As 2017 gets underway, I want to comment on a technology I see as poised for a breakout year: cognitive computing. We are now seeing a considerable amount of innovation in the development and application of cognitive computing across almost every industry. As a result, we recommend that companies start examining how they can benefit from applying cognitive computing in their organizations.

A Lean management system encourages those closest to the customer, those who best understand the work, to own their processes, solve their problems, and make their own improvements and innovations, guided by the strategic priorities of the overall organization.

The societal effects of AI-driven automation and the like are just beginning to be felt in earnest. The one thing that seems to be certain: over the next decades, companies and countries should be preparing for more political risk and uncertainty, and revamp their enterprise risk management approaches accordingly.

With EA, organization leaders can more readily improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and responsiveness of their enterprise. Effective EA is the key to enabling the enterprise to address orders-of-magnitude increases in complexity and orders-of-magnitude increases in the rate of change.

In the history of NoSQL data, there have been many approaches to solving the problem of performing analytics on it. Not all of these approaches are able to solve all problems in NoSQL analytics — they vary greatly in their expressiveness and flexibility.

This Advisor looks at how crowds can be used to organize, evaluate, and filter large information spaces. Specifically, let’s look at the way crowds have been leveraged to “make sense of” large product ranges, huge media databases, and the Web itself.

There is significant potential value for companies of all sizes in reviewing their potential financial vulnerability in the case of a cyberattack, as well as determining whether purchasing (or increasing their) cyber insurance could provide the protection to keep them in business.

Business architecture provides a holistic business perspective of a business ecosystem based on a clearly defined, time-tested framework. Core business architecture domains include capabilities, value streams, information, and organization. The extended view of business architecture includes strategies and policies that drive actions and investments, external and internal stakeholders that receive and participate in value delivery, the products and services a business delivers, the initiatives in which a business invests, and the metrics that enable business performance management.

As a manager and a leader it's imperative for you to develop good habits, systems, and strategies around time management, both for your own effectiveness and for the benefit of the people you lead.

According to our research, current adoption of data breach protection insurance is fairly limited. This is somewhat surprising, as I had expected usage to be considerably higher due to the many high-profile data breaches appearing in the news.

Here are the Agile Product Management & Software Engineering Excellence articles that garnered the most feedback from Cutter Members and clients in 2016. Look for these lists from each of our four practice areas, and rediscover Cutter's most intriguing articles of the year!

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Business Technology & Digital Transformation Strategies 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.

As has been our tradition for the last several years, we've compiled the five most intriguing articles published by the Cutter IT 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. Your questions and comments don't 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.

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.

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.

Outcomes are becoming the moments of truth for customers and employees alike, developing into the points where value is created for the business. Shifting the dial is not about changing capabilities; it’s about changing the way organizations look at what people really need and delivering that as an outcome. This is a competitive differentiator now and will become an essential hygiene factor for competing tomorrow.

In this Advisor, the author explores how cognitive technology can be used “in the small” with benefit today as potential users wait for it to scale for use “in the large.” The author shares three operational scenarios to show how firms could build tools to put cognitive computing techniques to work today.

As our world becomes more and more connected, the need for precisely timed predictive sensor fusion algorithms is essential for business success.

Engaging enterprise architecture (EA) in the acquisition process allows the acquisition team to plan, execute, and evaluate acquisitions within a strategic planning framework that improves acquisition performance without compromising orga­nizational performance.

Data breaches are front and center in the news again. And with the hacking of the US Democratic National Committee's (DNC) servers, allegedly by Russian security services in an effort to influence the outcome of the American presidential election, and Yahoo's latest announcement of a yet another hack involving data associated with more than one billion (!) accounts, it is obvious that no system should ever be considered entirely safe from breaches, regardless of the data security and protection solutions in place.

Business capabilities are a foundational business architecture domain. Capabilities play the role of anchoring business perspectives for a wide variety of transformation scenarios, including digital transformation. Coupled with value stream, organization, information, product, strategy, and initiative mapping, capabilities provide a central focal point for exposing multidimensional aspects of a business ecosystem.

It is nearly impossible to prevent technology debt from being created — ­product/service lifecycles are getting shorter, making time to market an imperative for which taking shortcuts becomes a necessity. However, the size and scope of the ­technology debt being created can be contained, and on rare occasions some technology debt can be ­prevented, with proper analysis of the impact of a ­proposed workaround on business process agility/scalability.

Cognitive computing requires more than just a collection of advanced algorithms. It involves the use of massively parallel processing (MPP) architectures to coordinate the interaction of the various natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), statistical, and other algorithms as well as the retrieval and integration of data acquired from different systems. This enables processing to arrive at an intelligent decision or outcome when analyzing large volumes of data or interpreting a user’s natural language question.

We hope the articles in this issue of CBTJ will advance the state of the knowledge for all readers, regardless of your specific area of interest in fintech. Whether you wish to gain an overview of the emerging fintech themes, broaden your knowledge of blockchain technology, or understand the impact these technologies are having on the insurance and payments industries, there are learnings for you here as you continue on your fintech journey. 

Generating new revenue streams, collaborating with customers and business partners, sensing customer sentiment — there are many reasons to adopt social media. But what is the best way to go about it, and how can you measure the results once you have? Is there a model for getting started?