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.
Your Definition of Customer Experience Is Wrong. Here's Why.
We need to understand that a customer’s interactions with our company are just a small part of a bigger picture. The sum of the interactions a customer has with our company isn’t the customer experience, that is just part of the whole customer experience.
Applying Agile Delivery to the Data Warehouse
One thing must be understood clearly for an Agile approach to be applied to a data warehouse or any other BI development: user value is not found in the application, but rather in the information availability for reporting and analysis. Next to the availability of information, the data warehouse can provide additional value to the user by providing insight into the sourcing of data and the quality of the resulting information.
Ringing the Digital Changes: A Different Future for Us All?
Whether we choose to face it or not, digital disruption is here to stay. Whether we choose to accept it or not, digital disruption will affect every enterprise. The jury on our digitized future is still out, and it may be some time before it comes to a unanimous conclusion. In the meantime, there are plenty of serious writers and researchers who predict some significant changes in our world. In this Advisor, I sketch some of these ideas so that you can consider them in your future planning scenarios.
4 Scenarios for Agile Business Intelligence
Agile development has long been considered for building small stand-alone systems. However, there is considerable disagreement as to how well Agile works for large, complex enterprise-class data integration initiatives, such as an enterprise data warehouse or enterprise metadata management. An obvious question the data management community has to ask is whether Agile can be used for projects like business intelligence.
Are Enterprise AI Applications Meeting Expectations?
A key question I’ve had for some time is: how well are enterprise AI applications living up to expectations? Initial results from our ongoing survey covering the adoption and application of AI technology (based on initial responses from 105 participating organizations) provides some insight into this question.
On the Road: The Future of the Automobile
If electric cars and trucks are the vehicles of the future, then that already suggests a massive change in the industrial infrastructure — new modes of manufacturing, new modes of refueling and repair, and, perhaps, new roads. Given the key role of autos in society, such a transition will be a major story. However, it is really only a small part of the changes facing the automobile industry.
Thinking Patterns for a Lean/Agile Organization
The real “lean” in the Lean world (or the “agile” in the Agile world) will manifest only when an organization’s focus is on the development of the whole organizational system.
Knowing Your Customer Requires an Event-Driven Architecture
One way to better understand the customer is through data about that customer.
Understanding the Business Architecture Knowledgebase
All organizations have a business architecture, but it may not be written down. And if it is, it may not represent a common enterprise perspective or be documented in an industry standard way. Thus, organizations that desire to leverage business architecture for transformation, better strategy execution, or various types of decision making need to build their business architecture knowledgebase first before they can fully benefit from the discipline.
Looking at All the Sides of Sustainable Cloud
The ever-increasing demand for cloud computing services deployed across multiple cloud data centers (CDCs) necessitates a significant amount of power, resulting in high carbon emissions and a negative effect on the environment. In sustainable cloud computing, renewable energy resources power the cloud data centers, replacing the conventional fossil fuel–based grid electricity or brown energy to effectively reduce carbon emissions.
Vital Mechanisms for Building the Agile Digital Organization
Agile organizations need a description of how teams work from beginning to end. The Agile product development framework will illustrate how operational and delivery risks are evaluated and reduced in an innovative environment.
3 Recommendations for Designing Cognitive Computing Systems
Designing cognitive computing systems (CCSs) requires a strong case for the investment into those systems. Organizations must not only be able to justify the initial investment into developing a CCS, but also think through the investments that will be needed to ensure it can be refined and enhanced over time.
Using Business Segments to Plan Your EA Rollout
Many enterprise architecture (EA) teams struggle with creating a program that demonstrates the level of strategic value that they believe EA should have. Taking actionable steps to remove many of the most common roadblocks to growing the strategic nature of your EA program takes time. For most programs beginning the journey to strategic engagement, I strongly recommend dividing up the enterprise into business segments and applying EA to one (or at most two) segment(s) at a time.
Public Policy Coming in from the Sidelines? It’s Already In!
The revelation of how information about us was sold to and misused by unscrupulous organizations for unethical and possibly criminal purposes has, for many, shaken their confidence in these companies’ integrity — a loss of innocence. A fraction of users has already closed their Facebook accounts; another fraction has tightened their preferences and reduced their usage. But if past behavior is a guide, the majority will mostly shrug and do little or nothing different. That said, a loss of innocence is never good and virtually impossible to recover from fully.
AI for Customer Engagement/Customer Experience Management
Our latest research indicates that organizations overwhelmingly view customer engagement/customer experience management as the most viable use case for applying AI. This finding comes from an ongoing Cutter Consortium survey covering the adoption and application of AI and machine learning technology, based on the initial responses from 105 participating organizations.
How Does Culture Drive Organizational Agility Success?
Does culture drive success, or is culture emerging from the implementation of carefully considered strategy, structure, and processes inside the organization? Our view is the latter, and the good news is that culture is something that executives can affect.
The (Digital) Transformation of Customer Experience
This Advisor describes three areas of customer experience that are affected by digital transformation: customer understanding, top-line growth, and customer touchpoints.
Defining a "Mature" Business Architecture Practice
We can define the real test of maturity through a key set of characteristics that demonstrate acceptance of, and commitment to, the discipline.
Blockchain: Where Are We Now? Where Are We Headed? — An Introduction
This issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal sheds some light on the status of blockchain technology adoption. With perspectives from eight different authors, the articles detail some of the opportunities, challenges, applications, and use cases, as well as the industry and business implications associated with a blockchain technology initiative.
AI Banking Initiatives in India
In this Advisor, we highlight a few AI applications that Indian banks have implemented to enhance customer experience.
What's the Big Picture in AI?
With all the focus on “exciting” AI applications, it’s sometimes hard to get a broader overview of how the market is actually developing.
Using Continuous Improvement to Scale Digitization
DevOps practices and cloud platforms can catapult enterprise technology forward, improving consumer responsiveness, time to market, throughput, and resilience, but they depend on continuous improvement to become internalized and self-sustaining.
How "Coase"-Grained Is Your Enterprise Architecture?
The ability to link smaller chunks of capabilities and resources together into patterns that generate value may hold the key to a more modern enterprise.
Are Chief AI Officers Really on the Rise?
The chief AI officer (or equivalent) in current organizations is very limited. The same can be said of future plans for designating a chief AI officer, with over half of surveyed organizations having no plans in the foreseeable future to appoint a chief AI officer (or equivalent). Instead, organizations are opting to share responsibilities for AI adoption among various technical and business leaders.
Using AI to Enable New Ways of Automating Business Processes
The main benefit organizations seek to obtain from adopting AI is the ability to create new ways of automating business processes.