Find analysis of data from Cutter's ongoing industry research efforts, brief treatments of topics that don't require the in-depth research of an Executive Report, updates on previously-covered topics, and more, in 2-4 page Executive Updates.
Big Data in the Enterprise, Part III: High-Performance Analytic Database Trend
In this Update, we focus on the corporate adoption, usage trends, and satisfaction with high-performance analytic databases.
Bricklayers or Lawyers?
The assumptions that programmers do semiskilled blue-collar work -- and hence that they are virtually interchangeable and can be hired and fired at will -- are reminiscent of Taylorism as it came to be understood. Yet there can hardly be any domain in which those assumptions are less appropriate than software development.
Encourage Your Staff to Work Themselves Out of Their Jobs: And How to React if They Succeed
Any position in any organization can be broken down into roles and responsibilities -- or a clear set of "jobs" the person must perform. Each job can be further broken down into a set of tasks -- sometimes complex, sometimes simple. Yet, to maximize productivity, these tasks are the first things we want to encourage our staff to find ways to eliminate.
Descriptive, Predictive, and Prescriptive Analytics: Emerging Visions for the Analytics Future
In this Update, we explore how analytics engineering will emerge as a focal point for handling the integrations and infrastructure requirements of this new discipline. And fundamental changes will be necessary in how business processes are understood and in how decisions are made and evaluated at every level.
A Practical Guide to the Most Useful Architectural Frameworks: Part III -- The Architecture Governance Process Framework
In the first two Executive Updates of this five-part series,1 we looked at frameworks for architecture content and the architecture development process.
Risk Management 2013: A Comprehensive Survey (Part III)
Risk Management 2013: A Comprehensive Survey (Part II)
Evaluating the Health of Service and Product Offerings: A Fourth Perspective
In adhering to the principle of triangulation, I have found that the three basic viewpoints for service or product health are: (1) the external subjective (customer satisfaction), (2) the external objective (usage), and (3) the internal objective (delivery). In this Executive Update, I explore these viewpoints, which cover three critical perspectives when looking at the health of a service or product.
The Road to Agile BI
Agile business intelligence (BI) has become a convenient catchphrase for a variety of movements sweeping through the BI, analytics, and software development communities. Its goals are relatively clear, but methods of execution can be murky and wrapped up in a range of competing practices and orientations.
Risk Management 2013: A Comprehensive Survey (Part I)
In 2002, Cutter Consortium conducted its first comprehensive survey of the state of risk management practice in the IT community.1 That survey found that some 86% of organizations responding claimed they were practicing risk management, and 51% of those were practicing it in a disciplin
The Challenges of Change Management
Organizations tend to develop far-reaching plans to describe their strategic ambitions, tactics, goals, milestones, and budgets. However, these plans in and of themselves do not create value. Instead, they merely describe the path and the prize. Value can be realized only through the unremitting, collective actions of the hundreds or thousands of employees who are ultimately responsible for designing, executing, and living with the changed environment.
Sustaining High Performance in Teams
As a learning consultant, my service delivery and project manager clients often ask "How can we sustain high performance in teams?" It's true that building a high-performance team is one thing and sustaining its performance at a high level over a long period is quite another.
The Business Impact of Cyber War
BI Product Owners Love an Agile PMO!
Product owners for Agile BI teams often face unique challenges compared to their peers on other functionally specific delivery teams.
Agile Performance Testing Lifecycle
The strategic goals, vision, and mission statements of today's organizations emphasize the importance of customer satisfaction, not only in terms of functionality but also in terms of quality of service (QoS). One of many QoS parameters for an application is performance. The performance of any system refers to how well the system is able to handle the user load in terms of application response and system resources.
Closing the Loop: State of the Art in Business Process Analytics
In recent years, the concept of business process management (BPM) has been gaining traction in modern enterprises and institutions. Broadly put, the management field aims to provide an encompassing approach in order to align an organization's business processes with the concerns of every involved stakeholder.
How to Motivate Staff Without Using Targets: Three Questions You Should Ask
I've written multiple articles and given numerous presentations on the problems with establishing targets for your measures of improvement. It's worth reiterating what's wrong with them, though, because if you haven't tried using targets, chances are you will.
RBT Framework Coupled with a Keyword-Driven Test Design Approach
Testing is potentially a risk-based activity. The fact is, one can't test everything equally, and even if one could, it would be too expensive. The risk-based testing (RBT) approach helps to identify risk factors associated with testing. Various RBT models and approaches available today deal with assessing and calculating risks associated with the test scenarios for a system under test. These studies have described risk calculation for test scenarios by considering various factors from both business and technical perspectives.
Emergent Agility: Best Practice Equivalence
Best practices are prescriptive, and Agile development opposes prescription. So, in this sense, there are no Agile best practices. Managers faced with a need to impose new processes are always in search of guidance, however, and need to know that they are doing what they have set out to do -- or at least are on track to do so. Guidance, whether it is called "best practices," "good things to do," or "useful approaches," is still necessary.
A Practical Guide to the Most Useful Architectural Frameworks: Part I -- The Architecture Content Framework
This is the first in a five-part Update series that describes the five most useful architecture frameworks. In this first Update, we cover the Architecture Content Framework.
The Game Is Afoot! IBM's Watson and Cognitive Computing
IBM's Watson, the famous cybernetic winner of the TV game show Jeopardy, is only the tip of the iceberg with respect to upcoming developments in analytics. We are on the verge of creating a whole new range of computing mechanisms based on analytics and real-time processing, which will put current devices to shame.