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.

Take a Complementary Path Toward Legacy Transformation

Juan Gonzalez, Rocio Castedo, Jaime Gomez

Digital competitors have raised the bar and are forcing incumbents from virtually every industry into huge transformation programs. To win this race for digitalization, incumbents are investing vast amounts of resources into multi-year programs that require them to change the engine with the train still rolling. This requires executive teams to manage many challenges and produce multiple results that are either different than expected or diluted.


Coming to Your Team's Emotional Rescue

Vince Kellen

How should project teams corral the natural but emotional forces exerting pressure on project decision making and processes?


Architecture for Digital Business: An Interview with Mike Rosen

Cutter Consortium

Mike Rosen’s webinar “Architecture for Digital Business” explored how to support your business transformation by taking an architectural approach to strategy. Here are four questions we asked Mike at the end of the webinar that you may also be considering.


Design Thinking to the Rescue!

Gustav Toppenberg, Biren Mehta

Transformation of a company and managing through change are inherently difficult. The inclusion of a digital component in this transformation effort makes the work that much more challenging, even for the sharpest and most visionary of executives. Companies undertaking digital transformation, in our opinion and based on our experience, face four major challenges that we believe design thinking tools can help overcome. In this Advisor, we explore two of these challenges and explain how design thinking can provide solutions.


It's All About the Customer

Curt Hall

Organizations should view customer analytics as a way to help align the enterprise and make it function from the same set of metrics to provide the much-talked-about but often difficult-to-achieve “single view” of the customer. This view serves as the basis for making decisions about how best to interact with your customers; in effect driving all aspects of the customer lifecycle — from acquisition, retention, and growth to maintaining loyalty and measuring ROI across the organization.


Getting to the Core of Your AI Strategy

Pavankumar Mulgund, Sam Marrazzo

AI strategy, at its core, must address vital questions, such as the following: How can AI deliver better value to customers? How can it help companies increase revenues, enhance efficiency, and reduce human errors? How can AI capabilities be integrated into the existing organizational processes to develop a distinct competitive advantage? To address those questions, AI strategy must closely align with a company’s business objectives, ensuring synergy between the corporate strategy and the AI strategy.


How Can AI Improve Agile Projects?

Jon Ward

In a recent on-demand webinar, “Using AI to Improve Agile Teams,” Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Jon Ward described a team that was able to cut time-to-market in half and reduce the cost to deliver by 60% by using Agile with artificial intelligence (AI). He addressed how AI could be used to further enhance a team’s productivity, where AI might inhibit it, and outlined where AI can be used to improve your productivity. This Advisor shares some of the questions Jon responded to at the end of the webinar, which you may also be considering.


To Start a Fire, An Architect Needs Matchsticks (and Paper)

Balaji Prasad

How does an architect see things that may be dark otherwise? There are many examples where seeing things differently make things different, sometimes with extraordinary, decades-long impact.


Data Architecture Is Really About People — An Introduction

Martijn ten Napel

This issue of CBTJ will help you understand that a data architecture should be much more than merely a technology roadmap. To be of any value to people in an organization, the architecture should guide the people in an organization to an understanding of how to organize for ever-changing information requirements.


Are You Getting the Most from Your Data Scientist?

Bhuvan Unhelkar

The data scientist role is perhaps the most important of all roles in the adoption of big data–based decision making.


Unblocking Blockchain

Steven Kursh, Arthur Schnure

Clearly, blockchain will have an impact on technology and the ways we conduct business and how governments and not-for-profits provide services. But until we alleviate several clear barriers, progress will be slow. We discuss a handful of those barriers in this Advisor, including lack of interoperability, lack of mature toolsets, and lack of qualified personnel.


How Would You Like to Pay for That? Blockchain in Payment Services

Lavlin Agrawal, Pavankumar Mulgund, Raj Sharman

In this Advisor, we consider the four types of blockchain and explore some financial services where blockchain can be used effectively to enhance customer experience and increase the efficiency of those services.


