Cutter Consortium: Business Technology Strategies

How Some Enterprises Are Using Hadoop

10 Apr 2012 16:49:48 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors |

Companies have used Hadoop mainly to process high volumes of unstructured data for Internet operations. In particular, Internet giants such as Facebook, Yahoo!, and Google regularly use it to sift through log files maintained on thousands of Web servers to extract data for reporting and other purposes to optimize their online systems and processes. Yahoo!, for instance, has Hadoop (running on approximately 42,000 servers) to help drive personalized advertising and other content and to provide enhanced anti-spam capabilities in Yahoo! Mail, among other uses.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2012/bia120410.html

The Evolution of IT: Improving Organizational Capabilities and Promoting Business Value -- Part I

5 Apr 2012 16:26:36 GMT

Austin, Robert D.; Nolan, Richard L.; Fleming, Brandon; Berendsten, Rune; Dahlstrom, Philip | Executive Reports |

Although some may argue that IT's capacity to contribute to business competitiveness has faded, we suggest instead that it has evolved and expanded, maturing and changing within a subset of companies that have effectively managed to use IT in various ways. In this two-part Executive Report series, we examine the status of the use of IT to improve organizational capabilities and promote business value, identifying varieties of use and directional trends as well as managerial challenges and critical success factors through five case studies. Here in Part I, we explore the first two: the Boeing 787 and JPMorgan Chase.

http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/reports/2012/02/index.html

Inflection Points for Decisions and Profit, Part II

5 Apr 2012 16:23:58 GMT

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors |

In my previous Advisor ("Inflection Points for Decisions and Profit, Part I"), I pointed out that all exchanges of goods and services are exchanges of risk and opportunity between the parties of the exchange, and that profit is the payment a supplier of a good or service receives for taking away its customers� risks or problems (or, viewed another way, creating an opportunity for the customer). In this Advisor, I wish to explore the linkage between decisions and profit, and the possibility that we are at the inflection point of a new industry that may potentially and profoundly disrupt both our corporate and our personal lives. Two recent events serve to make the point.

http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2012/bit120405.html

Collaboration and Tools: An Historical Context

3 Apr 2012 15:19:54 GMT

May, Thornton | E-Mail Advisors |

Somewhere in prehistoric times, a clever ancestor stumbled upon the advantages of applying shareable knowledge to common problems. Thus, collaboration was born.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2012/bia120403.html

Putting Enterprise Architecture and Portfolio Management Together, Part II

29 Mar 2012 15:02:35 GMT

Benson, Bob | E-Mail Advisors |

In my previous Advisor we described enterprise architecture (EA) and portfolio management (PM) ("Putting Enterprise Architecture and Portfolio Management Together, Part I"). We concluded by saying that the challenge is how to put these two together, and that there's always been a tendency for practitioners, depending on their orientation, to separate enterprise architecture and business-driven strategic IT planning exercises. While EA has recently strongly moved into the business domain (e.g., business architecture, business capability), EA-driven planning efforts still tend to be technology focused. At the same time, business-based practitioners tend to look at the strategic business requirements represented by business strategy, and establish investment requirements, initiatives, and programs without considering the architecture aspects.

http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2012/bit120329.html

Log Analysis for SLA Management

29 Mar 2012 19:54:54 GMT

Kothari, Chetan; Nautiyal, Shalini | Executive Updates |

SaaS is increasingly considered "enterprise grade" by many IT buyers and a viable choice in achieving reduced costs, improved service, and ongoing, timely functional currency. The benefits of SaaS force enterprises to provide their offerings via a SaaS model in order to compete with competitors. As such, demand for SaaS delivery continues to grow while sales of traditional on-premises solutions decline.

http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2012/bitu1203.html

Hadapt: A Hybrid Hadoop-Relational Analytics Platform

27 Mar 2012 19:43:35 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 27 March 2012 |

One important development expected to lead to greater use of Hadoop and MapReduce in the enterprise is the (ongoing) integration of the technologies with relational databases and SQL-based tools. And, as I said in my last Advisor ("What's Microsoft Doing with Hadoop?"), most of the major database vendors' RDBMS now facilitate (at least) the two-way exchange of data between Hadoop and their respective products. Two vendors, EMC-Greenplum and Teradata-Aster Data, have tightly integrated the MapReduce distributed computing framework with their data warehousing and analytic database products to facilitate in-database MapReduce processing. More recently, startup Hadapt Inc., has developed an advanced hybrid platform that tightly integrates the relational data model with Hadoop and the MapReduce parallel data processing framework. Hadapt is an interesting platform that deserves further consideration.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2012/bia120327.html

Putting Enterprise Architecture and Portfolio Management Together, Part I

22 Mar 2012 19:31:48 GMT

Benson, Bob | E-Mail Advisors |

Cutter Business & Enterprise Architecture Practice Director Mike Rosen and I recently presented a one-day workshop on enterprise architecture (EA) and portfolio management (PM), and how they work together. Part of Mike's contribution was about technical debt and how it fits into both EA and PM. Planning the workshop created a new awareness of how important both EA and PM are and how, together, they can produce superior insight into delivering value to business and government organizations.

http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2012/bit120322.html

Leadership Development: Intuition, Science, or Luck?

20 Mar 2012 19:15:42 GMT

Houston, Richard T.; Houston, Douglas | Journals |

In their well-researched article, Richard and Douglas Houston propose "a scientific approach to leadership" and explain how organizations can develop a leadership competency model to bring this about. Drawing on their deep experience and database of thousands of leadership profiles, they provide a useful, empirical framework for assessing and improving leadership skills.

http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2012/03/itj1203c.html

Is Leadership a Science?

20 Mar 2012 19:13:00 GMT

Ellyn, Lynne | Journals |

Is leadership a science? Whether you subscribe to the notion of leadership as science or consider it more of an art, we hope that this issue of Cutter IT Journal will provide tools and insights to improve leadership development in your own organization.

http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2012/03/index.html

Expertise and Access to Data: Managing Their Impact on Team Learning and Performance

20 Mar 2012 19:09:51 GMT

Hughes, Michael | Journals |

Michael Hughes reminds us not to forget the team and how they learn. While team learning might seem somewhat tangential to the topic of leadership, Hughes persuasively argues that "it move[s] the problems of understanding and managing team dynamics out of the sometimes slippery realm of 'soft' leadership skills -- with their emphasis on interaction styles -- into the more prescriptive science of learning theory." Through the use of learning theory, IT leaders are better able "to manage their teams for the correct balance of innovation and efficiency."

http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2012/03/itj1203e.html

Leadership Is Situational, Is It Not?

20 Mar 2012 19:06:20 GMT

Chan, David; Woodman, Mark | Journals |

In this article, David Chan and Mark Woodman dispute the idea that leadership is a science but acknowledge the contribution neuroscience may make to understanding leadership. They assert that leadership is situational and provide many examples. Fair enough. However, the examples given from history are basically military in nature -- certainly a very different situation from trying to implement SAP or complete code reviews for a new product. I would suggest that it is time to drop the war/sports/conquest context for leadership and focus on employees and business leaders trying to make a living and find meaning in their work. And, as Chan and Woodman note, we can definitely skip the "wild, drunken orgies" as a means of team building!

http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2012/03/itj1203a.html

IT Leadership: You Must Be All In

20 Mar 2012 19:03:37 GMT

McComb, Craig M. | Journals |

Unlike the authors of our previous two articles, Craig McComb discounts the notion of leadership as science and declares instead that "leadership is an endeavor of passion." While skills are necessary -- and McComb makes a strong case that technical knowledge is required to lead well in IT -- he insists that leaders need passion to succeed. I would agree, since leadership can be so challenging and exhausting. McComb provides us with some of his personal story, relating how his passion for leadership development drove his quest to become a better leader.

http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2012/03/itj1203d.html

Mind the Gap: Avoiding the Abyss Between Leadership and Management

20 Mar 2012 18:54:35 GMT

Charette, Robert N.; Gentry, Kerry F. | Journals |

Cutter Fellow Robert Charette and coauthor Kerry Gentry take on the differences between management and leadership and tell us some depressing tales of modern leadership failures in business and government. They assert that the failures signal a dearth of leadership and an excess of management. In the end they provide us with a useful model -- the Leadership Wheel -- for assessing leadership traits and emphatically argue that leadership is a science!

http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2012/03/itj1203b.html

Exploring the Scope of Social BI in a Health IT Organization

20 Mar 2012 18:52:16 GMT

Hazra, Tushar | E-Mail Advisors |

Business intelligence is nothing new to the business and IT worlds, but it is hardly business as usual when it comes to leveraging BI in the growing field of social media-oriented business. With the advent of social networks in business operations and the exponential growth in supply and demand of data, the application of BI in the analysis of business and data analytics is growing rapidly across the industry. The evolution of Big Data adds a new dimension to the impact of social BI in making informed business decisions.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2012/bia120320.html

Neuroscience-Based Leadership Coaching

23 Mar 2012 18:49:34 GMT

Ellyn, Lynne | Consulting |

Effective IT leadership creates the environment for productive team work, individual productivity and team alignment with organizational goals. The art of leadership is now enhanced with scientific insight from Neuroscience research about the brain and how people learn, create, solve problems and produce results.

http://www.cutter.com/consulting-and-training/neuroscience.html

Reflections on Innovation -- Part V: Words, Words, Words

15 Mar 2012 15:12:55 GMT

Devin, Lee | E-Mail Advisors |

When last we met, I went on about language and the sloppy and obfuscating use thereof ("Reflections on Innovation -- Part IV: The Care and Feeding of Language"). The occasion was a response to an article in the New York Times, in which the writer used "collaboration" to label every sort of activity done by more than one person. This author then asserted that "collaboration" could not result in anything creative or interesting. As a result, the word meant nothing, and the article failed to make its point.

http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2012/bit120315.html

What's Microsoft Doing with Hadoop?

14 Mar 2012 15:04:46 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors |

I've said for some time now that one of the more important developments that will lead to greater use of Hadoop and MapReduce in the enterprise is integration of the technologies with relational databases and SQL-based BI tools. Realizing just how important Hadoop is when it comes to the future of data analysis, Microsoft has been working to bring the power of Hadoop to the Windows platform.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2012/bia120314.html

CEP Technologies Optimize Modern Business

12 Mar 2012 14:57:53 GMT

Gerden, Eugene | Executive Updates |

Certain business situations require analytics to monitor operations as close as possible to real time. However, delays caused by moving data in the repository for its analytical treatment are usually too long to enable companies to respond efficiently to queries -- or to take actions in real time. One of today's biggest challenges is the need to act efficiently amid the huge volumes of constantly changing information.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2012/biau1205.html

Inflection Points for Decisions and Profit, Part I

8 Mar 2012 14:44:51 GMT

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors |

There were two interesting IT-related news stories the past few weeks that caught my attention. The first was the news that the market value of Apple had exceeded US $500 billion -- only the fifth company to have achieved that milestone. The others include ExxonMobil, which reached that level at the height of the oil crisis in 2007, and Cisco, General Electric, and Microsoft, which did so in 1999 during the height of the tech bubble.

http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2012/bit120308.html

Capabilities, Functions, Value Chains, and Big Business Processes

7 Mar 2012 14:38:05 GMT

Orr, Ken | E-Mail Advisors |

There is a lot of discussion these days about business capabilities and their role in business architecture. While any discussion of "what business(es) our business is in" is worthwhile, it is perhaps useful to step back in time and consider an analysis technique that resembles capability modeling (CM): functional decomposition (FD). Back in the 1970s and 1980s, FD, which was part of some form of "structured analysis," was all the vogue. One of the advantages of FD then, like CM now, was that it mirrored the organization chart. Functions like capabilities fit in nicely to the way businesses structured themselves. Moreover, FD (again, like CM) fit a hierarchical analysis model, which is easy to fit into modern automated tools.

