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.
Driving Change: A Case Study in Banking
Jagdish Bhandarkar, Namratha Rao
Many classic change management models fail to consider the significant dimensions of technology and innovation. This Advisor shares a case study involving a bank that developed key performance indicators to track all dimensions of change, enabling the bank to constantly improve its capability to implement change.
Fintech: COVID-19 Impact & Opportunities for Economic Growth — An Introduction
Kevin O'Leary, Philip O'Reilly
In this issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal (CBTJ), we examine the role that fintech will play in facilitating economic recovery and growth.
Using Heat Maps to Better Drive the Rationalization of Your IT Landscape, Part II
Serge Thorn
In my last Advisor, “Using Heat Maps to Better Drive the Rationalization of Your IT Landscape,” I introduced the use of business capability heat maps to better focus on business areas that require attention. This Advisor further illustrates the approach and offers next steps in sharing your organization’s evolution with stakeholders.
Reskilling and Retraining During and After COVID-19
Cui Zou, Wangchuchu Zhao, Keng Siau
A “next normal” is undoubtedly going to emerge once the COVID-19 pandemic slows down or resolves. But while the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted the economy and work routines, it also provides opportunities for organizations to implement continuous learning and make progress toward upskilling and reskilling employees.
The Treasure Chest at the Nexus of Strategy, Risk, and Performance
Noah Barsky
While strategy, risk, and metrics coexist tangentially in many organizations, the nexus of the three reflects the degree to which management thinks and acts proactively.
Mastering Strategic Capability Management
Carlos Mira, Juan Gonzalez, Gregory Pankert, Florence Carlot, Rafael Martínez
Businesses have traditionally organized themselves to ensure optimal effectiveness in each of their business functions. In today’s business climate, however, shorter product lifecycles, demand for customization, rising consumer expectations, and the growth of automation and data challenge this model. This Advisor describes the building blocks of generic capabilities and describes three categories of capability-based players seeking competitive advantage.
What Is the Chief Scientist’s Role in Research and Technology Organizations?
Gonzalo Libano, Ben Thuriaux, Philip Webster
The chief scientific officer — or CSO — plays a key role in research and technology organizations (RTOs), ensuring scientific leadership, setting medium- to long-term strategy, and influencing scientific investment, among other roles. In a recent study, Arthur D. Little (ADL) set out to understand the full scope of the CSO position in RTOs across the globe.
Racial Equity in the Workplace: Stop Lying and Stick to Your Values!
Nicole Price
If you believe the undisputed research about diversity, equity, and inclusion improving outcomes, then ensure your behaviors match. If you value the importance of living in alignment with your values, then show the proof.
Using Heat Maps to Better Drive the Rationalization of Your IT Landscape
Serge Thorn
Heat mapping allows for high variability. It is a very universal approach to produce easy-to-read material that helps prepare decisions (e.g., for capability-based IT planning and IT rationalization). Heat maps may also show “hot spots” in the IT landscape and help communicate them.
Industry Trends: Strategy Plans for Adopting IPA
Curt Hall
Interest among organizations for developing detailed plans and strategies for adopting and disseminating intelligent process automation (IPA) technologies and practices is very high, pointing to accelerated adoption of IPA over the next 12-24 months.
Who's in It to Win It? Understanding the Healthcare Ecosystem
Helene Spjuth
Despite a lack of solid evidence, most stakeholders agree that the health economics of mHealth look compelling. If, however, mHealth implementation expands post-pandemic as an integral part of established healthcare over the long term, the question then becomes who should pay for mHealth. The answer relies primarily on two parameters: who benefits economically from mHealth and who bears the risks of healthcare costs.
Start Now to Shift Rapidly to Intentional Stillness!
Jutta Eckstein, John Buck
How well is your company dealing with the pandemic? As the pandemic crisis deepened and all your business plans were invalidated rapidly, you probably tried to experiment and innovate at high speed. Experimenting can easily be done as an undirected action if there is no reflection happening. Only reflection allows us to come up with experiments that are based on an hypothesis (drawn from both experience and theory). Then we can innovate — by understanding how to measure the experiments in order to (in-)validate our hypothesis.
Cultivating Diversity & Inclusion in the Workplace — An Introduction
Carla Ogunrinde
This issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal dives deeper and looks at diversity, equity, and inclusion from different angles with the help of seven stellar voices who lend their expertise to educate, examine, enumerate, and offer solutions.
