The COVID-19 pandemic has led to sizable disruptions in international economic activity, impacting all industries, although at different magnitudes. It is now time for decision makers to expand their focus beyond immediate crisis management to actions that will strengthen their competitive play in the medium and long term. In this Advisor series, we take a look at the telecom, media, and technology sectors, in particular, which show relatively strong resilience to the adverse impact of COVID-19. Here in Part I, we begin with the COVID-19 impact to the consumer electronics and media world.

I’ve always hoped to make risk-adjusted project schedule commit­ments while having teams buy in to working toward more aggressive target schedules. And I wanted to do so in support of the notion that great organizations must continuously strive to do more with less. This might sound contradictory, but it does not need to be — not if an organization also practices (and assimilates the results of) proactive risk management with the use of schedule risk analysis modeling and simulation tools and techniques.

An architecture is designed collaboratively. Architects are also, sometimes, part of the collaborative process. Yes, “also, sometimes, part of.” The collaborative nature of architecture in enterprises is what makes it so challenging, intriguing, and even vexing to those who are entangled in what is a very multidimensional process.

Advances in blockchain technology have been unwavering. Thanks to a slew of current and emerging trends, blockchain is now viewed as a mature and accessible technology and business solution for those seeking to make transactions with greater security, transparency, speed, efficiency, and cost savings. In a Cutter Consortium webinar earlier this year, Karolina Marzantowicz revealed some new blockchain-based innovations — such as the growth of global blockchain consortiums, stablecoins, digital currencies, new service offerings from big tech giants, and decentralized finance platforms — that are revolutionizing the banking and finance industry by transforming both the business and consumer experience in positive ways. In this Advisor, we share six questions asked at the end of the webinar that may help you in your blockchain journey.

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. We recommend managers and companies consider the four types of learning technology for workforce training, professional development, and onboarding described in this Advisor.

In the third installment of their webinar series, “Using AI/Machine Learning to Manage Risk,” Cutter Senior Consultants Carl Bate, Craig Wylie, and Tom Teixeira answered some questions about new risk models that utilize artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to understand and respond to the changing business landscape.

This Advisor explores long-term and short-term solutions to the issues posed by the "four horsemen" of not-so-strategic HR practices.

As business architecture gains more and more attention and adoption worldwide, every once in a while it can be useful to lift up, step back, and refresh on a few key concepts. If you’re new to the discipline, these will help you to accelerate your understanding and navigate the wealth of information available. If you’re experienced with the discipline, these will help you to ensure alignment with the latest and greatest evolution. This Advisor lays out the top five foundational things you need to know about business architecture.

The RPA vendors have taken considerable interest in IPA. Over the past year, many have been adding (to varying degrees) AI technologies — particularly ML, NLP, smartbots, and advanced imaging — to their platforms to provide intelligent capabilities necessary to automate more complex processes and tasks that are beyond the scope of what is possible using only conventional RPA tools. This, in effect, has allowed the RPA providers to try and position their products as a familiar platform for organizations to segue AI into their operations.

Even as digital tools recast the entire healthcare industry model, old problems remain, especially in the centralized and technologically inefficient modes of data management. That’s where good data software testing and quality assurance come into play in the form of test automation. As automation becomes the software development standard for revenue-minded companies, regular testing is required to make sure productivity and security activities are above board.

Being capable to react to change with agility is a key requirement for all companies onboarding digital business models or digital products and processes. And when it comes to competing and staying relevant, agility is becoming a necessity. Large companies, however, appear to face a plethora of challenges with balancing agility and stability. Here in Part II of this two-part Advisor, we answer the question of how to learn and adapt after the pilot launch of an end-to-end Agile process and provide concrete examples of how large corporations have overcome imminent obstacles.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed unprecedented challenges to businesses across all sectors and throughout the world. Risk management systems and contingency measures have been put to the test, and as is so often seen in moments of crisis, many have been found wanting. The result? A real need now exists to determine what is meant by business resilience and how to apply it to organizations’ different operating models.

In his on-demand webinar, “EA in the Face of Digital Disruption,” Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Roger Evernden explored some of the issues enterprise architects are facing with digital disruption. He tackled how organizations and entire industries must rethink value — creating and capturing it ­— to meet the challenges that digital brings to our lives. In this Advisor, we share some of the questions addressed in the Q&A portion of the webinar.

Applying a simplistic algorithm to inadequate data fails to deliver expected exam grades as the pandemic exposes flawed thinking and underlying bias in the education system.

A big cause of failure for large organizations is the attempt to apply one of the many off-the-shelf Agile models. These typically work well for small companies, but not so much in large corporate settings. In Part I of this two-part Advisor, we explore the first half of a four-part framework to scale and customize a tailored Agile approach that caters to an organization’s specific requirements, beginning with assessing your needs in the understand phase. We then describe how picking building blocks from the many Agile concepts available will shape a working model according to the needs of your enterprise.

In a recent webinar, Cutter Senior Consultant Rodolfo Guzmán and Daniel Monzón offered insight into what O&G companies need to focus on for the best chance to weather the COVID-19 storm. They also answered questions from participants about digital strategies and technologies that will support such transformations in their organizations.

A recent survey by Arthur D. Little and Blockchain in Transport Alliance confirms that blockchain users within the transport industry believe that the technology facilitates greater transparency and efficiency, resolving key challenges around inefficiency and information asymmetry among supply chain players.

Enterprises need access to data-driven insights faster than ever before. Analytics use cases have evolved from traditional, precanned reports to self-service and guided analytics. Enterprises exploring solutions to these challenges are steadily embracing the cloud data warehouse. These platforms provide agility, scalability, and simplicity that enable the enterprise to focus on data solutions rather than spending valuable effort on peripheral overheads.

The number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices — ranging from connected consumer products like smart speakers, TVs, refrigerators, and stoves to sensor-enabled industrial machinery and business equipment — continues to proliferate, but many of these devices lack strong built-in security features. This Advisor considers the application of AI and blockchain technologies for strengthening the cybersecurity capabilities of IoT devices and networking environments as well as future developments in this area.

To tackle the high and unpredictable demand volatility, lean production is not enough. Instead, manufacturing companies must improve responsiveness or, in other words, become Agile. In this Advisor, we focus on the production unit.

While the software industry is currently grappling with ideas of complexity and resilience, there has been very little in the way of concrete actions or activities that software engineers can use to actually design systems. Residuality theory answers this need and draws on complexity science and the history of software engineering to propose a new set of design techniques that make it possible to integrate these two fields.

My studies of enterprise architecture (EA) practices in multiple diverse organizations have identified several consistent patterns describing the size and structure of architecture functions that companies tend to find optimal for their needs. We can use these empirically observed generalities to synthesize a simple, heuristic three-step approach for designing organization-specific architecture functions.

Intelligent automation applications are reaching the point where both organizations and governments must create policies regulating the use of and the liability associated with using smart technologies.

This Advisor looks at three of the challenges facing customer experience (CX) initiatives in the enterprise: problems providing seamless CX across all customer channels, a lack of CX professionals in the organization, and difficulty defining/mapping CX.