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.

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.

Better Transparency and Fairness in AI Systems

Curt Hall
Neural-symbolic artificial intelligence (AI) combines the pattern-recognition and pattern-matching capabilities of neural networks with the symbolic-reasoning functionality and transparency features of rule-based and knowledge-based systems (KBSs). One of the main goals of neural-symbolic AI is the development of hybrid AI systems that are more explainable and transparent in their reasoning.

Capturing the AI-Powered RPA Opportunity: A CSP Example

Agron Lasku, Louise Sjöholm, Tor Berglund
Robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) are complementary – when implemented together they enlarge the scale of value that can be created. In this Advisor, we share some practical insight into how communication service providers (CSPs) and other organizations can embark on the AI-powered RPA opportunity.

Why Does Agile Fail?

Matt Ganis, Michael Ackerbauer, Nicholas Cariello

There are a variety of circumstances that can cause Agile methodologies to struggle to gain a firm foot­hold in many organizations. We believe the most prevalent issue surrounding adoption (or lack thereof) is the misunderstanding of many Agile practices and techniques, a key component of which is the lack of understanding of the underlying reason why it is necessary to perform certain practices.


Adapting Organizational Structures to Drive Digital Transformation

Jonas Andrén, Lokesh Dadhich, Johan Treutiger
This Advisor explores a key question regarding digital transformation among analog-native companies: how can these businesses adapt their organizational structures to accelerate the transformation and build digital maturity?

5 Steps to an Effective BA Process

Brian Cameron
Leading organizations leverage BA not only to articulate and detail their business strategy, but also to create guidance that drives business and IT execution toward that future-state vision. Business architects can succeed only if they support BA in conjunction and in collaboration with, and maybe integrated with, other closely related disciplines, including business analysis, strategic planning, and portfolio management.

Raising the Bar: A Proposal for Improving Virtual Trust

David Tayouri
While the current level of trust may be satisfactory for some uses, we must secure a higher level of trust when accessing personal sensitive data. Establishing a trusted Web layer, in which users are uniquely identified and thoroughly authenticated, reduces the lack of trust issue.

First Change the Culture: Managing Organizational Risk

Jim Highsmith
Effective risk management begins with a culture in which reality isn’t overwhelmed by hubris. No project manager can be a good risk manager in a political environment in which executives are so gung ho that it blinds them from the reality. Effective risk management requires that executives and project managers make hard tradeoff decisions as the speculative hypotheses we call plans are smashed against the reality of the rough-and-tumble business world.

Cross-Functional Teams: Closing the Gap Between Business and IT

Jonas Fagerlund
Several fundamental Agile principles drive behaviors that can improve an organization’s ability to make use of its data. One of the Agile behaviors that is key in identifying and analyzing data, and eventually for designing a solution, is the use of cross-functional teams.

Tackling Digital Transformation? Go the Whole Way!

Jutta Eckstein, John Buck
Digital transformation needs to address the whole company as part of the larger strategy. Transforming the digital aspects of your company means transforming the whole company.

Centering Architecture Decisions: The Architectural Spirit Level

Balaji Prasad
There is a space within which we operate. There is also a time window through which we peer into the world. There may be a broader universe that contains more of space and more of time, but that would be of little concern to us because the only universe that realistically matters is the little piece of it that we have carved out for ourselves, out of the vast spaces and time horizons of the broader one. And therein lies the architect’s challenge: Where are we operating in the space-time continuum? And are we sure that this is where we would like to be? This Advisor introduces an architectural tool that helps the enterprise center itself.

Intelligent Process Automation Is at the Ready

Curt Hall
According to Cutter Consortium research, organizations are using NLP and advanced imaging to add conversational computing and intelligent document processing capabilities to RPA platforms — enhancing their RPA deployments with more advanced process automation capabilities.

The Quest for Digital Equilibrium: A Case Study

Fabian Sempf, Fabian Doemer, Volker Pfirsching
A major player in the transportation and logistics industry recently conducted a digital shift over an extended period. The program was initiated by the IT department, with the clear goal of making the organization more digital and finding its digital equilibrium. This introduces a key question: is the IT department really the best place to start when it comes to digitalization?

