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.
EA Programs: Prove Your Value in Digital Transformation Efforts
Avinash Malik
In the enterprise architecture (EA) anti-pattern described in this Advisor, the EA team primarily functions to review projects in the architecture review board (ARB). Each IT project is given a series of standards that it is expected to meet, and at various checkpoints in the software development process, the project team submits a document to the ARB for review. Your enterprise architects are there to be, essentially, a “forcing function.”
3 Ways to Keep Your Options Open
Olivier Pilot, Michael Papadopoulos, Michael Eiden
While it is impossible to predict the future, the ability to adapt to what we already know is most likely to prompt a solution’s future pivot can make the difference between an elegantly evolving architecture and one that must be thrown away. In our experience, the patterns and techniques discussed in this Advisor are useful for keeping our digital and data architectures open to changes.
The Opportunities of Next-Generation Innovative Business Modeling
Zion Schum, Isaiah Morales, Roger Yin
The next generation of business and associated business models is being ushered in by blockchain’s versatility in creating and exchanging value. The opportunities are boundless, but first we must transition from our current infrastructure. Today, the data network protocols establish the rules of the Internet and facilitate its use. Most of the value these protocols create is absorbed by just a few companies — either by operating and distributing Internet access or governing the applications that make it easier to use. Only recently has blockchain emerged to offer businesses the chance to capture the value that will come from next-generation Internet protocols.
Ingredients for Enterprise Agility, Part I: The Countdown to Enterprise Agility
Jon Ward
This article is the first in a series of Advisors that will outline some of my lessons from leading Agile transformations. Getting started with Agile involves some organizational preparation; hence, the countdown to enterprise agility is the subject of this Advisor.
Digital Transformation: Shifting the Mindset from Cost to Investment
Sunny Ray, Joab Meyer, Karl Johnson
We have set out to “demystify digital transformation” through interviews with a cross-section of senior leaders at seven firms in a variety of industries. As we conduct our research, a comprehensive view of how mindsets must evolve to enable this transformation within firms is emerging. One of our most prominent initial observations centers on the digital mindsets of leaders; this mindset determines whether an organization’s digital transformation gains traction or flounders.
DevSecOps: 7 Metrics to Measure Culture Change
Kristin Curran, David Lipton, Steven Woodward
Organizational culture change is disruptive, but along with implementing a DevSecOps culture, the integrated security, and the automation, the comfort we crave is just as accessible. Communication and transparency allow DevSecOps and organizational culture change to thrive, facilitating its continued relevance and growth. But how do we measure culture change? In this Advisor, we identify a logical set of seven incremental steps to measure culture change.
Find the Sweet Spot on the Path to an “Agile Architecture”
Svyatoslav Kotusev
Instead of trying random “Agile” or “traditional” planning approaches prescribed by famous industry gurus and institutions, organizations should consciously find their “sweet spots” along the various dimensions of agility. This path will save dollars.
Reducing Concerns with Confidential Computing, Part II: Products and Applications
Curt Hall
Confidential computing offers a hardware-based solution for protecting data in use, enabling organizations to confidently migrate their sensitive data to cloud platforms by allowing them to maintain complete control of the data and to meet or exceed government and industry regulations for protecting data in cloud environments. This Advisor examines some confidential computing products and applications that organizations have developed by leveraging the technology.
Learning to Lead Collective Creativity from Miles Davis
Daniel Hjorth, Robert Austin, Shannon Hessel
When you watch live video recordings of jazz legend Miles Davis, he walks among the assembled musicians on stage during performances, guiding the focus or center of gravity of the music that they collectively create; he performs leadership. As one’s belonging gets more distributed in networks, relations become key to achieving collective creativity. Leaders are challenged to develop within their teams the capability to act and respond as one entity greater than the sum of their parts — to sound with one voice.
Never Waste a Good Crisis! It’s Time for Innovation
Jutta Eckstein, John Buck
The challenge of being open to innovation is in breaking out of familiar patterns. A lot of what we do is guided by patterns. These patterns help us in a stable context but get in the way in a dynamic or complex context and hinder innovation. The first step in dealing with suboptimal patterns is to be aware that they are hard to see.
Using Wave Alignment to Achieve Successful Agile EA
Avinash Malik
This Advisor looks at “wave alignment,” a process used to accomplish the goals of Agile enterprise architecture (EA). Wave alignment is an addition to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), although the principles can be applied to any Agile development organization of size.
EA Is at the Heart of Digital Transformation
Stefan Henningsson, Gustav Toppenberg
We believe that at the heart of the ability to manage an ongoing and multilayered organizational transformation rests a sophisticated enterprise architecture capability with a specific charter to act as a transformation engine connecting strategic intent and execution excellence.
Reducing Concerns with Confidential Computing
Curt Hall
Confidential computing is a promising technology that seeks to solve one of the remaining impediments to greater cloud computing adoption and data security in general: how to protect data during processing. It also offers exciting possibilities for organizations to develop new collaborative applications.
Apply Residuality Theory to Improve Systems: A Q&A with Barry M. O’Reilly
Barry OReilly
In a recent webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Barry M. O’Reilly introduced a new way to model systems in complex environments — residuality theory. In this Advisor, we share some questions asked at the end of the webinar about using residue as an alternative building block that enables software systems designers to consider the entire environment and its complex interdependencies without slowing down the design process, delivering benefits to both architecture and risk management practices.
5 Ways to Forecast Your Cloud Spend
Frank Contrepois
Do you need a forecast of your cloud spend? In this Advisor, I investigate five cloud spend forecast methods, with their pros and cons, to help you make a choice.
Analyzing EA Through the Strategic Planning Process
Svyatoslav Kotusev
An enterprise architecture (EA) practice can be best viewed and analyzed in terms of three distinct EA-related processes: (1) strategic planning, (2) initiative delivery, and (3) technology optimization. This Advisor takes a closer look at the first process: strategic planning.
How Parler May Have Hedged Its Architectural Bets
Balaji Prasad
Risk is not just about what we do; it is also inherent in what we don’t do. Standing still while the world moves can be as dangerous as moving out of step with real events. Architecture, too, like everything else, has risk, and it is probabilistic in nature.
Life and Data in a Time of Pandemic, Part IV
Barry Devlin
During the past year, the application of technology to well-bounded problems proved its strengths in the impressively rapid R&D that delivered multiple vaccines in a previously unheard of time frame. The challenging transition from R&D and production to distribution has, however, once again proven that project and change management issues are often more challenging than product development.
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.