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.

Separating Myth from Reality in Software Projects

Danette McGilvray, Masha Bykin
Historically, many projects concentrated their efforts on people, process, and technology. However, a vast amount of projects still fail to fully address the data and information aspects of their efforts. Many projects have failed due to this oversight, while others have left a wake of data quality issues that put long-term burdens on business processes and subsequent projects. It is useful to understand some of the common yet erroneous beliefs associated with projects. Believing such myths has caused many projects to fail because project teams did not account for the reality in their plans and budget. In this Advisor, we examine some of these myths and realities, along with their solutions.

Your Path to BaaS: To Build or Buy?

Timothy Virtue
Adoption of innovative business models is essential for new market entrants. In the build-versus-buy debate, I vote for buy, but it’s important that the BaaS provider be a trusted partner, not simply a commodity supplier.

Grooming the Path to Data Governance and Quality

Danette McGilvray, Masha Bykin
When effective data governance and quality processes are paired with Agile methodologies, data definitions and quality measures can help produce clear and complete user stories.

Successful Digital Transformation: Q&A with Johan Treutiger

Johan Treutiger

In the Cutter Consortium on-demand webinar “4 Key Questions: What You Need to Consider for Successful Digital Transformation,” Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Johan Treutiger addresses four key questions over four key transformational areas your organization should consider to successfully achieve a digital transformation. In this Advisor, we share four questions asked at the end of the webinar that may help you in your transformation efforts.


Service Providers Need a Reality Check

Aluru Chandra
In this Advisor, we examine the first two levels of a maturity continuum — customer dissassifaction and customer satisfaction — and discuss the associated behaviors on the part of the service provider.

Use a Common Language to Break Down Silos

Christian Kaul, Lars Rönnbäck
The process of continuous siloization found in many organizations, and in almost all organizations above a certain size, means that the data that employees need to do their work is distributed over a large number of nonintegrated IT systems within different intracompany jurisdictions. We’ve come to the realization that the solution could be to put data modeling front and center. It just has to be done a bit differently than it has been done in the past.

Some Tools in the Toolbox: RPA, IPA, and COVID-19

Curt Hall

Hospitals, government agencies, and other organizations are struggling with process management and information processing issues that have been compounded by the novel coronavirus pandemic. They are turning to RPA and AI-based solutions — including smartbots and intelligent virtual assistants — to attempt to mitigate such concerns. From a market perspective, industry providers are moving rapidly to meet their needs, including offering solutions that hospitals and other organizations responding to the contagion can license for free. This Advisor explores some of the trends we are seeing to address these concerns.


Listen Up: The “Soft” Side of Remote Work Can Work

David Coleman

Although the technology for remote working (collaborative) has been around for 30 years, the adoption rate has been slow but steady. Now, all of a sudden, the adoption rate has shot up to almost 100%, as just about all nonessential industries are working remotely to help flatten the COVID-19 infection curve. This rapid adoption of remote working technologies has had a number of challenges.


An Open Blockchain Architecture to Monitor and Manage COVID-19 Patients

Claudio Lima

COVID-19 is spreading at fast speed, and time is of the essence to share, coordinate, and take actions to mitigate pandemic propagation. Current centralized database solutions solve part of the problem, but require an overarching and time-consuming coordination between multiple government and health authorities, including the entire chain of decision makers to collect test data, analyze/diagnostic, register, monitor, and enforce regulations and policies to isolate and monitor COVID-19 cases. Blockchain DLT technology solves the coordination challenges of broken healthcare centralized data lake silos, creating an open, trusted, immutable, and decentralized data architecture framework to speed up a multi-party, end-to-end COVID-19 data-sharing coordination process, while preserving patients’ data privacy.


COVID-19: How Are Workforces Evolving Through It?

Kaushik Dutta

COVID-19 has already had a massive impact on all our lives and is on track to continue doing so for some time. In this situation, technology is playing an increasing role in moving life and business forward. This will all have long-term, and potentially positive, impacts on society and how we run our lives.


Make It Work: Putting the EA Function to Work for Project Completion

Vince Kellen

A project can reconfigure the arrangement of distributed resources, human or otherwise, at any point in the lifecycle of the project, especially with the help of enterprise architecture (EA) to substantially rethink project technology and even organizational approaches. Projects can and should reinvent themselves.