http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2012/ea120307.html

Hadoop in the Enterprise: High-Performance Processing for Big Data Analytics

6 Mar 2012 14:11:34 GMT

Hall, Curt | Executive Reports |

This Executive Report examines the technology behind Hadoop and MapReduce, with an eye toward how more mainstream organizations can use it. It covers new developments in the Hadoop ecosystem and commercial developments coming from various vendors -- all of which are making it more practical for organizations to implement and administer Hadoop applications.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/reports/2012/01/index.html

Predictions on Collaboration in 2012: The Smarter CIO

6 Mar 2012 14:08:11 GMT

Coleman, David | E-Mail Advisors |

Over the last year, discussions with the CIO around social applications have changed. I did some research in June of 2011 that showed that 45% of the CIOs we interviewed thought IT was in control of social programs in the enterprise. Of the participants in our research, 12% believed that the C-suite was in control of social in the enterprise. When asked who controlled the budget for these social projects and implementations, 40% believed IT controlled it, and 18% felt the C-suite controlled it.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2012/bia120306.html

Leadership "Yoga"

1 Mar 2012 15:43:50 GMT

Shum, Annie | E-Mail Advisors |

"Leadership yoga" -- flipping the organization upside down to have their eyes to the ground to see the grass roots, where the next opportunities are starting to grow. -- Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School professor

http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2012/bit120301.html

Packaging IT's Unique Value for Long Term Survival

28 Feb 2012 15:38:17 GMT

Blitstein, Ron | Consulting |

When you package IT Service Strategy in a way that makes its contribution to profit margin, revenue achievement, customer relationships, competitive differentiation and even secure and reliable operations obvious, your business users will clearly understand IT's value to the enterprise. Your organization can then fully leverage technology for competitive business advantage, adequately fund and resource for IT operations, obtain the managerial buy-in necessary for critical IT management initiatives, and achieve the right balance between technology innovation and IT maintenance.

http://www.cutter.com/consulting-and-training/packaging-its-unique-value.html

Driving the Snakes Out of Ireland ... and Out of Our Business Models

23 Feb 2012 14:31:36 GMT

Pritchard, Carl | E-Mail Advisors |

The story of Saint Patrick is an epic unto itself; not because of the miracles wrought, but because of his remarkable savvy about those around him. St. Patrick is attributed with converting the whole of Ireland -- the only such recorded Christian missionary to do so without bloodshed. How did he achieve this wonder? He knew the people at their worst and their best and didn't try to change them. Instead, he changed their context. And the rest is history.

http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2012/bit120223.html

Mobile BI Success at Herbalife

21 Feb 2012 14:21:46 GMT

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors |

Back in 2010, in a report on mobile BI (see BI Unwired: The Case for Mobile, Vol. 10, No. 9), I commented on a mobile BI application in use at that time at global nutrition company Herbalife. This sales performance and employee recruitment app was built to deliver information dashboards to management via the iPhone. Recently, I've been researching how organizations are using mobile BI applications implemented for tablet devices to help them extend BI capabilities to their mobile workforces. Doing so, I've found that Herbalife continues to expand its use of mobile BI. The company's latest mobile app is impressive due to the degree of functionality it provides. Herbalife's use of mobile BI is also interesting because it offers insight into how the implementation of mobile technologies can lead some organizations to upgrade their back-end systems to take advantage of the real-time capabilities afforded by mobile applications in general, and mobile analytics in particular.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2012/bia120221.html

Unleashing the Powers of Emergence with Leveling

16 Feb 2012 14:47:32 GMT

Shum, Annie | E-Mail Advisors |

We have all witnessed profound implications and disruptive shifts during the past decades when the power of emergence is unleashed because of leveling. In my last Advisor, I discussed the transformation of the automobile (see "Will History Repeat Itself? The Pitfalls of Blinkered Views and the Horseless Carriage Syndrome," 8 December 2011). As that history illustrates, forward-thinking leaders and stakeholders should evaluate choices and tradeoffs based on a long-term view with a broad historical perspective.

http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2012/bit120216.html

Getting Data Integration Out of the Mud with Hypernormalized Data Designs

14 Feb 2012 14:02:53 GMT

Hughes, Ralph | E-Mail Advisors |

It still amazes me how many enterprise data warehousing/business intelligence (DW/BI) projects struggle, often to the point of paralysis, with the "Inmon/Kimball" debate. This impasse revolves around whether a DW/BI program should insist upon routing all information through a complex, third normal form (3NF) data layer or take it straight to a user-intelligible star schema repository from where it can be reported more or less directly. It's easy to fault the 3NF for more than doubling the complexity, expense, and data latency of a DW/BI project, but also for being of zero direct value to the project sponsors and their stakeholders. On the other hand, projects that deliver data immediately to star schemas can quickly become complex themselves as the scope of the warehouse grows. When the conformed stars scale out, they too end up necessitating enormous reengineering efforts whenever the underlying business requirements change.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2012/bia120214.html

Do We Have to Hug? Part II -- Collaboration Tools

9 Feb 2012 13:32:24 GMT

Love, Jim | Executive Update

In Part I of this two-part Executive Update series, we looked at the barriers to and possible benefits of collaboration. I examined the "four pillars of collaboration," which provide a foundation that supports collaboration and collaborative structures. I also put forward the proposition that there are a vast number of tools available to facilitate collaboration in the modern enterprise. Many are available for little or often no direct cost. Even though we are still in the relative infancy of collaboration tools, what is readily available is mature, feature-rich, and, in many cases, scalable to the enterprise level.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2012/biau1203.html

Leadership Versus Management

8 Feb 2012 13:30:08 GMT

Youker, Robert | E-Mail Advisors |

The general literature on leadership is very confusing. There are over 250 different definitions of leadership in the literature! Many of these definitions are not operational in that they don't provide guides to action. What specifically does a leader do? There is confusion over how leadership contrasts with the words "management" and "authority." Educational institutions like the Harvard Business School say their mission is to train leaders, but every professor has his or her own definition of leadership. We need a definition that tells people exactly what they need to do to provide leadership to a group.

http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/advisor/2012/itj120208.html

Predictions on Collaboration in 2012: Vertical Not Horizontal Collaboration

7 Feb 2012 13:24:49 GMT

Coleman, David | E-Mail Advisors |

I started to see this trend play out last year, and this year I expect it to be more popular based on the advice I have been giving some of my vendor clients. Here is the story: two collaboration companies (both direct competitors) came out with not only solutions, but solutions where collaboration was integral to a critical process as well as a specific vertical market.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2012/bia120207.html

Contra Goals in Architecture

3 Feb 2012 15:33:44 GMT

Mohandoss, Ramaswami |

In technology architecture, it's easy to spot a wrong solution but almost impossible to design the perfect system. The primary reason for this ever-changing nature of the solution is its evolution toward staying relevant to the changing business use case. A seasoned architect soon realizes that a sound architecture or design is actually a zero-sum game with "contra goals": pairs of two critical design goals (or priorities), where one priority can only exist by compromising (or even eliminating) the other.

http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/updates/2012/eau1201.html

The Expanding Scope of Business Resilience: Linking ERM with Agility

2 Feb 2012 15:18:18 GMT

Dooley, Brian J. |

As we explore in this Executive Report, business resilience combines enterprise risk management (ERM) and agility to create robust organizations capable of withstanding any threat. A resilient organization aligns its strategy, operations, and management systems to continually adjust to changing risks, endure disruptions, and improve efficiency. Resilience is a program for taking proactive measures to ensure an effective response and preserve core values. In addition to examining ways to achieve resilience, including existing industry frameworks and models, this report also reviews some case studies that illustrate how organizations can create resilient practices.

http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/summaries/2012/01/index.html

Defining Enterprise Performance Architecture

6 Jan 2012 15:10:00 GMT

Rosen, Mike |

Management guru Peter Drucker is famous for saying "You can't manage what you can't measure." From a different perspective and equally guru-like, W. Edward Deming once said, "The most important things cannot be measured." Deming clarified this by explaining that "the issues that are most important, long term, cannot be measured in advance. However, they might be among the factors that an organization is measuring, just not understood as most important at the time." Perhaps many organizations fall in between, where they are neither exactly sure what the most important things are nor how to measure them. Can you answer the question, "How is my enterprises business performance measured?" or the follow-on question, "How do my IT systems contribute to business outcomes?"

http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2012/ea120201.html

The Expanding Scope of Business Resilience: Linking ERM with Agility

31 Jan 2012 15:03:44 GMT

Packaged Big Data Appliances = Hadoop in the Enterprise

31 Jan 2012 16:20:32 GMT

Hall, Curt |

An important development bound to positively impact the use of the open source Apache Hadoop technology in the traditional enterprise is the introduction of packaged Big Data appliances from the enterprise hardware and software vendors. These offerings -- from Oracle, EMC Greenplum, Dell, and NetApp -- bundle Hadoop distributions along with database, storage connectors, and other software for integrating Hadoop applications with various data sources and into an organization's data center. They also come preinstalled on hardware or include hardware-based storage systems. All offer various levels of support for organizations wanting to build and run Hadoop applications.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2012/bia120131.html

Social Media Speaks Out

27 Jan 2012 15:49:18 GMT

Andriole, Stephen J.; Schiavone, Vincent J. |

Advances in the components of computing have enabled massive social media sites and application tools like Facebook and Google. It is the scale of these platforms that makes social networking interesting and economically viable, politically potent, and of great interest to businesses. As Cutter Fellow Steve Andriole and Cutter Senior Consultant Vincent Schiavone point out in their leadoff piece on social media, this new form of computing is powerful because of its massive reach and its massive volume of data and interactions. With social media now so globally pervasive, the authors pose a simple question: why wouldn't a company invest in social media, especially in the analytics of social media? They deftly delve into the critical elements of a social media strategy, how companies ought to take advantage of this technology, and how the future of social media may unfold. Here in 2012, any company that thinks social media is a passing fancy or isn't relevant to them simply hasn't been paying attention.

http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2012/01/itj1201a.html

The Consumerization of IT: Predictions, Wishes, and Dart-Throwing Monkeys

27 Jan 2012 15:46:36 GMT

Love, Jim |

Cutter Senior Consultant Jim Love, is correct in pointing out that the tension between the current consumer market and the resistant IT organization will be a challenge in 2012. Love argues forcefully that we in IT should not resist this change but embrace it. If we think more broadly about what is going on, it becomes clear that cell phone data networks are continuing to grow faster (although sometimes not fast enough); are being augmented with WiFi networks at home, work, and play; and are being used to reach hundreds of millions of user devices with powerful CPUs distributed across the globe. With the ubiquity of Internet protocols and with HTML5 poised to be a common-enough user interface development environment, consumer devices and software can now reach unprecedented scale at lower costs than ever. Love writes that the "tipping point" for consumerization is near. I would argue it is past us already, and the rest is merely denouement. Laggard IT shops will have to catch up to those organizations that sprinted ahead.

http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2012/01/itj1201c.html

Hot IT Trends 2012

27 Jan 2012 15:01:43 GMT

Kellen, Vince |

Each of these trends described in this issue is powerful on its own and requires devoted study from IT planners and leaders. Taken collectively, they can be a rather large tsunami that engulfs organizations faster than they can adjust. 2012 will likely emerge as a critical transition year in which two well-established trends, social media and consumer technology, meet up with two emerging trends, Big Data and cloud computing, and transform corporate IT from the inside and the outside. There is a lot of promise and peril in these trends. To some, they represent the beginning of the end of the modern IT organization. I -- and I think our authors -- would disagree. This is merely the end of the very early phase of an important transformation that will require all the best and brightest IT leaders across the globe. New tools enable new strategies, and, boy, do we have new tools available to us in 2012! To sort this out, I encourage you to read on and learn how these trends will impact you and your organization.

http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2012/01/index.html

An Executive Primer on Big Data

27 Jan 2012 14:56:03 GMT

May, Thornton |

Thornton May, pokes holes in the term "Big Data," pointing out that it has no clear definition and that the focus on "big" may miss the mark. May makes clear that the variety of types of data, the variation in analysis methods, and the speed of business decision making should also be considered when looking at the Big Data trend. He then goes on to give several current, real-world examples of organizations that have successfully used Big Data methods for business advantage (and one that didn't).

