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.
More on Business Process Change
Business Process Change
The Role of Program Management for BI
Requirements: The Eternal Moving Target (Part III: Dealing with Change)
Business Process Outsourcing: An Emerging Business Strategy
Business process outsourcing (BPO) is a corporate strategy that is gaining in popularity.
Funding: Who Pays the Technology Bills?
How much are you spending on technology? Who pays for what? How do you determine funding responsibilities? And how do you determine how to pay for infrastructure, applications, R&D, and ongoing technology management? These are huge issues -- especially when you consider that the US spends more than one trillion dollars a year on hardware, software, and services. Yes -- a trillion dollars!
Organization: A Trend Emerges
How many of us wrestle with the question "who should report to whom?" several times a year? Have your efforts to "reorganize" the business-technology relationship been proactive or reactive? Often, because some influential people complain about the relationship, things change. But reactive changes usually don't last long.
People: Train Them Often, Train Them Right
Requirements: The Eternal Moving Target (Part I: Taking Aim)
Requirements: The Eternal Moving Target (Part II: Accepting the Inevitable)
Continuous Partial Attention
Cutter Business Technology Council Fellow Tim Lister's recent Council Opinion (Vol. 3, No. 8) discusses the continuous partial attention (CPA) phenomenon first described by Linda Stone (then of Microsoft) in a January 2001 New York Times article.
Building Strong IT Sourcing Projects
Imagine that you were going to build an IT outsourcing process from the ground up -- that is, you didn't have to deal with existing constraints or "the way we've always done it around here." How would you do it? What capabilities would be critical to maintain a high degree of outsourcing success and ongoing business customer satisfaction?
Leveraging the Benefits of Selective Outsourcing
As outsourcing has evolved over the past 10 years, many new trends have developed. Client companies have become more adept at maximizing the value received through outsourcing using a number of methods.
Enterprise Architectures
Enterprise architecture means very different things to different people. Some think of it as one thing, while others view it as a set of different architectures or perspectives. In recent years, the Zachman framework has become an increasingly popular way of defining the breadth and scope of an enterprise architecture.
Are Companies Using Web Services?
Supply Chain Intelligence: Development Issues (Part III)
Supply Chain Intelligence: Development Issues (Part IV)
Gaining Senior Management Acceptance for New Development Processes
Editor's note: This discussion has been adapted from Bennatan's texts Software Project Management: A Practitioner's Approach (McGraw-Hill, 1992) and On Time Within Budget: Software Project Management Practices and Techniques, now in its third edition (John Wiley & Sons, 2000).
Enterprise Application Integration
Every large company has hundreds of applications that were developed to solve one problem and are being used today for vastly different purposes. There's the accounting system that was designed to update customer accounts and generate statements that's now being used to provide online customers with information about their account balances.
"Requirements Always Change" ... Or Do They?
It has become fashionable to design and develop business systems by starting in the middle, with the latest technological or e-commerce fads, which, supposedly, can solve most business problems.
The COBOL Legacy
Business Intelligence Software
Business intelligence (BI) software can prevent your company from suffering the next Enron-like meltdown. BI software can even improve homeland security -- at least this is what some vendors' marketing claims purport.