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.

Using EA to Confront Digital Disruption: A Q&A with Roger Evernden

Roger Evernden
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.

Life and Death in a Time of Pandemic, Part I

Barry Devlin
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.

Scaling Agile Right in Large Companies, Part I

Volker Pfirsching, Marc Droste, Michael Opitz
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.

Weathering the COVID-19 Storm: An Oil & Gas Q&A

Rodolfo Guzman, Daniel Monzon
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.

Tackling Transport Supply Chain Issues with Blockchain

Petter Kilefors, Fabian Doemer, Ingrid af Sandeberg, Tomislav Andric, Philipp Mudersbach
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.

Cloud Data Warehouses: A Paradigm Shift in Data Platforms

Sagar Gole, Kamal Gupta, Vidyasagar Uddagiri
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.

What’s New: Safeguarding IoT Devices and Applications

Curt Hall
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.

Challenging Trends Require Agility for Successful Supply Chain Operations

Niklas Brundin, Bo Lenerius
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.

Applying Residuality Theory for Better Software Design

Barry M O'Reilly
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.

A 3-Step Approach to Designing Architecture Functions

Svyatoslav Kotusev
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.

Take Charge: Intelligent Automation Governance

Daniel Power, Ciara Heavin, Shashidhar Kaparthi
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.

Top 3 Challenges to CX Adoption in the Enterprise

Curt Hall
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.

Trust in Me? Misinformation in Decentralized Social Media

Panagiotis Monachelis, Panagiotis Kasnesis, Charalampos Patrikakis, Xing Liang, Ryan Heartfield, George Loukas, Nelson Escravana, Soulla Louca
A primary motivation of decentralized social media is censorship resistance, often achieved through anonymity. But anonymity comes with a price. Checking the reliability and trustworthiness of information is much harder with anonymous information. In this Advisor, we present a brief overview of two main under­lying technologies that help in decentralization while still providing a degree of trust between networked entities: (1) P2P social networks and (2) blockchain technology.

Is a Long-Term WFH Strategy Really Necessary?

Mark Lee
Even those who recognize the advantages of a cloud-based remote access platform over a VPN might argue that the current WFH solution is a temporary anomaly. In that case, why not just muddle through with a VPN until things get back to normal?

Engaging Enterprise Architects in Acquisitions

Stefan Henningsson, Gustav Toppenberg
We have typically found in the acquisition process that EA is primarily a technical capability and engaged in a constrained fashion. In most firms, the EA team does not possess the necessary critical business knowledge and, therefore, is not able to contribute to the acquisition process through direct engagement. At some pioneering firms, however, the reformation of EA has explicitly aimed to build a business strategy competence in the EA team by giving enterprise architect roles the responsibility for business and operations architectures.

How Do You Feel About That? Emotion Recognition in Speech Applications

Curt Hall
An important trend is the development of emotion recognition technology for speech-based systems with the goal of optimized customer engagement while providing an enhanced customer experience.

A Paradigm Shift in Healthcare, Part II

Vikas Kharbanda, Samir Imran, Regien Sumo, Nitin Kenkere, Louay Saleh
A new wave of innovation within healthcare is driving the need for more advanced, robust, and scalable hospital information systems (HIS). Healthcare providers — hospitals, in particular — are starting to reorient their investments in core technologies and how technology vendors are adapting their solutions and services to meet these needs. Here in Part II of this two-part series of Advisors, we look at three challenges of digitalization as well as eight key trends changing the HIS solution space.

Off the Top of Your Head: Tackling Cognitive Issues in Estimation

Vince Kellen
Despite research limitations, the psychological basis for estimation biases is much clearer now than several decades ago, and these insights can have a positive impact on the practice of project management.

Digital Success Through Strong EA

Stefan Henningsson, Gustav Toppenberg
Leaders peering over the edge of the horizon of their own and adjacent industries might wonder, “What are companies that have achieved digital success doing differently?” 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.

Evolving Your API Platform

James Higginbotham
Enterprises are expanding their API programs to include the broader concerns of enterprise architecture. In this Advisor, we describe some next steps for evolving your API platform.

The Cybersecurity Management Cycle

Feng Xu, Xin Luo
To mitigate cybersecurity threats, it is essential to understand the cycle of infor­ma­tion security governance and control: preparation, prevention, detection, response, and learning. This information security management cycle provides important guidance to organizations dealing with security incidents. However, in the con­text of Industry 4.0, these five tasks present different challenges. This Advisor explores the challenges of cybersecurity management.

A Paradigm Shift in Healthcare, Part I

Vikas Kharbanda, Samir Imran, Regien Sumo, Nitin Kenkere, Louay Saleh
In this two-part Advisor series, we illustrate how healthcare providers — hospitals, in particular — are starting to reorient their investments in core technologies and how technology vendors are adapting their solutions and services to meet these needs. Here in Part I, we focus on the key features of this paradigm shift.

Project to Product: Fact or Fiction?

Jon Ward
What are the ramifications of moving from a project orientation to a process or product orientation? First, an organization needs to establish an efficient means of production. It must create a funding model and a value stream equipped and staffed with people able to deliver its software requirements. Then the organization must manage the flow of work into that development value stream. The concept of flow is critical to value stream performance. Lean manufacturing principles have established that an overloaded value stream slows down the rate of delivery, increases costs, and decreases quality.

Crisis Alert! Strategies for Today & Beyond — An Introduction

Steve Andriole
This issue of CBTJ discusses various aspects of corporate crisis management and how business technology can help companies deal with crises of all kinds, but especially those that change everything. Remember that corporate crisis planning and management is a continuous activity that must be acknowledged and well-funded.

Connecting People to the Data

Martijn ten Napel
Data is not a resource. Data is the breadcrumb trail of human activities. Like a true breadcrumb trail, it indicates the activity but never fully describes it. Data doesn’t fall out of the sky like manna from heaven; it cannot be mined like cobalt, either. Data is a residue of activity, and when you think about data in this way, you can envision a data management practice where you start to fully focus on the activities that bring you value and, therefore, the data you need to collect.