http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2012/01/itj1201b.html

The Gen Y Retention Challenge

27 Jan 2012 14:50:14 GMT

Schildkraut, Laura |

As we continue in questionable economic times, many have been wondering how the extended downturn will impact Gen Y retention. (Gen-Yers were born between 1981 and 1999.) As a cohort, Gen-Yers are known for their facile use of technology, their strong interest in social issues, and, often, their delaying "adulthood." This extended adolescence can often manifest itself in Gen-Yers viewing their early jobs as enrichment opportunities rather than the start of a lifelong career. Additionally, many of them expect that their professional lives will involve a series of parallel employment endeavors where they will have one primary job and several smaller money-making and/or altruistic projects on the side.

http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2012/bitu1202.html

Too Smart By Half

26 Jan 2012 14:38:37 GMT

Orr, Ken |

Those of you have been following my Trends and Enterprise Architecture Advisors will recognize that I have become increasingly concerned about software reliability and security and the role that design and complexity play in these areas. Recently, I received a really interesting hyperlink from my colleague and Cutter Business Technology Council Fellow Lou Mazzucchelli. The link reported a study done by CAST Software, in which the results of an analysis of a huge number of programs and code (365 million lines of code in 745 applications) showed that more recent languages such as Java tend to have many more problems both from an application as well as a security standpoint.1 In this study, the newest languages had the most problems and the oldest the least, with COBOL, of all things, having superior results in both application and security defects.

http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2012/bit120126.html

Playing the Customer Role Is Easier for the 21st-Century IT Professional

25 Jan 2012 14:33:20 GMT

Malladi, Suresh |

Last September's Cutter IT Journal contains many insightful contributions about 21st-century IT professionals to help you gear up for the new world in which products like smartphones and tablets are playing a growing role (see "21st-Century IT Personnel: Tooling Up or Tooling Down?" Vol. 24, No. 9). The articles touch on the essentials for the 21st-century IT professional, including usability, user interfaces, smart devices, and so on. The authors also discuss the skills demanded of these professionals and suggest roles for them to play. I believe another role that IT professionals can play more effectively than ever is that of the customer. I see this as a byproduct of the smartphone and tablet revolution itself. In this Advisor, I highlight the following points in the 21-century professional world:

http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/advisor/2012/itj120125.html

Collaborative Intelligence

23 Jan 2012 14:21:57 GMT

Coleman, David |

We have all heard of IQ (intelligence quotient) and even EI (emotional intelligence), but very few people seem to deal with collaborative intelligence (CI). I have been focused on collaboration for the last 20-plus years, and I have become aware that true collaboration rarely is successful unless all those involved have the mindset of collaboration. This is not as easy as it sounds, even though thousands of collaboration vendors promise great collaboration by using their tool.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2012/biau1202.html

Webinar: When a Business Plays Games: It Can Be a Good Thing, Too

1 Feb 2012 17:32:14 GMT

Perkins, Bart | Events |

When you hear that a business is "playing games," you probably think something shady is going on. But not necessarily! A new class of games - video games - is emerging that is extremely useful to virtually every organization. Businesses, not-for-profits, and governments are starting to use video games to address a wide range of business challenges.

http://www.cutter.com/events/multimedia/playing-games.html

The Economy, the Cloud, and the iPad: Notes from a CIO Breakfast

19 Jan 2012 19:43:31 GMT

Rau, Ken | E-Mail Advisors |

I had the good fortune recently to attend a bimonthly breakfast meeting of CIOs. In addition to me, seven of the 23 regular members of the group were in attendance. The group meets at 7:30 am in a conference room at the location of a member who is the designated "host of the month." There is no agenda or presentation; just informal discussions about current topics of interest or concern to the attendees. During the course of the next hour, three main topics were discussed, which I summarize in this Advisor.

http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2012/bit120119.html

Webinar: Right Requirements Right Now

18 Jan 2012 19:22:59 GMT

Stribrny, Scott | Events |

Poorly defined software requirements are a classic barrier to software project success. To succeed, you must know how to find the precise requirements, prioritize them in a credible way, and validate whether the implementation exactly matches that requirement. Once you're better at defining requirements, the automated products that you build will become a seamless part of your users' work -- no matter what kind of work it is.

http://www.cutter.com/events/multimedia/rightrequire.html

Agile EA: Governance Introduction

13 Jan 2012 19:10:34 GMT

Watson, Jim | Executive Reports |

This Executive Report explores processes in enterprise architecture governance to achieve improved agility using technology advancements in Maven and virtualization. The report describes approaches for enterprise situational awareness, agile systems integration, and dependency management, along with technology variants and innovation.

http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/reports/2011/09/index.html

Who Watches for the Watchers When the Watchers Don't Watch?

12 Jan 2012 19:00:22 GMT

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors |

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? "Who will guard the guardians?" Roman poet Juvenal supposedly asked that question nearly 2,000 years ago, and it is one that often comes to mind when speaking of the current financial crisis as it drags itself into yet another year.

http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2012/bit120112.html

Cloud Computing: Don't Miss the Forest for the Trees

11 Jan 2012 18:57:58 GMT

Malladi, Suresh | E-Mail Advisors |

Much has been discussed about the potential and perils of cloud computing. While there is promise in provisioning elasticity on demand, cautionary tales point to security, interoperability, portability, and privacy, among others. A recent edition of Cutter IT Journal was forward-looking with excellent suggestions on architectural and operational strategies for effective cloud sourcing (see "Cloud Computing: A CIO's Perspective," Vol. 24, No. 7). In fact, this echoes well with a call by institutions like the World Economic Forum that it might be time to move beyond the concerns about cloud computing and investigate the possibilities it can offer.

http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/advisor/2012/itj120111.html

Cloud Strategy: Some Good Tactics to Implement

11 Jan 2012 18:53:51 GMT

Teti, Frank | Executive Updates |

It appears lately that all business consulting has something to do with cloud computing. For instance, an organization I am currently working with has a mandate in place requiring all forward-engineering projects to be developed using a virtualized cloud environment. This effort is, in this organization's "corporate mind's eye," a way to prepare it to move production applications into the cloud, which is something it has not previously done. The company believes that this tactic will ensure that cloud architects are competent at administering applications hosted in the cloud, since code development within the cloud is relatively transparent from a developer's perspective.

http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2012/bitu1201.html

HPC Steroid for Big Data

9 Jan 2012 18:40:42 GMT

Hate, Sudhanshu | Executive Updates |

Today's unprecedented growth rate of data (structured and unstructured) necessitates faster and cost-effective processing for near-real-time decision making. Over the years, many have viewed high-performance computing (HPC) as a monster too complex and too unaffordable for processing large data. However, that viewpoint is changing rapidly due to open source innovations such as Apache Hadoop, the advent of the cloud, and simple and affordable platforms like Microsoft. In this Executive Update, we examine how various HPC techniques, deployment patterns, and Microsoft technologies are emerging to solve various Big Data problems.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2012/biau1201.html

Creating Crowd Value: Taking the Next Step Beyond the Social Enterprise

3 Jan 2012 18:36:42 GMT

Coleman, David | Executive Reports |

As a business leader you're probably just starting to contend with social networks in your business and often find them to be of questionable value. The "social enterprise" is being touted as the next big thing: the new way to do business and a "social" way to do business. But the next big thing in collaboration is crowds, not the social enterprise. Social is only a new method of connecting and discovering information; it does not enable and guide action or have an outcome or result. Business is about delivering results and for that you need a crowd. In this Executive Report, I define a crowd as a network of people that has business value and drives an outcome, task, or goal. Understanding how crowds can add value to your business and making sure your business does not get disintermediated (the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain) by a crowd-based business is the focus of this report.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/reports/2011/07/index.html

Creating the Crowd Value: Taking the Next Step Beyond the Social Enterprise

23 Dec 2011 18:24:58 GMT

Coleman, David | Executive Summaries |

As a business leader you're probably just starting to contend with social networks in your business and often find them to be of questionable value. The "social enterprise" is being touted as the next big thing: the new way to do business and a "social" way to do business. But the next big thing in collaboration is crowds, not the social enterprise. Social is only a new method of connecting and discovering information; it does not enable and guide action or have an outcome or result. Business is about delivering results and for that you need a crowd. In this Executive Report, I define a crowd as a network of people that has business value and drives an outcome, task, or goal. Understanding how crowds can add value to your business and making sure your business does not get disintermediated (the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain) by a crowd-based business is the focus of this report.

http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/summaries/2011/07/index.html

Devops: Exploring the Value of Microblogging

22 Dec 2011 18:18:11 GMT

Gafni, Ruti; Khononov, Vladik; Sivan, Yesha | Executive Updates |

This Executive Update examines the potential value of microblogging for software development teams. As a reference point, we introduce TwitTeam, a prototype tool similar to Twitter that has been enhanced with special capabilities. These include automatic tags, integration with the software development environment used by the organization, automatic publication and distribution of messages, and reports for control and supervision. The use of this enhanced microblogging infrastructure is in keeping with the spirit of CAMS (Culture, Automation, Measurement, and Sharing), the four pillars on which the devops idea was established.1 In order to successfully implement an effective and efficient connection between the development and operations departments, there is a need to embed communications in the corporate culture. Collaboration is enhanced by sharing ideas and information and using automated tools for management, monitoring, and control, which can help to measure and improve the processes.

http://www.cutter.com/content/project/fulltext/updates/2011/apmu1124.html

Marketing IT Operations: Part II -- Executing the Marketing Plan

22 Dec 2011 18:11:29 GMT

Keyworth, Bill | Executive Updates |

In Part I of this two-part Executive Update series, we reviewed the critical urgency of IT "marketing" its value to the business end users with a vision that is crisp, clear, and compelling.1 Businesses now have competitive options previously unavailable to them. If IT's business contribution is to avoid being marginalized in the long term, then someone must take responsibility in the short term for ensuring that the customer (business units) intuitively grasps the intrinsic value of its vendor or service provider (IT).

http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2011/bitu1114.html

Inciting Infrastructure Insights

21 Dec 2011 18:07:24 GMT

Baker, Steven W. | E-Mail Advisors |

ood infrastructure is like having a good dinner party planner -- when everything goes well, few guests notice or appreciate the careful plans and up-front investments that went into the event. Yet if and when something does go wrong, things seem to come to an abrupt halt, often with embarrassing results.

http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/advisor/2011/itj111221.html

Operational Excellence -- The CIO's Friend or Foe? Revisited

9 Jan 2012 17:07:58 GMT

Fry, Malcolm | E-Mail Advisors | Since I wrote the Cutter IT Journal article "Operational Excellence, the CIO, and Cloud Computing" (Vol. 24, No. 7), there have been some serious outages at RIM, HSBC, and Barclays Bank that perhaps could have been handled with better IT service management, which is the key to operational excellence. http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/advisor/2011/itj111214.html

Time Management for IT Leaders

9 Jan 2012 17:15:37 GMT

Cohen, Moshe | Executive Reports | 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. As we'll explore in this Executive Report, effective time management includes an awareness of how you spend your time as well as clarity regarding your priorities so that you can develop the best systems and strategies in executing your plan. You also need to manage interruptions, delegate and eliminate some tasks, and manage your own stress along the way. Using these tools, you can become more effective at managing your time and achieving your goals. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/reports/2011/09/index.html

Take a SCARF to Architecture Reviews

9 Jan 2012 17:15:38 GMT

Rosen, Mike | E-Mail Advisors | I've been doing architecture for close to 20 years now and have built my practices based on what I've read, studied, and researched, and also from my experience of what works with clients. Every once in a while, some new information comes along that validates that experience, such as the excellent presentation on neuroleadership that Cutter Fellow Lynne Ellyn delivered at the Cutter Consortium CIO Forum in Mexico City a few weeks ago. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2011/ea111130.html

Press Release: Stat of the Week -- Organizational size vs. performance after an IT reorganization