EA Is a Tool for Successful Acquisitions
Stefan Henningsson, Gustav Toppenberg
Organizational transformations come in many forms, including divestures, joint ventures, taking a business public or private, and general market reorientations. Here, we explain EA in relation to one type of strategic transformation: acquisitions. Acquisitions are one way that businesses seeking to digitize use to accelerate the journey to their destination and, in our experience, to specifically complement their innovation-management pipeline.
Are Organizations Benefiting from Their IPA Efforts?
Curt Hall
Cutter Consortium has been conducting a survey examining how organizations are adopting or planning to adopt intelligent process automation. According to our initial findings, approximately one-fifth of surveyed organizations are currently using IPA platforms and technologies, while another 20% plan to do so sometime within the next 12 months.
4 Cornerstones for Blockchain Implementation
Petter Kilefors, Fabian Doemer, Ingrid af Sandeberg, Tomislav Andric, Philipp Mudersbach
Since coming into prominence within financial services applications via technologies like cryptocurrencies and digital asset exchange, the race to find breakthrough applications in blockchain in other industries has been intense. However, despite major investments in knowledge, PoCs, and pilots, the results and value generated from these efforts remain modest, and it remains unclear whether blockchain technology really is the silver bullet that companies have hoped for. This is particularly true in the transport industry, identified early on as a promising area for blockchain applications due to its large number of independent but linked players, decentralized nature, and need to deal with issues like verifying authenticity and improving traceability and transparency, all while reducing transaction costs. In this Advisor, we share four cornerstones for executives in transport and many other industries to follow.
Transform Your Business with Today’s Low-Code/No-Code Solutions
Greg Smith, Michael Papadopoulos, Joshua Sanz, Michael Grech, Heather Norris
Examine today’s low-code/no-code (LC/NC) solutions — declarative development options with relatively low learning curves that provide a company’s workforce with the tools needed to easily create software to grow and transform the business.
Aligning EA with Digital Transformation
Avinash Malik
If your enterprise architecture (EA) program is not engaged in digital transformation, I offer some advice that comes from successful cases where an EA program overcame the situation that had it sidelined and was brought in to an already running digital transformation.
Architecture’s Twilight Zone
Balaji Prasad
The architecture of architecture itself is multi-layered, just as architecture layers the things it represents in the real world in ways that we can understand and deal with. Some parts of architecture are easier to work with than others. This Advisor points to the need for a deeper understanding of the muddled middle of architecture.
Life and Data in a Time of Pandemic, Part III
Barry Devlin
A decade ago, social media was broadly perceived as driving innovation, enabling social inclusion, and — in some loosely defined sense — as a force for good. In 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become something of a pariah, at least in the eyes of those who propose or long for rational, balanced, and successful campaigns to manage and control the disease. What went wrong?
Confronting Risk: Why Do We Ignore Expert Advice? How Can We Get People to Better Follow It?
Laurel Austin
Today, people across the globe are sharing the experience that the world is a very different place than it was just a few months ago. In this Advisor, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant and Ivey Business School Professor Laurel Austin discusses some of what we know about risk taking and risk prevention behaviors. In particular she considers the question of why people take risks that experts advise against. She discussed this a few months ago in her Cutter Consortium webinar, “Risk in the Time of Coronavirus,” which is available on the Cutter website.
Taking the Handoff: Using Value Stream Mapping to Visualize Your Process
Catherine Louis, Karen Smiley
Value stream mapping is a team event. Identification of wasteful handoffs inspires team members to consciously improve communication and collaboration, which positively impacts the quality culture.
Applying ML to Transform Clinical Operations Management
Ben van der Schaaf, Thomas Unger, Michael Eiden, Ben Enejo, Craig Wylie, Tom Teixeira, Richard Eagar
In this Advisor, we look at ADL’s COVID-19 Prediction Dashboard, which can enhance the ability of pharma companies to manage clinical trials effectively, during the pandemic and beyond.
Tuning Into the IT Landscape Using Business Capability Modeling
Serge Thorn
The use of business capability maps and an associated application landscape with functionalities are a great tool to identify what may be rationalized, consolidated, modernized, replaced, and retired. Starting with a baseline application landscape and related infrastructure, you will end up with a target application landscape and associated roadmaps.
Make It Better: How mHealth Can Benefit Clinical Trials
Ben van der Schaaf, Pan Xi
This Advisor provides a glimpse into the mHealth market and select innovations and benefits of mHealth adoption in clinical trials.