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.

Removing Point Attractors as Core Management Practice

Jens Coldewey

Recently, I supported a team that was unhappy with its Scrum implementation.


The Role of IT in Enterprise Architecture

Ruth Malan, Dana Bredemeyer

In its early manifestations, enterprise architecture was an IT function. The chief enterprise architect generally reported to the CIO, and the enterprise architecture work was focused on IT issues such as enterprise application integration, and (the lack of) technology standards across the enterprise. But just as business process reengineering (BPR) efforts illuminated the need to consider technology in BPR, so too did enterprise architecting efforts illuminate the need to consider business process -- and more broadly, business architecture -- in IT reengineering.


Job Ready Not Enough

Ken Orr

In the Kansas City Star recently, an educator posted an editorial that suggested all students graduating from college these should days should be "job ready." The educator argued that the current college curriculum w


IBM Watson Discovery Advisor at Work

Curt Hall

In January, I discussed key developments with IBM's Watson natural language understanding and analytics question-and-answering system (see "IBM Bets the Future on Watson").


Getting There: Business Technology Preparation

Steve Andriole

How do business technology professionals stay current or, ideally, ahead of the constantly changing business technology curve? Unlike lots of disciplines, technology is an always-moving target. Business models change just as quickly.


Cultivating Meaningful Client Involvement When the Client Team Doesn't Understand Complex Project Management

Robert Wysocki

Early in my career as a project manager I invited my client to work with me on a particularly complex software development project that my team was ready to start for them.


The Increasing Complexity of Enterprise Software

David Frankel

Enterprise software has come in waves over the years. The first wave introduced mainframe applications that rested on the business premise that automating certain routine operations could power a large company to new levels of productivity and efficiency.


Data Hacking: No Day at the Breach

Ken Orr

[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Fellow Ken Orr's introduction to the August 2014 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "Data Hacking: No Day at the Breach


Marketing in Transition

Brian Dooley

Marketing has always been a first mover in digital technologies, being vital for monetization of all processes on the Web and leading the way for communications and service delivery.


Building a Mobile App? Start with Design

Sebastian Hassinger

Your organization has decided that it wants to build a mobile application. Congratulations! How exactly are you going to go about accomplishing that?


Good Practices in Bridging the Maturity Gap

Roger Evernden

In a recent Executive Report ("Jumping the Maturity Gap: Making the Transition from Average to Excellent"), we showed how levels of EA maturity should relate to the types of initiative and the outcom


The Coevolution of the Notions of Architecture and IT

Balaji Prasad

We hear of few organizations that debate whether the enterprise needs a marketing function. However, there is interminable wrangling about the value proposition for enterprise architecture (EA), and considerable effort devoted to crafting and articulating persuasive arguments for EA's existence.


New Modes of Enterprise Transformation

Brian Dooley

Organizational change today is aided by emerging concepts of enterprise agility, as well as by a growing range of technologies that can buttress key components of a change strategy.


Hadoop and the Connected Home

Curt Hall

The real value of the Internet of Things (IoT) is not achieved by connecting individual sensor-enabled devices separately to the Internet or mobile network.


Education: Avoiding a Perishable Competence

Ken Orr

In the Kansas City Star recently, an educator posted an editorial that suggested all students graduating from college these should days should be "job ready." The educator argued that the current college curricul


Empathy-Based Systems Design

Dale Anderson, Marvin Richardson

Taken together, Head, Heart, and Hands (HHH) form an holistic, integrated framework that enables organizations to review, assess, and improve human-centered processes and constructs. It can be applied vertically from the senior executive to the front-line staff level, and horizontally across many points in an applicable value chain.


Surface Pro 3 and the Enterprise Market for Tablets

Curt Hall

The latest advertisements from Microsoft comparing its new Windows 8-powered Surface Pro 3 tablet with Apple's MacBook Air laptop have me thinking about the market for tablets in the enterprise.


Shoring Up the People Leg of the Stool

Peter Anlyan

"The tech jobs are coming! The tech jobs are coming!" We hear the cry around the globe. "We don't have the talent! We don't have the talent!" We hear the response.


Database Futures I: Big Data, Cyber Security, IoT, and a Database Called "Cockroach"

Ken Orr

Database thinking tends to go in waves. In the 1960s and 1970s there was an enormous amount of imagination and experimentation with various different types of database models: hierarchical, network, inverted file, and relational.


It's Summer and I'm in a Hurry

Carl Pritchard

Think about your late summer/early fall expectations. Either you're vacationing OR you are diving into the end-of-the-fiscal-year melee. In either case, you have little time to suffer fools gladly. And you have less time to read about it.


Large and Complex Projects

Jens Coldewey

Though there are tons of material on the importance of feature teams in an Agile setting, the dominant way to structure teams in most organizations I run into is still based on components. Usually there are good reasons for this -- specialization being one of the major ones.


Principles of Application Architecture for the Cloud Managed Platform

David Shilman, David Shilman

Today's cloud technology comes in many flavors. Business software, traditionally offered as commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software solutions to be deployed at the client company's data center (on-premise), are being rapidly replaced with software as a service (SaaS) cloud-based solutions.


Organizational Change in the New Age

Brian Dooley

The art of business transformation has a long history of mediocre success as companies have attempted to make great changes for quality and efficiency and to contend with significant movements in the market.


Sensor Data Analysis and the IoT

Curt Hall

As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to gain acceptance over the next few years, the huge volumes of data generated by sensor-enabled devices, processes, people, and machines is going to offer incredible opportunities for data collection, analytics, and automation.


Going Forward and Backward with Advanced Technology

Ken Orr

Years ago at a wireless provider, the organization had a problem: how to ensure that customers wanting face-to–face contact with a company representative were handled in an efficient manner.