9 Jan 2012 17:15:40 GMT

Cutter Consortium | Jerry Grochow concluded from his research on IT reorganization success that "Some part of IT reorganization success is about circumstance (it helps to be in a medium-sized organization, for example). Some part is about having the right goals, such as improving performance. Some part is about having the right champion such as a new IT leader. Put all this together, and there is a very high likelihood that reorganizing will indeed improve IT performance for your organization and, consequently, you will be seen as the thoughtful leader you know you are!" http://www.cutter.com/press/111129.html

Cloud Computing: Checking for Blind Spots

Malladi, Suresh | E-Mail Advisors | Cloud computing discussions are fraught with apprehension about security, privacy, interoperability, reliability, and so on. While the advocates of cloud computing emphasize the importance of IT governance to address these issues,1 most of the practitioner literature is confined to surface-level analysis of the cloud computing concerns. Here I will focus on the nuances of some issues. In doing so, my first goal is to stimulate more thought about all issues that can mar cloud computing. Second, I hope this can galvanize planning and action to realize the true benefits the cloud promises. http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/advisor/2011/itj111123.html

Security Is the Name of the Game When It Comes to Mobile Device Management

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | Mobility is now one of the top strategic priorities for organizations. In fact, supporting mobility is seen as so important that some organizations are offering employees the option of using their own personal devices. This “bring your own device� concept is seen as a way for companies to reduce costs, but the proliferation of smartphones and tablets in the enterprise means that IT needs to somehow practically manage these devices. And, when most IT people talk about “managing mobile devices,� they primarily mean ensuring that they are used correctly (i.e., according to company polices regarding data access, storage, and transmission) and do not become a “black hole� of a security threat to the company. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2011/ea111123.html

Security and the Enterprise

Shoemaker, Dan | E-Mail Advisors | Security of information is a hot topic these days. That is probably because cyber crime has reached a level of popularity that far outstrips the drug trade in terms of ROI for everybody from old-fashioned Mafiosi types to any kid in the Ukraine with a computer. And given the fact that crime on the Internet is all about money, any CEO who does not take all of the steps necessary to secure their organization against cyber attacks is rolling the dice with their company's assets. At least that's what current doctrine would like you to believe. But the problem is that cyber criminals can pillage your company in an infinite number of ways. http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/advisor/2011/itj111116.html

What is Senior Management Really Afraid Of?

May, Thornton | Executive Updates | I am on the road about 280 days a year. During my travels, I collect over 500 business cards every five to six weeks. In fact, I've been called a "bow tie wearing sensing device" by my sharper-tongued colleagues. During the past two years, I have been going door to door with senior executives to determine what the "top of the house" is really thinking about. In a previous Executive Update, I set forth the premise that risk and risk management will be the defining element of enterprise success for the second decade of the third millennium. 1 In this Update, I hope to take you on a "fantastic voyage" 2 inside the troubled and increasingly risk-aware minds of senior management. The research -- conducted on LinkedIn, at four universities (Florida State College at Jacksonville, Ohio State University, Olin College of Engineering, and University of Kentucky), and at the 2011 Interop New York conference (with more than 7,500 attendees) -- surfaced three fundamental management fear zones: http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2011/bitu1113.html

Applying Decision Models to Resource Allocation in Network Security

Moitra, Soumyo | Executive Summaries | Improving the effectiveness of resource allocation decisions for cyber security is an extremely important issue, especially since resources are constrained and organizations would like to have the best security they can for their budgets. The accompanying Executive Report discusses several relevant issues to such decisions. It presents insights, ideas, and implications that have arisen from a project I was involved in at CERT at Carnegie Mellon University's SEI. The project investigated the benefits from investments in network security to address real needs. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/summaries/2011/08/index.html

Applying Decision Models to Resource Allocation in Network Security

Moitra, Soumyo | Executive Reports | Making effective decisions regarding the allocation of resources for network security is a key part of business today. This Executive Report focuses on the relevant issues, including a number of questions that require special attention from CIOs and chief security officers (CSOs). The report presents the questions to be asked, offers ways of answering them, and provides recommendations on how security decisions and network security can be improved. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/reports/2011/08/index.html

Gonnegtions, the Occupy Movement, and the Future of Decision Making

Pritchard, Carl | E-Mail Advisors | In the literary classic The Great Gatsby, Meyer Wolfsheim hints at some shady business "gonnegtions" (an intentional mispronunciation of "connections"), suggesting that there's money to be made if the protagonist is a fellow "businessman" (read: criminal). Over the past few weeks, we've seen the Occupy Wall Street movement fan out across the US, railing against those kinds of shady "gonnegtions" among wheeler-dealers on Wall Street, in government, and in the currency, commodity, and financial markets. How does this affect us in our day-to-day decision making? Well, it impacts us because in addition to business acumen, the effective manager is expected to have a clear moral compass that takes into account the concerns of society at large. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit111103.html

Press Release: Stat of the Week -- What steps has your organization taken to cope with the current economic climate regarding initiated projects?

Cutter Consortium | 01 November 2011 | In our sixth annual CBR IT Budgeting issue, Dennis Adams looked at the changes in the initiation of money saving projects. Adams saw the fact that over half of this year's respondents companies had initiated short-term money-saving projects as "the clearest indicator we have seen that the economic climate is still influencing organizational budgets. When compared to last year's survey, 44% of responding companies made this claim. We can expect these projects to keep coming until the economy is healthier. Thus, it would be a good idea for managers to take longer-term projects and break them up into smaller deliverables. Focusing on limited, controlled rollouts of small projects is a risk management strategy for the current economy." http://www.cutter.com/press/111101.html

A Whole Lot of Heart: Properly Aligned Employees and Teams

Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | For several years now, so many pundits, experts, and concerned citizens of the IT world have prattled on about IT alignment with the business. So much so that whenever you hear any phrase that starts with "IT must be aligned with the business," you already know what's coming next. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit111027.html

Disruptive Technology in the Real World: The Cloud Computing Example

Cohen, Beth | Journals | 21 October 2011 | Borders. Blockbuster. Polaroid. Kodak. Teen magazine. Tower Records. Virgin Megastores. When we think about these names, we recall once major brands that have undergone dramatic shifts that, in some cases, led to their demise. These companies were beset by external changes in their competitive environments brought about at least partly by disruptive technologies. We see these changes happening today as the newspaper and music industries are being transformed by new entrants with new technologies. In some cases the technology is used by existing competitors, but in others the competition can seem to materialize out of thin air. The entrepreneurial innovators are out there; the rest of us need help. And so we find that the debate about disruption isn't about whether it happens or not. The debate is, what should companies do to keep from being disrupted? http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2011/10/itj1110e.html

Disruptive Technology in the Real World: The Cloud Computing Example

Technology Disruption in Service Industries

Brennan, Kevin | Journals | 21 October 2011 | Borders. Blockbuster. Polaroid. Kodak. Teen magazine. Tower Records. Virgin Megastores. When we think about these names, we recall once major brands that have undergone dramatic shifts that, in some cases, led to their demise. These companies were beset by external changes in their competitive environments brought about at least partly by disruptive technologies. We see these changes happening today as the newspaper and music industries are being transformed by new entrants with new technologies. In some cases the technology is used by existing competitors, but in others the competition can seem to materialize out of thin air. The entrepreneurial innovators are out there; the rest of us need help. And so we find that the debate about disruption isn't about whether it happens or not. The debate is, what should companies do to keep from being disrupted? http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2011/10/itj1110c.html

Disrupting the Disruptors: Three Design Patterns for Combatting Disruption in Incumbent Organizations

Gordon, Dan | Journals | 21 October 2011 | Borders. Blockbuster. Polaroid. Kodak. Teen magazine. Tower Records. Virgin Megastores. When we think about these names, we recall once major brands that have undergone dramatic shifts that, in some cases, led to their demise. These companies were beset by external changes in their competitive environments brought about at least partly by disruptive technologies. We see these changes happening today as the newspaper and music industries are being transformed by new entrants with new technologies. In some cases the technology is used by existing competitors, but in others the competition can seem to materialize out of thin air. The entrepreneurial innovators are out there; the rest of us need help. And so we find that the debate about disruption isn't about whether it happens or not. The debate is, what should companies do to keep from being disrupted? http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2011/10/itj1110b.html

Cloud Y

Braithwaite, Francis; Woodman, Mark | Journals | Borders. Blockbuster. Polaroid. Kodak. Teen magazine. Tower Records. Virgin Megastores. When we think about these names, we recall once major brands that have undergone dramatic shifts that, in some cases, led to their demise. These companies were beset by external changes in their competitive environments brought about at least partly by disruptive technologies. We see these changes happening today as the newspaper and music industries are being transformed by new entrants with new technologies. In some cases the technology is used by existing competitors, but in others the competition can seem to materialize out of thin air. The entrepreneurial innovators are out there; the rest of us need help. And so we find that the debate about disruption isn't about whether it happens or not. The debate is, what should companies do to keep from being disrupted? http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2011/10/itj1110d.html

The New Outsourcing: Toward Collaborative Innovation

Willcocks, Leslie P. | Executive Reports | This Executive Report examines current research by my colleagues and I regarding the outsourcing and innovation practices of 26 organizations from Europe, the US, and the Asia-Pacific region, selected specifically for their relative maturity in sourcing capability and management. The report presents how these companies define collaboration and innovation with their outsourcing suppliers and how their distinctive practices have enabled them to achieve collaborative innovation. The report also provides illustrations of these practices through four case studies. It then develops a fourfold framework that consolidates the practices across leading, contracting, organizing, and performing -- all behaviors that the case study organizations exhibited in order to achieve levels of innovation atypical in the 20-year history of IT outsourcing (ITO) and business process outsourcing (BPO) arrangements. The report concludes by detailing 10 lessons emerging from the research. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/reports/2011/07/index.html

Of Earthquakes, Enron, Risk, and Responsibility

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors | Around 2 pm on the 23rd of August, as I sat working at my desk in my basement office, I became mindful of an increasingly loud roar, followed by an eerie feeling that I had been teleported aboard a moving passenger train. As my office seemed to sway back and forth, there was an abrupt jolt, like when a train crosses a railroad switch. Everything returned to a disconcerting sense of "normal" a few moments later. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit111020.html

Big Data Analytics

Dooley, Brian | Executive Updates | The phenomenal growth of digital data over the past several decades, known today as Big Data, has created a range of issues and opportunities. In the earliest days, accessible data consisted of alphanumeric records and simple text. These could be organized, managed, and stored with relative ease. Today, however, data available both inside the corporation and on the Web includes structured and unstructured text, audio, video, graphics, sensor data, application records, and streams of all types of information. As such, data has doubled every 18 months or so; so, too, has storage capacity. These multiple petabytes of data constitute a vast wealth of useful information. However, this information is growing beyond our current capabilities in making use of it. http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2011/biau1120.html

Press Release: Stat of the Week -- Organizations with increasing IT budgets: 2006-2011

Cutter Consortium | In our annual CBR IT Budgeting issue, Bob Benson took a look at the growth (or lack thereof) of the overall IT spend. According to Benson, "This graph basically reflects the path of the current economy: 2009 was the low point of the "first" recession, while 2010 and 2011 showed some recovery. It is entirely imaginable that 2012 will reflect 2009's pattern. The economic uncertainty we're experiencing today will be reflected in overall IT spending and likely show a flat line or decline in ongoing IT investment." http://www.cutter.com/press/111018.html

A Tribute to Steve Jobs

The Cutter Business Technology Council | The passing of Steve Jobs on 5 October 2011 has affected all of us involved with IT to some extent, whether we use Apple products or not. Jobs was an innovator who changed consumer interaction with computing and how computer products are developed. As working IT professionals, the Cutter Business Technology Council recognizes Jobs�s genius and his impact on today�s computing environment. Each contributor to this omnibus Council Opinion shares his or her personal tribute to the computing pioneer who was Steve Jobs. http://www.cutter.com/content/trends/fulltext/reports/2011/03/index.html

Steve Jobs: Greater than Scipio Africanus?

Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | As expected and sudden was the inevitable and tragic end to Steve Jobs's life, so too is it surprising yet necessary that an outpouring of praise and emotion would follow. We all loved his inventions. The Twitterverse was rightfully aflame with stories about Steve. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit111013.html

Business Architecture: Part V -- Team Building Through Development

Ulrich, William | Executive Updates | In Parts I-IV of this Executive Update series, we discussed how business architecture provides the means for shaping and communicating business strategy, transformation roadmaps, and funding models; how to use value streams as a basis for planning and deploying business initiatives; and how capabilities form the foundation for articulating a shared business vocabulary. 1 Here in Part V, we outline how to establish and socialize the business architecture, including introducing a rapid roadmap deployment approach that business architecture teams can use as a template for getting started. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/updates/2011/eau1113.html

Beware of Strategies Masquerading as Objectives (and Objectives that Aren't Well Defined)

Schildkraut, Laura | Executive Updates | Have you ever overloaded your dishwasher? You focus completely on getting every last dish and every last glass and every last utensil loaded. Then you breathe a sigh of relief as you press "start." An hour later, as the wash cycle completes, you return to find that the dishes and glasses and utensils aren't really clean. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2011/bitu1112.html

High Performance Operations: Strategies for Making Compliance a Competitive Advantage

Glazer, Hillel | Consulting | General Overview: The bureaucracy of everyday compliance issues often gets in the way of being lean and achieving excellence. In fact, the desire to be lean and agile can turn into its own form of "compliance". This one-day workshop introduces a revealing systematic approach that puts compliance properly in its place -- behind your pursuit of excellence. http://www.cutter.com/workshops/high-performance-ops.html

Webinar: When a Business Plays Games: It Can Be a Good Thing, Too

Perkins, Bart | Events | When you hear that a business is "playing games," you probably think something shady is going on. But not necessarily! A new class of games - video games - is emerging that is extremely useful to virtually every organization. Businesses, not-for-profits, and governments are starting to use video games to address a wide range of business challenges. http://www.cutter.com/events/multimedia/playing-games.html

Corporate Use of Text Mining and Analysis: Part II -- Development Issues and Software/Services Trends

Hall, Curt | Executive Updates | In June/July 2011, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey asking 61 end-user organizations about the adoption and use of text mining and analysis. The goal was to uncover corporate adoption trends and examine application development issues to discern how organizations use unstructured data analysis technologies and practices. http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2011/biau1119.html

Press Release: Stat of the Week -- How much does your organization spend on education and training per IT employee annually (in US dollars)?

Cutter Consortium | Two years ago we added this question to our research on IT Trends. Though the data is limited, spending appeared to be growing this year, and is a data point we'll continue to track. According to Mike Sisco, the growth "... could be attributed to developing staff internally to avoid hiring new employees. Last year, I discussed the future challenge we will face in staffing our IT organizations as the demand for qualified resources outpaces the supply due to retiring baby boomers and fewer IT majors graduating from universities. Training and education is a powerful motivator for IT employees and a tool that can help you retain your good employees. http://www.cutter.com/press/111004.html

Do We Have to Hug? Part I -- Building Collaboration

Love, Jim | Executive Updates | How would you feel if you owned a Ferrari and couldn't get it out of first gear? That's exactly what's happening in many companies when it comes to collaborative technologies. http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2011/biau1118.html

Multiskilling or Specialization: The Dilemma of a 21st-Century Info Worker

N, Vijaykumar | Journals | It is clear that organizations are setting new expectations for their IT departments. Historically, the mission of IT was to reduce business and technology costs by optimizing existing IT assets and processes. While there is still demand for asset optimization and process efficiencies, organizations expect innovative breakthroughs from their IT departments in such areas as virtualization of work and leveraging the consumerization of technology. In many cases, the CIO is expected to lead these breakthroughs, both from a championing and execution point of view. So information and information technology have been (and will continue to be) drivers for a fundamental shift in business operating models. But will IT as a function be a relevant part of this? And, if so, at what impact to the oft-maligned IT worker? Is there a 21st-century IT professional? http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2011/09/itj1109e.html

21st-Century IT Personnel: Tooling Up or Tooling Down?

Scott, Robert D. | Journals | It is clear that organizations are setting new expectations for their IT departments. Historically, the mission of IT was to reduce business and technology costs by optimizing existing IT assets and processes. While there is still demand for asset optimization and process efficiencies, organizations expect innovative breakthroughs from their IT departments in such areas as virtualization of work and leveraging the consumerization of technology. In many cases, the CIO is expected to lead these breakthroughs, both from a championing and execution point of view. So information and information technology have been (and will continue to be) drivers for a fundamental shift in business operating models. But will IT as a function be a relevant part of this? And, if so, at what impact to the oft-maligned IT worker? Is there a 21st-century IT professional? http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2011/09/index.html

Versatility and Innovation: The Keys for Survival of 21st-Century IT Personnel

Dhakshinamoorthy, R | Journals | It is clear that organizations are setting new expectations for their IT departments. Historically, the mission of IT was to reduce business and technology costs by optimizing existing IT assets and processes. While there is still demand for asset optimization and process efficiencies, organizations expect innovative breakthroughs from their IT departments in such areas as virtualization of work and leveraging the consumerization of technology. In many cases, the CIO is expected to lead these breakthroughs, both from a championing and execution point of view. So information and information technology have been (and will continue to be) drivers for a fundamental shift in business operating models. But will IT as a function be a relevant part of this? And, if so, at what impact to the oft-maligned IT worker? Is there a 21st-century IT professional? http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2011/09/itj1109a.html

Force of Habit: Seven Essentials for 21st-Century IT Professionals

Bavani, Raja | Journals | It is clear that organizations are setting new expectations for their IT departments. Historically, the mission of IT was to reduce business and technology costs by optimizing existing IT assets and processes. While there is still demand for asset optimization and process efficiencies, organizations expect innovative breakthroughs from their IT departments in such areas as virtualization of work and leveraging the consumerization of technology. In many cases, the CIO is expected to lead these breakthroughs, both from a championing and execution point of view. So information and information technology have been (and will continue to be) drivers for a fundamental shift in business operating models. But will IT as a function be a relevant part of this? And, if so, at what impact to the oft-maligned IT worker? Is there a 21st-century IT professional? http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2011/09/itj1109c.html

The Mindset of a Successful IT Professional

Capmany, Gabriel; Jose Pedro Pagano; Ronchese, Jorge V.A. | Journals | It is clear that organizations are setting new expectations for their IT departments. Historically, the mission of IT was to reduce business and technology costs by optimizing existing IT assets and processes. While there is still demand for asset optimization and process efficiencies, organizations expect innovative breakthroughs from their IT departments in such areas as virtualization of work and leveraging the consumerization of technology. In many cases, the CIO is expected to lead these breakthroughs, both from a championing and execution point of view. So information and information technology have been (and will continue to be) drivers for a fundamental shift in business operating models. But will IT as a function be a relevant part of this? And, if so, at what impact to the oft-maligned IT worker? Is there a 21st-century IT professional? http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2011/09/itj1109d.html

Cultivating Millennials and Harvesting the Value They Produce

Bess, Charlie; Bartolini, Claudio | Journals | It is clear that organizations are setting new expectations for their IT departments. Historically, the mission of IT was to reduce business and technology costs by optimizing existing IT assets and processes. While there is still demand for asset optimization and process efficiencies, organizations expect innovative breakthroughs from their IT departments in such areas as virtualization of work and leveraging the consumerization of technology. In many cases, the CIO is expected to lead these breakthroughs, both from a championing and execution point of view. So information and information technology have been (and will continue to be) drivers for a fundamental shift in business operating models. But will IT as a function be a relevant part of this? And, if so, at what impact to the oft-maligned IT worker? Is there a 21st-century IT professional? http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2011/09/itj1109b.html

How 21st-Century Enterprises Grow

Evernden, Roger | Executive Updates | It's your first briefing from the CIO: First and foremost, we need to keep everything up and running. And we absolutely have to meet mandatory compliance and regulatory deadlines. Then we've got to complete the integration project that kicked off following a big acquisition a couple of years ago, and it had better deliver the planned cost reductions and efficiencies, and on time, because we can't go back on our promises to shareholders. In parallel, we desperately need to transform our business and systems -- cracks are showing and getting bigger, and we're falling far behind competitors in meeting even basic customer expectations. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/updates/2011/eau1111.html

Enterprise Risk Management: Understanding the Value of the Risk and Control Self-Assessment Technique

Doughty, Ken | Executive Reports | Creative accounting and poor risk management practices led to the infamous corporate disasters of companies like Enron and WorldCom in the 1990s. To minimize the likelihood of such practices continuing, US legislators introduced the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). While this legislation addressed the financial accounting practices, it did not remedy the problems associated with organizational risk management. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/reports/2011/06/index.html

Business Architecture: Part IV � Building a Robust Foundation for the Future

Ulrich, William | Executive Updates | In Part I and Part II of this six-part Executive Update series, we discussed the importance of executive sponsorship and outlined how business architecture provides the means for shaping and communicating business strategy, transformation roadmaps, and funding models. 1 Part III explored using value streams as a basis for planning and deploying various business initiatives. 2 Here in Part IV, we examine how capabilities, introduced in Part I, form the foundation for fusing business and IT through a shared vocabulary, vision, and transformation strategy. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/updates/2011/eau1110.html

Being a Collaborative Leader (And Getting Things Done)

Spann, David | Consulting | General Overview: The Being a Collaborative Leader course will help you discover how you can be a leader who motivates people to work better together, deliver results faster, and exceed basic customer satisfaction by creating an environment in which others succeed. You'll understand the organizational and behavioral barriers that prevent your teams from being as agile and adaptive as they could be. By developing an understanding of the beliefs, behaviors, and practices of successful Collaborative Leaders, you'll become one, and be better positioned to serve your teams so they can reduce cycle times, increase customer satisfaction and enhance organizational value. http://www.cutter.com/workshops/agilebehaviors.html

Enterprise BI Architecture Groups: The Key to Effective Agile Data Warehousing Programs

Hughes, Ralph | Executive Reports | Agile data warehousing delivers powerful BI applications in the shortest time frame possible, yet coordinating multiple fast-moving BI teams demands more than simple project management. Organizations need an enterprise business intelligence architecture (EBIA) function to coordinate high-level requirements, designs, and technologies in order to avoid ruinously expensive mistakes and redundancies. An effective EBIA function must provide not only guidelines and reviews but also services and support to the agile teams in order to obtain their willing participation and compliance so that, out of all their loosely coupled efforts, an enterprise data warehouse will emerge. http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/reports/2011/05/index.html

Getting Thrown Off the Methodology Merry-Go-Round

Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | 08 September 2011 | Business Technology Trends & Impacts Maybe I am getting old. Lately I have been reflecting on the debates regarding methodologies that this industry seems to have all the time, no matter the decade. Every generation of IT people seems to spontaneously generate a new, great methodology that will transform and replace all that came before. Oh yes! Ever since I started reading about structured design in the early 1980s, I have from time to time jumped into existing methodologies and invented a couple of my own. Hope springs eternal -- even for me, I suppose. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110908.html

IT Strategy: What vs. How

Andriole, Stephen J. | Executive Updates | I recently finished grading about 60 graduate student papers on IT strategy. Without going into the details of the assignment, suffice it to know that I provide students with a template for developing IT strategies that must be applied to their companies, or to a company at which they've worked. Their assignment is to describe and prescribe what's happening at their companies and what their companies should do. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2011/bitu1111.html

Webinar: How to Keep Your CIO Job

Blitstein, Ron | Events :: The stories and statistics are well known and troubling: the door to the CIO office remains a revolving one. Every CIO -- whether new to the organization or long-sitting -- needs to know what is required to ensure organizational success and personal longevity. http://www.cutter.com/events/multimedia/keep-your-cio-job.html