Autonomous Systems: How Can They Help with COVID-19?

San Murugesan

We all are now experiencing a major unprecedented and unexpected crisis caused by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The situation we’re facing now is unseen previously, unanticipated, and unimaginable. Any help that we can enlist to emerge from this unprecedented crisis — and other potential crises we may encounter in the future — is worth pursuing. In this Advisor, let’s explore how autonomous technology can be employed in key areas to control and manage emergencies we face now.


Enterprise Agility: Use It or Lose It!

Jon Ward

Just as my trainer says in the gym, “Use it or lose it!” the same can be true of enterprise agility in the digital era. What are the organizational exercises — the squats and the pushups for an enterprise — that make a difference? Some of these, like adopting a new exercise regime, could be quite radical. Choosing new ways of working, changing organizational precepts, and focusing on continuous improvement could be some of the fundamental changes.


COVID-19: IT’s Fancy Fresh Hell

Lou Mazzucchelli

I don’t have to tell you about the impact of the coronavirus — you are feeling it. While we are all negatively affected personally, businesses are experiencing a spectrum of effects. Some are seeing an explosion of their e-commerce activities. Others are watching their business collapse as activities at all points in their supply chain slow down. Much has been written about dealing with explosive growth, so let’s focus on the downside case. This is where organizations show their true character.


Bolstering AI with Business Design

Mike Clark, Whynde Kuehn

This Advisor explores two key ways in which the concept of business design can help bolster artificial intelligence (AI): by improving the customer experience and by identifying and protecting the data that powers AI.


Lizards and COVID-19, Complexity, and Software Engineering

Barry M O'Reilly

Our role as software architects is, first and foremost, to stay in our lane; we are not epidemiologists and should not share our opinions about the right course of action for anyone other than ourselves. The resulting, emergent, unpredictable result of these millions of decisions will shape our future for a long time to come.


Blockchain’s Role in Mitigating the Impact of Coronavirus

Curt Hall

As the novel coronavirus contagion rages, governments and commercial enterprises are utilizing blockchain to better manage the disease and mitigate its impact. This Advisor explores how the pandemic is driving the use of blockchain technology across the globe.


Creating Working Agreements for Effective Teams

James Schiel

Working agreements establish the ground rules needed to encourage acceptable behavior, create depend­ability, and foster consistency in day-to-day work. They also signal the intent of the individual employees to work together as a team.


The Skies Are Opening for Drone Delivery

Helen Pukszta

With announcements on two regulations, one addressing the certification of unmanned aircraft and the other the certification of carriers using drones for delivery, the FAA revealed the regulatory framework that accom­modates commercial package delivery by drones.


One Size Does Not Fit All

Svyatoslav Kotusev

My studies of enterprise architecture 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. As we explore in this Advisor, we can use these empirically observed generalities to synthesize a simple, heuristic three-step approach for designing organization-specific architecture functions.


Architecture: Everything is Not Equal

Balaji Prasad

Everything is not equal. Are you able to separate the things that really really matter from those that are less significant? Is your definition of “architectural significance” clear enough to help your enterprise deal with different shades with different treatments?


Data Architecture — Out of the Lakehouse, Into the Lake

Barry Devlin

After a decade of data lakes, their architectural foundation is as muddy as ever.


Paving a Path to Innovation

Katia Passerini

In her on-demand webinar, “Innovation Models Across Industries: A Linear or Complex Path?” Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Katia Passerini considers innovation across many of the key sectors that are being — or will be — disrupted by technology. In this Advisor, we share some of the questions addressed in the Q&A portion of the webinar.


Projects as the Firm’s Emotional and Social Working Memory

Vince Kellen

Finding systemic solutions to emotional regulation and social problem solving should significantly improve project performance. This Advisor offers some ideas for project leaders to help solve problems linked to social and emotional cognition.


Digital Shift — An Introduction

Volker Pfirsching

To effectively manage this “digital shift,” enterprises must not only consider how business processes need to evolve, but also how the people within the enter­prise can become its advocates. More so even than technology, it is the human factor that ultimately determines the success or failure of such a project. This issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal (CBTJ) examines the challenges that arise, along with the opportunities presented by the digital shift from a variety of viewpoints, with a particular focus on the human factor.