The 3 Pillars of Digital Architecture

Mark Greville

Architecture should play a key role in creating the strategy for a digital business. But strategy alone is not enough, so architecture must go deeper by focusing on three pillars: (1) accelerated change, (2) decentralized decisions, and (3) public self-governance.


Organizations Eye Smartbots and Intelligent Assistants for CX Initiatives

Curt Hall

According to a recent Cutter Consortium survey, approximately a quarter of organizations are looking into using smartbots and intelligent assistants for their customer experience initiatives. Intelligent agents and smartbots enable customers to conduct common interactions in a conversational manner via speech and natural language speech or text-powered interfaces.


Can Robots Make Customers Happier?

Curt Hall

Robotics has benefited considerably over the past two years from advances in AI, with the biggest stemming from developments around deep learning neural net architectures and machine vision systems. Consequently, today we are seeing robots employing advanced autonomous navigation and intelligent object recognition capabilities — including image-sensing functions utilizing advanced pattern matching, shape detection, and face-tracking and analysis.


7 Approaches to Agile Integration and Testing

Donald Reifer

When using Agile methods, the integration and testing effort is performed continuously since capability is built up and delivered in short iterations. In order to implement continuous integration and testing concepts, consider the seven Agile approaches examined in this Advisor.


Blockchain: Distributed, Decentralized, Immutable, and Tamper Resistant

Iweta Laskowska

Working with blockchain over the past few years has made me realize the broad possibilities of distributed networks. Certainly, one could say that blockchain is “just” a distributed database; however, emerging adoption reinforces the potential underneath. There are myriad ways to adopt this technology, including in transferring funds, managing supply chains, handling tax evasion, and performing targeted analyses of data already recorded on the blockchain.


Capability Architecture: A Blueprint for Ensuring Organizational Alignment

Dinesh Kumar

A capability architecture defines what we are and do at any given time, whereas process, information, platform, and other architectures describe how we accomplish what we are or perform what we do at any given time. As we improve or mature, what we do and/or how we do it changes over time, meaning that both our capabilities and the enabling architectures evolve.


Blockchain: Here to Stay? — An Introduction

Karolina Marzantowicz

As we explore in this issue of Cutter Business Techology Journal, blockchain is a smart but still small baby only just beginning the process of becoming an adult. The next two to three years will be important in terms of implementing proper regulations and standards to enable wider adoption of blockchain and to establish the technology on a solid legal foundation.


The Rise of the Customer-Centric Business Model

Curt Hall

Today we are seeing a growing interest in the customer-centric business model among organizations that have come to see such models as a practical way to support a standard customer experience across all their various channels and brands.


Top Intriguing Business Agility & Software Engineering Excellence Articles for 2019

Karen Coburn

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we’ve compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Business Agility & Software Engineering Excellence practice for today’s Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members. Your questions and comments not only make it possible to create lists like this, they help focus Cutter’s Senior Consultants’ research on the areas that are most important to organizations like yours. So please keep your feedback coming.


Top Intriguing Business Technology & Digital Transformation Strategies Articles for 2019

Karen Coburn

We’ve compiled the five most intriguing articles published by Business Technology & Digital Transformation Strategies in 2019 for today’s Advisor.


Top Intriguing Business & Enterprise Architecture Articles for 2019

Karen Coburn

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we’ve compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Business & Enterprise Architecture practice for today’s Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members. Your questions and comments not only make it possible to create lists like this, they help focus Cutter’s Senior Consultants’ research on the areas that are most important to organizations like yours. So please keep your feedback coming.


Top Intriguing Cutter Business Technology Journal Articles for 2019

Karen Coburn

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we’ve compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Cutter Business Technology Journal this year for today’s Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients and those that created controversy among Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows.


Top Intriguing Data Analytics & Digital Technologies Articles for 2019

Karen Coburn

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we’ve compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Data Analytics & Digital Technologies practice this year for today’s Advisor. How did we come up with this list? We chose the articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients and those that created controversy among Cutter Senior Consultants and Fellows.