IT Strategy: What vs. How

Andriole, Stephen J. | Executive Updates :: I recently finished grading about 60 graduate student papers on IT strategy. Without going into the details of the assignment, suffice it to know that I provide students with a template for developing IT strategies that must be applied to their companies, or to a company at which they've worked. Their assignment is to describe and prescribe what's happening at their companies and what their companies should do. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2011/bitu1111.html

The Proof Is in the Certification

Shoemaker, Dan | E-Mail Advisors :: The person who cuts my hair has a formal license on the mirror. The guy who fixes the pipes in my old house has a license, as does my doctor, my lawyer, and the guy who flies me around the country. Heck, even the kid next door has a driver's license. But the person who developed the architecture, wrote the code, and manages my IT operation is not only unlicensed, he or she has no formal proof whatsoever of competence beyond a college degree and some experience. http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/advisor/2011/itj110907.html

Business-Oriented Service Management: A Roadmap for IT

Keyworth, Bill | Executive Reports :: Given the game-changing role that technology now plays within corporations, educational institutions, and government agencies (henceforth referred to as "the business community"), why don't IT recipients take a more proactive role in getting their technology needs addressed? Given the dependency that business entities have on the process automation and information-retrieval capabilities managed by IT, why aren't such enterprises more heavily involved with day-to-day IT operations? Given the potential impact that great IT or bad IT has on revenue achievement, profit margins, customer relationships, competitive differentiation, and so forth, why isn't the business community more tightly integrated with the delivery of IT services? http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/reports/2011/05/index.html

The Modern Leader Mantra: Don't Just Do the Right Things, Do Them Right

Moroney, Patrick E. | E-Mail Advisors :: As business and technology leaders, we may occasionally be tempted to pine for the days of old when the pace of life and business was slower and when change management had more to do with the coins in our pocket than ongoing transformational change. We may long for the time before we hopped on the technology bullet train that seems to be stretching our businesses vertically and horizontally daily. Those days, of course, are gone forever. IT is increasingly the enabler (and disabler) of competitiveness and survival in every industry, especially global and data-centric ones, with only accelerating change, which increases competitive complexities, in sight. Understanding how to employ technology effectively to create new products, reach new markets, service customers, reduce and manage costs, allow employees and partners to communicate, collaborate, and innovate, as well as collect, store, and analyze vastly increasing amounts of data, among other business challenges, can be both a differentiator and a competitive survival skill. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110831.html

Collaborative and Social KM Solutions

Baudoin, Claude | Executive Updates :: In a recent Executive Update, I established that while early knowledge management (KM) relied on the organization and classification of document repositories, today's KM success depends on the crucial integration of the human aspect with enterprise strategies. http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/updates/2011/biau1115.html

Using Enterprise Architecture for Governance, Alignment, and SOX Compliance

Finkelstein, Clive | Executive Reports :: In this Executive Report, I describe a practical approach utilizing enterprise architecture (EA) for rapid compliance with business governance requirements such as the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). Throughout the report, I show how senior management can establish internal controls by using a governance analysis framework (GAF), which is used to align and document the relationships within an enterprise that support financial and other reporting requirements. The framework is based on a comprehensive organizing framework using the Zachman Framework as well as proven EA methods and tools for the documentation and management of a GAF. It also ensures that senior management is able to comply with the internal control reporting requirements of Section 404 of SOX. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/reports/2011/06/index.html

Webinar: How to Keep Your CIO Job

Blitstein, Ron | Events | 14 September 2011 | Business-IT Strategies The stories and statistics are well known and troubling: the door to the CIO office remains a revolving one. Every CIO -- whether new to the organization or long-sitting -- needs to know what is required to ensure organization success and personal longevity. http://www.cutter.com/events/multimedia/keep-your-cio-job.html

Bettering the Future by Beheading Bearers of Bad News

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors | 25 August 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Enterprise Risk Management & Governance "I'm breathing. Are you breathing, too? It's nice, isn't it? It isn't difficult to keep alive, friends -- just don't make trouble -- or if you must make trouble, make the sort of trouble that's expected. Well, I don't need to tell you that." http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2011/erm110825.html

Devops at Advance Internet: How We Got in the Door

Shamow, Eric | Journals | 25 August 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Enterprise Architecture; Cutter IT Journal Only by providing positive results to the business and management can IT reverse its bad reputation and become a reliable partner again. In order to do that, we need to break through blockers in our thought process, and devops invites us to challenge traditional organizational barriers. The days of top-down control are over -- devops is a grass-roots movement similar to other horizontal revolutions, such as Facebook. The role of management is changing: no longer just directive, it is taking a more supportive role, unleashing the power of the people on the floor to achieve awesome results. And that is the focus of this issue of Cutter IT Journal. http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/2011/08/itj1108b.html

Finding Our Balance

Pfleeger, Shari Lawrence | E-Mail Advisors | 24 August 2011 | Cutter IT Journal; Business-IT Strategies; Enterprise Risk Management & Governance On 17 July 2011, the Boston Globe reported on the predicament of a driver seemingly "caught in a dragnet." John Gass's Massachusetts driver's license had been revoked; "An antiterrorism computerized facial recognition system that scans a database of millions of state driver's license images had picked his as a possible fraud ... It turned out Gass was flagged because he looks like another driver, not because his image was being used to create a fake identity." It was up to Gass, who drives for a living, to prove who he is, and it took him "10 days of bureaucratic wrangling" to have his driver's license reinstated. http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/advisor/2011/itj110824.html

Press Release: Stat of the Week -- To what extent do you agree with the following statement about tablet device usage?

Cutter Consortium | 23 August 2011 | Business-IT Strategies The fact that more than half of respondents indicated agreement with this statement foreshadows a sea change in IT's role to CBR contributor Niel Nickolaisen; "Several years ago, the notion of employees selecting and using their own devices to access and use ERP, CRM, logistics, and other business applications would have been heresy. Today, some of us are already doing this with a whole bunch of others planning to do so in the near future. It could be that the storm is already here. If this is indeed our future, one of our traditional IT roles will change: we will get out of the end-user device business. And if this is our future, we will be asked to take on new roles: securely connecting our computing resources to a wide range of devices that support both mobile employees and customers and depend increasingly more on wireless networks." http://www.cutter.com/press/110823.html

Is It Time to Radically Change Your Approach to CRM?

Love, Jim | Executive Reports | 22 August 2011 | Innovation; Business Intelligence; Business-IT Strategies CRM continues to ride a growing wave of interest as businesses struggle to find any way to gain advantage in difficult markets and difficult economic situations. Companies have demanded, or at least pursued, strategies that I call the "Three Fs" (features, functions, and fads). Vendors have responded. New features, new functions, new fads, and even new CRM packages have hit the market at an amazing rate. Ironically, in the midst of this explosion of offerings, few companies have exploited the features of their existing systems. All too often, CRM systems remain caught in a vicious cycle of overpromise and underachievement. Customers are making radical changes to the way they behave in relationship with the companies that serve them. Can these same companies avoid radical changes to systems they count on to develop and manage those relationships? Tinkering won't do. In this Executive Report, I explore the real changes required to reinvent CRM and successfully address the challenges of the 21st-century customer. http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/reports/2011/04/index.html

CIO Longevity Diagnostic

Blitstein, Ron | Consulting | Business-IT Strategies If you've been in the CIO seat at your organization for some time now, the odds are stacked against you sitting there much longer. It's widely understood that the average tenure for a CIO is not much more than four years. How can you beat those odds? http://www.cutter.com/consulting-and-training/cio-longevity-diagnostic.html

100 Day Ramp-up Plan for CIOs

Blitstein, Ron | Consulting | Business-IT Strategies If you're a new CIO, either new to the organization or completely new to the role, there is a high likelihood that you'll be gone before four years is up. So how can you beat the odds? By knowing exactly what sits beneath every single rock. Understanding the lay of the land right from Day 1 is critical to your success. http://www.cutter.com/consulting-and-training/cio-100-day-plan.html

The Space Race and the Tough Decisions

Pritchard, Carl | E-Mail Advisors | 17 August 2011 | Business-IT Strategies It's been a challenging year, both politically and economically. It's also been interesting to watch the reactions. As the job market has tanked, many have given up on the job hunt, turning their searches instead to themselves to explore new careers and new possibilities.1 As government belt-tightening has taken place, private firms are stepping in to fill the void that hitherto would have been handled by the government sector. Nowhere has this been more visible than with the end to the shuttle program, which has been seen as the end of an era to many in the US. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110817.html

Business Architecture: Part III � Leveraging Value Streams in Business Transformation

Ulrich, William | Executive Updates | 15 August 2011 | Enterprise Architecture; Business-IT Strategies In Part I of this six-part Executive Update series on business architecture, we discussed the importance of executive sponsorship and leadership. 1 In Part II, we outlined how business architecture provides the means for shaping and communicating business strategy, transformation roadmaps, and funding models. 2 Here in Part III, we explore how to use value streams as a basis for deploying various business initiatives ranging from large-scale transformation efforts to near-term, high-payback tactical deployments. We discuss the use of value streams in improving productivity and enhancing the customer experience. Before we get into various case study examples, let's recap the role of the value stream in analyzing business challenges and crafting strategies for addressing those challenges. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/updates/2011/eau1109.html

Boarding on the Edge of Chaos

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors :: The causes of corporate death that are most often heard at the coroner's inquest fall into two major categories: death caused by a weak/inappropriate strategy or death caused by operational ill-execution. Occasionally, the corporate pathologist will testify that both were equally to blame. http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2011/erm110811.html

Arming the Fortress: Principles for Securing Your Enterprise

Shoemaker, Dan | E-Mail Advisors :: We as a nation -- and each CEO as the individual custodian of a business enterprise -- are going to have to rethink how we define "secure." On most planets there is no way anybody would consider him or herself safe if the average evil-doer could penetrate a defense simply by walking around it. Nevertheless, that is precisely the situation when it comes to cybersecurity. http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/advisor/2011/itj110810.html

Strategic IT Planning: Get the Business of It Right

Benson, Robert J. | E-Mail Advisors :: Strategic IT planning is central to establishing the IT vision and, more importantly, the vision of how IT will propel the business (or government agency) forward. It's one of the seven basic competencies every CIO and IT organization should master to bring value to the business. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110810.html

Tablets in the Enterprise: Entering the Post-PC Era? Possibly ...

Piccoli, Gabriele | Cutter Benchmark Review :: Our goal with this issue is to provide some benchmarking data on the state of the adoption and use of post-PC devices in an attempt to understand whether they have become pervasive and how organizations are approaching their integration in the firm's overall infrastructure. If you need ammunition to spur your action into better action when it comes to a tablet strategy, you can find it here -- we have done our job! http://www.cutter.com/content/benchmark/fulltext/2011/05/index.html

Social Media and the Enterprise: Part II -- From Fear to Reasoned Adoption

Baudoin, Claude R. | Executive Reports :: Social media is increasingly relevant not only to the professional life of your colleagues and employees, but also to the relationship between an organization and its customers or associates. Yet it also evokes fears, including confidentiality breaches and productivity losses. Some concerns are exaggerated, in part because the risks are not specific to the new medium. Others are real, and each enterprise needs to assess for itself whether it can mitigate them well enough to proceed. This Executive Report, the second in a two-part series, discusses the issues and risks of social media -- attempting to distinguish justified concerns from irrational fears -- and concludes by proposing steps for a reasonable corporate social media adoption roadmap. http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/reports/2011/03/index.html

Five Opportunities in Outsourcing to China

Su, Ning | E-Mail Advisors :: China's transformation toward a technology powerhouse gives Western firms new opportunities for IT services sourcing. However, with it comes significant managerial challenges. Based on multiple visits to major Chinese IT services hub cities and interviews with senior managers from leading Chinese vendors, multinational Chinese subsidiaries, and industry experts, consultants, and government officials, a recent Cutter Executive Report ("China's IT Outsourcing Industry After the Global Financial Crisis") identifies five opportunities for outsourcing IT-related services to China. Beyond the commonly discussed reasons, such as low cost, large talent pool, and robust infrastructure, more strategic benefits can arise if Western firms pay special attention to the following five areas. http://www.cutter.com/content/trends/fulltext/advisor/2011/btt110804.html

IT Reorganization: Part III

Grochow, Jerrold M. | Executive Updates :: In Part I of this three-part Executive Update series, we began our examination of a recent Cutter survey about reorganization of the IT function. 1 Nearly three-quarters of reporting organizations had some type of IT reorganization in the past three years (80% in the past five). Outcomes were promising, with 60% reporting improved IT performance after reorganization, although 24% reported worsened performance. In Part II, we discussed reasons, type, scope, time, and size of overall organization as factors related to success. 2 While the survey data can't tell us about causality, it does show that the most successful reorganizations occurred in medium-sized organizations, didn't attempt to reorganize too much or too little (i.e., involve 20%-50% of the staff), and were supported by a new IT leader trying to improve performance of the IT organization (rather than deal with budget cuts). IT reorganizations that didn't have to contend with consolidating dispersed IT functions into a central organization were also more successful. While these are all interesting correlations to the outcome of improved IT performance, the questions we really want to answer are why do these correlations occur and how do we capitalize on this knowledge. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2011/bitu1109.html

Marketing IT Operations: Part I -- If You Don't Do It, Who Will?