(Re)Defining the Game: From Methods and Tools to Principles and Mindset

Erik Schon
Tools and methods can work in some contexts but not others. If you have your own principles and mindset, then you can adapt or create your own methods and tools to fit your context. Once we realized this, we made a mental leap from a focus on methods and tools to a focus on principles and mindset.

CX Practices and Technologies: Help or Hype?

Curt Hall
In a recent survey, Cutter Consortium asked organizations whether their customer experience (CX) practices and technologies are meeting or beating company expectations. We also sought to answer the following question: can organizations that have deployed these CX practices and technologies deliver a better customer experience and journey?

Business Architecture's Key Role Across Strategy Execution Lifecycle

Whynde Kuehn
Business architecture is a critical — and typically missing — bridge between strategy and execution. Organizations should leverage it to translate strategies and other business direction and collectively architect, prioritize, and plan actions to be taken from a business-driven, enterprise-wide perspective. Indeed, business architecture and business architects contribute unique value across the strategy execution lifecycle, as well as connect other teams and help them be more effective.

Take the Next Step: Trust the Data

Philippe Flichy
Transforming all the data we generate into insights requires many steps. For someone to have the confidence level to use the resulting information and insights, these data manipulations must be trusted. In this Advisor, we review these steps.

To Build and Sustain Momentum in a Digital Shift, Communicate!

Paul Clermont
As we explore the idea of “making a digital shift,” it’s important to examine the ways to keep up the momentum and stay on track in managerial, not technical, terms. The premise is that, as with a paint job, meticulous preparation is essential to success. From the earliest days, partial successes and outright failures litter the history of digital shifts, with write-offs running into 10 figures on some government projects.

Agile in Balance: Collaboration and Specialization

Jim Highsmith
The myth surrounding Agile projects goes something like this: a small team of developers who can handle any coding task (database, business logic, user interface, middleware, etc.) works hand-in-hand with the end user who talks with the development team about the details of the work requirements. The small-team-filled-with-generalists model may work for some small projects, but it doesn’t scale. The problem has been with confusing two parts of the traditional development problem: collaboration and specialized skills.

Predicting Pandemic Spread with COVID-19 Secondary Data

Kaushik Dutta, Arindam Ray
In this Advisor, we take a closer look at another type of important COVID-19 data: secondary data, which can help with future pandemic predictions.

So Much Data

Roger Evernden
The volume of data available within an enterprise — and externally to it — is phenomenal. As a consequence, the role of information architecture has evolved, from the passive structuring and managing of data to a smarter, more active role of information effectiveness.

The Doctor Is In: Using Machine Learning Tools in a Pandemic

Curt Hall
Researchers at hospitals, universities, and technical institutes are teaming up to apply artificial intelligence, machine learning, and analytics to help determine and predict COVID-19 patients’ hospitalization paths and medical needs.

Implementing Industrial Agile in Your Organization

Peter Borsella, Hubert Smits
The Industrial Agile Framework is a framework for applying Agile to physical product delivery. It pulls together everything that’s needed to design and mass produce a product, beginning with an idea and including design, components, supplier considerations, manufacturing, and everything in between. With Industrial Agile, you can change directions while working on product development and you don’t have to go back to square one. And, as with Agile for software, inspecting early and often means finding and fixing errors before they become excessively costly. At the end of their recent webinar on the Industrial Agile Framework, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultants Hubert Smits and Peter Borsella responded to some questions that you may be wondering about as well.

What to Do in a Pandemic: Managing Risk with AI and ML

Tom Teixeira, Craig Wylie
Established risk management methodologies and approaches tend to be static in nature and lead to models that are backward-looking. During the COVID-19 crisis, many companies have found their decision-making tools and dashboards for crisis management and business continuity to be inadequate given the geographic scale of the disruption. New risk models look ahead by utilizing AI and ML and can be continually updated as more data becomes available. In the first in a series of webinars, Tom Teixeira, Carl Bate, and Craig Wylie answered some questions about what risk management looks like in this changing business landscape.

Beyond Automation: AI, ML & RPA — An Introduction

San Murugesan
This month's issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal (CBTJ) examines the new face of automation and explores novel ways to address the various issues and challenges encountered.