the pieces. We’re not applying the knowledge that we have, which is why we’re missing the big picture. This Advisor considers how businesses navigate employment.
Exploring the Boundaries of Automation in Software
Erik Fogg
One of the key advances in software development in recent years has been the automation of many tasks and services. Contemporary software automation goes far beyond simple task runners and is now beginning to augment artificial intelligence and machine learning into the process, which further widens the scope of what can be automated. However, not all tasks in software development are well suited to automation, and not all tasks should be automated. Where do you draw the line, and where is software automation most useful for developers?
Leveraging Business Architecture for Global Change
Whynde Kuehn
While every UN member state should use the SDGs for framing their agendas and political policies, the responsibility and potential for meeting these goals also lies with every individual and organization. This includes governments, non-profit organizations, and even for-profit businesses, which can be a powerful mechanism for change.
Take a Look at 4 Layers of Data Architecture and Data Quality
Rich Huebner
It takes a lot more than rugged and hardened data architecture to ensure data quality. One way of thinking about data quality issues as they relate to data architecture is to examine and address them through a layered approach described in this Advisor.
Pandemic Disruptions: Financial Services Respond
Bhavik Pathak
The unemployment and income instability caused by COVID-19 has resulted in many people having difficulty meeting their credit obligations and many industries struggling to run their operations. Worldwide, governments and businesses have taken steps with exceptional speed to match this pandemic‘s unprecedented nature.
Tools to Use: How an Annual Report Can Offer Clues to Risk
Noah Barsky
Often overlooked as financial filings to meet regulatory requirements, company annual reports provide an endless well of insight about how and how well companies articulate and integrate business strategy with risk management and performance measurement.
The Agile Digital Culture
Jon Ward
Unless an organization pursues a strategy of innovation for its own sake, then digital era products and services are still subject to the marketing lifecycle with profitability and reward appearing in the market growth and maturity stages. This means that organizations need to create structures and a culture within which they can simultaneously innovate and deliver the new inventions. There needs to be a marriage of innovation expense control and revenue generation. So how does a modern leader engender such a culture?
Pandemic or Not, Automation Is More Necessary Than Ever
Curt Hall
In this Advisor, we take a look at how COVID-19 is affecting automation efforts, based on findings from an ongoing Cutter Consortium survey on intelligent process automation.
Drawn from Nature: 9 Properties of Complex Adaptive Systems as a Tool for Change
Roger Sweetman, Kieran Conboy
In nature, apparently robust systems can be disrupted by a single new invasive species, while other systems can retain their resilience despite a sustained assault. The behavior of such systems can be explained by the interdisciplinary theory of complex adaptive systems (CAS). This Advisor describes how we can use CAS theory to support organizational change.
How Do We Pay for That? Budgeting Trends for IPA in the Enterprise
Curt Hall
Our findings indicate that 2021 looks to be the year that organizations really get serious with their IPA efforts. Consequently, we should expect to see more organizations move beyond the experimentation stages and start developing and deploying new IPA applications into production environments.