Keyworth, Bill | Executive Updates :: IT organizations devote significant attention to delivering the technology and processes that ensure the achievement of business objectives. It's what we do in IT. It's the recognition that drives our actions. It's our purpose for existing. Yet is it sufficient to simply deliver value without any executive recognition for that contribution? IT best practices require that we not only deliver on the promise of IT, but that we also take the necessary steps toward recognition of that value so that the business "buys IT." This marketing-style approach allows IT to remain adequately funded, gain support for technology investments, obtain backing for critical IT initiatives, and ensure responsiveness to our dependencies. In this two-part Executive Update series, we will explore a five-step process to achieve IT "market" effectiveness, focusing on the first step (market vision) here in Part I. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2011/bitu1110.html

Business-Driven Roadmaps and Funding Models

Ulrich, William | E-Mail Advisors :: Business architecture not only provides a vision for aligning stakeholder value and customer experience across business units and product lines, but it also allows executives and portfolio managers to change the nature of planning, roadmap development, and related investment strategies. Through our consulting practice, my colleagues and I have reviewed a good number of business transformation plans and have found that many of these plans have several things in common... http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110803.html

The Evolving Threat Environment

Dooley, Brian J. | E-Mail Advisors :: Threats to the enterprise come from a wide variety of areas and can appear suddenly or grow over time. Such risks include the following types... http://www.cutter.com/content/trends/fulltext/advisor/2011/btt110728.html

Webinar: How to Keep Your CIO Job

The News of the World Scandal: Would ERM Have Helped Prevent It?

Charette, Robert | E-Mail Advisors | 28 July 2011 | Enterprise Risk Management & Governance; Business-IT Strategies "I feel that people I trusted ... have let me down." http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2011/erm110728.html

Identifying Your Key Stakeholders

Cohen, Moshe | E-Mail Advisors | 27 July 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Business Intelligence IS departments interact with a multitude of stakeholders through the inception, development, and completion of projects. Whether assessing the needs of internal departments, developing partnerships with external partners and vendors, managing deadlines and deliverables, or setting expectations for end users, IT professionals must be adept at identifying key stakeholders, understanding their interests, and then communicating and negotiating with them effectively throughout the life of the project. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110727.html

Business Resilience Through IT

Dooley, Brian J. | Executive Updates | 22 July 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Enterprise Risk Management & Governance; Business Technology Trends & Impacts The enterprise threat environment continues to grow in complexity and increasingly falls to IT for a solution. Solutions in enterprise risk management (ERM) and business continuity management (BCM) aimed specifically at IT have evolved to embrace greater territory. Meanwhile, significant new threats continue to emerge, including regulatory compliance, security, and financial issues from the sputtering global economic crisis as well as recent natural disasters across the globe such as flooding in the US and Australia, earthquakes in New Zealand, and the earthquakes and tsunami in Japan. http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/updates/2011/ermu1106.html

Managing Stakeholders in IS Projects

Cohen, Moshe | Executive Reports | 21 July 2011 | Business-IT Strategies The success of a technology project depends on numerous factors, but as this Executive Report will show, the most important are identifying key stakeholders, determining their power and impact on the project, understanding their interests, and then communicating and negotiating with them effectively throughout the life of a project. By planning your strategy ahead of time based on a solid understanding of the stakeholders and the context of your project -- and executing on that plan with strong negotiation, communication, and relationship management skills -- you can garner the support required for your project and ensure its successful completion. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/reports/2011/04/index.html

Plot, Coherence, and Resonance

Devin, Lee | E-Mail Advisors | 21 July 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Innovation The ancient philosopher, Aristotle, wrote a book about "making." In it, he used plays -- tragedies -- as his example of a complicated made thing, and he declared plot the "soul" of tragedy. He defined "plot" as the principle of arrangement for all the other parts. A made thing, in other words, is what it is, not because of its parts themselves but because of their arrangement. http://www.cutter.com/content/innovation/fulltext/advisor/2011/iea110721.html

Decision Making Under a Different "Hat"

Pritchard, Carl | E-Mail Advisors | 20 July 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Business Intelligence Executives make decisions every day. They base them on their wealth of personal and professional experience. They base them on the available information sets. They base them on what they believe is in the proverbial "crystal ball" because of what they've seen in the past. The problem is, each of us has only one true past. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110720.html

Social Media and the Enterprise: Part I -- From Apprehension to Explosion

Baudoin, Claude R. | Executive Summaries | 19 July 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Business Intelligence Social media, including but not limited to social networks, is no longer just where you spend your evenings when there is nothing on TV. As we'll explore in this two-part Executive Report series, it is now increasingly relevant not only to the professional life of your colleagues and employees, but also to the relationship between an organization and its customers or associates. Yet social media still evokes fears, mostly of confidentiality breaches and productivity losses. This series examines the pros and cons of social media and proposes reasonable steps for a corporate social media adoption roadmap. http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/summaries/2011/02/index.html

Social Media and the Enterprise: Part I -- From Apprehension to Explosion

Baudoin, Claude R. | Executive Reports | 18 July 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Business Intelligence Social media, including but not limited to social networks, is no longer just where you spend your evenings when there is nothing on TV. As we'll explore in this two-part Executive Report series, it is now increasingly relevant not only to the professional life of your colleagues and employees, but also to the relationship between an organization and its customers or associates. Yet social media still evokes fears, mostly of confidentiality breaches and productivity losses. This series examines the pros and cons of social media and proposes reasonable steps for a corporate social media adoption roadmap. http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/reports/2011/02/index.html

The Impact of Green IT on the Value of Cloud Computing

Lindner, Maik A.; McDonald, Fiona | Executive Updates | 15 July 2011 | Business-IT Strategies Cloud computing is an evolving technology that offers opportunities and benefits for companies and enterprises. It provides the ability to simplify previously difficult processes such as using green IT. This helps organizations follow corporate social responsibility (CSR) guidelines and make use of environmentally friendly IT. As businesses that utilize cloud computing provide their products in a cloud supply chain, it is important to clarify what IT services are involved in order to point out the value that can be gained from using cloud computing. Therefore, value should be seen as the amount buyers are willing to pay for what a company provides. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2011/bitu1108.html

Business Architecture: Part II -- Business-Driven Transformation Strategies, Roadmaps, and Funding Models

Ulrich, William | Executive Updates | 15 July 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Enterprise Architecture In Part I of this six-part Executive Update series on business architecture, we took a look at why business executives must sponsor and enable business architecture for the business. 1 We discussed how business architecture supports a wide range of business initiatives, such as improving customer service and reducing customer attrition; enabling merger, acquisition, and divestiture activities; and deploying new business strategies across product lines and business units. The challenge facing many organizations today is that enterprise strategies and executive mandates rarely align to funded initiatives and project deployments. Fragmented, redundant, or even conflicting projects often take organizations in directions that fall far short of strategic goals and executive mandates, in spite of the millions of dollars spent on these efforts. Here in Part II, we'll discuss how organizations can craft business-driven transformation strategies that address these challenges. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/updates/2011/eau1108.html

Where Do Complex Managers Come From?

Wysocki, Robert | E-Mail Advisors | 14 July 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Agile Project Management Right now, most complex project managers (CPMs) are accidents of their experience rather than the product of a planned professional development program. To be really effective in managing complex projects, organizations will have to reverse that. A cadre of CPMs must be developed to align with the current and future needs of the organization. That means having a professional development program that anticipates future demands and counsels and prepares CPMs to be ready to meet that demand as it materializes. Future demand is a changing target, and so is the profile of the CPM cadre at any point in time. Maintaining the alignment of supply and demand over time is a major challenge. http://www.cutter.com/content/project/fulltext/advisor/2011/apm110714.html

Cloud Computing: The New Foundation for Corporate IT?

Shum, Annie | E-Mail Advisors | 13 July 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Business Intelligence Cloud computing "as a platform" will change the economics of computing by replacing up-front CAPEX with a more scalable, variable cost structure based on an on-demand, (almost) friction-free entry/exit, elastic, pay-as-you-go model. Increasingly, a growing number of organizations will find it compelling to consider cloud computing as a utility-based alternative (or supplement) to privately owned, on-premises data centers. Additionally, organizations, notably nimble entrepreneurs and cash-strapped startups, will be able to punch above their weight class and accelerate time to value. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110713.html

Are You Doing Architecture?

Rosen, Mike | E-Mail Advisors | 13 July 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Enterprise Architecture In yet another conversation with a client, I was reviewing the activities that its architects were performing. As you can imagine, those activities included following procedure, organizing meetings, investigating issues or technologies, performing reviews, writing documents, creating models, and so on. As I pointed out in my last Advisor (see "Define Roles and Responsibilities to Avoid Conflict," 29 June 2011), an architect has many different roles. But one question we don't often ask is: Should architects be performing those roles? Or, put another way: What roles should they be performing? This leads to another question: Are we doing architecture? http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2011/ea110713.html

SoftBut

Gat, Israel | E-Mail Advisors | 07 July 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Agile Project Management Cutter colleague Jens Coldewey recently published a very incisive Advisor entitled "Pitfalls of Agile XIV: KanBut" (16 June 2011). I must admit some jealousy mixed with anxiety evolved within me while reading his excellent article. Bas Vode and Jeff Sutherland have their ScrumBut test, Jens has his KanBut, but I have no "but" to claim. Am I falling behind? Can my Cutter practice really succeed without a "but"? What am I going to say to a prospect who tells me, "Dr. Gat, please cut the crap about your experience and accomplishments -- our RFP clearly stipulated that having a 'but' is a mandatory prerequisite." Hence, I felt compelled to write this Advisor entitled "SoftBut"; we are doing software but ... http://www.cutter.com/content/project/fulltext/advisor/2011/apm110707.html

Establishing a Reserve Data Center

Gerden, Eugene | E-Mail Advisors | 06 July 2011 | Cutter IT Journal At present, establishing reserve data centers could be recommended to almost any organization and company that hopes to ensure business continuity and avoid possible financial losses associated with the failure of the main databases. http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/advisor/2011/itj110706.html

Achieving Immediate BSM Success

Keyworth, Bill | E-Mail Advisors | 06 July 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Business Intelligence Most successful IT executives grasp the minimal appeal of business-alignment metrics focused on application downtime, system uptime/availability, speed of endpoint provisioning, mean time to repair (MTTR), and other measurements essential in tracking the efficiency of IT operations. That isn't a new doctrine. What might be new is the "business" language required to relate IT deliverables to the end users' business objectives. If the IT deliverable is of no importance to the business function, then IT should eliminate or repackage it into a service that carries appropriate business value. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110706.html

Webinar: How to Keep Your CIO Job

Aligning Enterprise Architecture, Strategy, and Portfolio Management

Finkelstein, Clive | Executive Reports | 05 July 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Enterprise Architecture; Business Intelligence Success with enterprise architecture depends on strategy, rather than on existing business processes. This leads to the development of a strategic model of the enterprise as a "picture of the business" for management, while also being a high-level enterprise model for IT. This strategic model is analyzed to derive a portfolio of systems based on management priorities. This Executive Report demonstrates methods you can use to derive project plans and project maps from data maps by inspection. These easy-to-apply methods have not previously been used in data modeling and promise to transform portfolio management. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/reports/2011/04/index.html

Software Cloud Computing: Part II -- How to Spend $20 Billion

Bennatan, E.M. | Executive Updates | 01 July 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Agile Project Management; Business Intelligence Here's a question for you: who do you think is planning to spend $20 billion a year on cloud computing, every year? I can't imagine that you came up with any answer other than the US government, and you're right. Well, almost. http://www.cutter.com/content/project/fulltext/updates/2011/apmu1112.html

Radioactive Walrus Redux

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors | 30 June 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Enterprise Risk Management & Governance It is depressing to see that the "Jumping the Radioactive Walrus" syndrome is alive and well in the US as well as in Japan (see "Jumping the Radioactive Walrus: Nuclear Risk Mismanagement in Japan," 7 April 2011). According to a recent report by the US Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, the safety culture at the Hanford nuclear waste treatment and immobilization plant in Washington State is "flawed and effectively defeats" the 20-year Department of Energy (DOE) requirement that there be "a culture that encourages setting and maintaining high standards; identifying and resolving problems and deficiencies; openness to criticism and recommendations for improvement; and mutual respect and effective communication between line managers and independent oversight." http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2011/erm110630.html

Cloud Computing as a Platform Through the Prism of Leveling

Shum, Annie | Executive Summaries | 29 June 2011 | Business-IT Strategies Cloud computing is emerging as a defining platform coinciding with the rise of Big Data and the "always connected" mobile era. As the industry attempts to define both its promises and challenges, cloud computing is rapidly evolving. Drawing parallels from past transformative shifts, notably the auto industry, this Executive Report explores both the pitfalls and potentials of the cloud. Regarding pitfalls, we shine a spotlight on the risks of blinkered views and the "horseless carriage syndrome." On potentials, after a brief historical review of the profound impact of "leveling" on society, we focus on how cloud computing can play a vital role as a catalyst in accelerating the leveling of modern society by fueling the ongoing shift from top-down, "supply push" business environments to bottom-up, "demand pull" business ecosystems. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/summaries/2011/03/index.html

The Public Clouds Are Coming Faster

Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | 29 June 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Business Intelligence Regardless of what you think about cloud computing, one thing seems certain: while adoption is still very early, cloud computing is growing very fast. Before we begin to discuss this, let's quickly define some terms. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110629.html

Cloud Computing as a Platform Through the Prism of Leveling

Shum, Annie | Executive Reports | 28 June 2011 | Business-IT Strategies Cloud computing is emerging as a defining platform coinciding with the rise of Big Data and the "always connected" mobile era. As the industry attempts to define both its promises and challenges, cloud computing is rapidly evolving. Drawing parallels from past transformative shifts, notably the auto industry, this Executive Report explores both the pitfalls and potentials of the cloud. Regarding pitfalls, we shine a spotlight on the risks of blinkered views and the "horseless carriage syndrome." On potentials, after a brief historical review of the profound impact of "leveling" on society, we focus on how cloud computing can play a vital role as a catalyst in accelerating the leveling of modern society by fueling the ongoing shift from top-down, "supply push" business environments to bottom-up, "demand pull" business ecosystems. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/reports/2011/03/index.html

Mysterious Appeal

Devin, Lee | E-Mail Advisors | 23 June 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Innovation Cutter Fellow Rob Austin and I are completing a book on innovation, The Soul of Design: The Surprising Power of Plot to Enhance Product and Service Experiences (forthcoming from Stanford University Press, 2012). In it we focus on unique products that appeal to customers on grounds that you can't quite pin down. What is it about certain things that generate an appeal beyond that justified by utility? Apple's line of iGizmos, for instance: they don't always work a lot better than the competition, but they sell better. A lot better. Why is that? What's the difference between an iPod and another mp3 device that might even work better? http://www.cutter.com/content/innovation/fulltext/advisor/2011/iea110623.html

The Benefits of Business Architecture

Ulrich, William | E-Mail Advisors | 22 June 2011 | Enterprise Architecture; Business-IT Strategies Business architecture is gaining recognition as a game-changing discipline that enables businesses to address major challenges in new and unique ways. Simply put, business architecture allows a business to establish a common vocabulary, shared vision, and a degree of transparency that facilitates initiatives ranging from M&As to the reversal of customer attrition. But even as business architecture success stories emerge, the message has been slow to penetrate the executive suite. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2011/ea110622.html

The Coming Tsunami: In-Memory Databases, Part I

Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | 16 June 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Enterprise Architecture; Business Technology Trends & Impacts SAP may have dished up a fastball high and inside, just under the chin. The target: its database competitors. http://www.cutter.com/content/trends/fulltext/advisor/2011/btt110616.html

Secrets and Cyber Security

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors | 16 June 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Enterprise Risk Management & Governance "You can't manage a secret." http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2011/erm110616.html

Computers Don't Know All the Answers

Pritchard, Carl | E-Mail Advisors | 15 June 2011 | Business-IT Strategies From the simplest to the most complex decisions, we like to believe that we are making them with an objective perspective and a willingness to take all the parameters and factors into account. The tragedy, however, is that we often don't give enough credit to our wealth of information in making those decisions. In a recent class on building decision-making models, I watched as participants wrestled with the parameters that actually mattered in their processes. Some were simple and objective, such as cost. Many more were subjective or difficult to narrow down, such as user-friendliness and long-term supportability. The challenge came in term definition. What constitutes "user-friendly"? What's "long-term"? Every time an adjective came into play, the ability to boil the parameter down to clear logic became doubly challenging. Models were built, and the answers they pumped out were sometimes wrong. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110615.html

Classification, Understanding, and Frameworks

Rosen, Mike | E-Mail Advisors | 15 June 2011 | Enterprise Architecture; Business-IT Strategies In other words, data is a collection of unorganized/uninterrupted facts. When we put those facts in the context of a schema or classification, then we have useful information. When we put that information into the context of experience, then we have knowledge. When we apply that knowledge to add value, then we have wisdom. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2011/ea110615.html

Are We Already Implementing Business Service Management?

Keyworth, Bill | Executive Updates | 14 June 2011 | Business-IT Strategies Even though the concept of "business service management" (BSM) has been debated, advocated, debased, and promoted for years, the immaturity in articulating its mechanisms is still somewhat pervasive. Yet IT has been, is, and will continue to be hammered for being disconnected from the business needs of the customers that it serves unless something fundamentally changes within IT. Fortunately, as discussed in this Executive Update, we are witnessing a growing number of IT managers who are actually delivering meaningful value -- even though they're struggling to achieve recognition for that business benefit. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2011/bitu1106.html

Want to Remove Obstacles from Your Project? Then Communicate with Stakeholders

Cohen, Moshe | E-Mail Advisors | 08 June 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Agile Project Management The success of an IS project often depends less on the technical skill of your project team and more on your ability to understand, manage, and gain the support of a bewildering array of stakeholders that impact the project. You need to be able to identify your key stakeholders, figure out the extent and manner in which they impact your project, understand what they need from you, and influence their behavior so they help move your project forward. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110608.html

Risk Management = Testing

Estes, Don | E-Mail Advisors | 08 June 2011 | Enterprise Architecture; Business-IT Strategies If we create a suitably accurate and comprehensive set of tests at the outset of the project -- tests for both performance and business functionality, the two primary reasons for project failure -- and apply those tests continually throughout the project, then the project can never fail on either basis. In effect, I recommend applying a large-scale version of test-driven development, a key feature of agile programming methodologies. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2011/ea110608.html

IT Reorganization: Part I

Grochow, Jerrold M. | Executive Updates | 03 June 2011 | Business-IT Strategies The recession and other financial woes of the last three years have affected almost every industry. Reorganization in one form or another, often accompanied by layoffs, became the norm. It is little surprise then that three-quarters of all organizations in a recent Cutter Consortium survey reported IT reorganizations during the period 2008-2010. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2011/bitu1105.html

Do Cancelled IT Projects Leave a Carbon Footprint?

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors | 02 June 2011 | Enterprise Risk Management & Governance; Business-IT Strategies There was a recent story in USA Today about how venture capitalists have been pouring billions of dollars into startups that are targeting clean or "green" technologies, with billions more in investment on the horizon.1 The story noted that mainstream companies are investing billions in green technologies, too, as a way to save money and lower their social reputational risk. http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2011/erm110602.html

Architecting Sustainable IT: Use Your Green Thumb

Rosen, Mike | E-Mail Advisors | 01 June 2011 | Enterprise Architecture; Business-IT Strategies This week, in recognition of International Green IT Awareness Week, Cutter is addressing the topic of green or sustainable IT. The question I'll explore is how to take an architectural approach to going green. First, let me propose the following definitions. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2011/ea110601.html

Energy Informatics Getting Energized

Pritchard, Carl | E-Mail Advisors | 25 May 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Business Intelligence A colleague and I started talking and writing about Energy Informatics about three years ago as a result of a request from the Advanced Practices Council (APC) of the Society for Information Management to make its members, typically CIOs, aware of developments in green IS. Our ideas were well received, and Energy Informatics emerged from the APC-funded research. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110525.html

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Baudoin, Claude | E-Mail Advisors | 18 May 2011 | Business-IT Strategies Consider some well-known examples of user interfaces, varying from extremely simple to extremely complicated.1 At one end of this spectrum we have the Google search engine, which initially captured our attention not only because its "secret sauce" -- the page-ranking algorithm -- gave better results, but also because the search page was so extremely simple: the Google logo, a search box, a search button, and precious little else. The page loaded almost instantly, not least because in addition to being very small (this started at a time when dial-up connections were still common), it ended up staying in the user's browser cache all the time. Because there was only one box in which you could type, and it was smack in the middle of the screen, under the logo, it was obvious where you needed to type the search string. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110518.html

How Cloud 2.0 Offers a Way Out of Silicon's Limits

Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | 05 May 2011 | Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Business Intelligence; Business-IT Strategies; Enterprise Architecture Let's face it. We are at the end of Moore's Law. The common version of this law says computing power doubles every 18 to 24 months. Advances in silicon engineering have made this possible. But this natural law of silicon is driven by the fundamentals of materials science and the laws of physics. Unless we find a way to change the gravitational constant of the universe or surpass the speed of light, we are likely to face another four decades of computing unlike the past four decades. http://www.cutter.com/content/trends/fulltext/advisor/2011/btt110505.html

Risk Management Caught Napping

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors | 05 May 2011 | Enterprise Risk Management & Governance; Business-IT Strategies "We don't pay people to sleep." Or so Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Administrator Randy Babbitt emphatically stated last week. Babbitt was wholeheartedly supported in his sentiment by his boss, Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Ray LaHood. Secretary LaHood reiterated that, "On my watch, controllers will not be paid to take naps. We are not going to allow that." http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2011/erm110505.html

What Does IT Think About the Business?

Mendelovich, Rachel | E-Mail Advisors | 27 April 2011 | Business-IT Strategies "Frantic," "indecisive," "technology-disabled," "fantasy-driven," "doesn't know what it wants" -- these are only some of the statements provided by IT people when asked to describe their customers. And this is hardly a surprise. In general, IT processes are characterized by long durations and time-consuming efforts. Once assigned to a task, the IT project manager is first asked to "understand the need" (aka requirements management). Only when the project manager believes the requirements have been fully defined will he or she move to the next phase, drafting the functional design (i.e., high-level design) and technical design (i.e., low-level design). http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110427.html

Beyond the Suggestion Box: Getting "Them" to Participate

Pritchard, Carl | E-Mail Advisors | 20 April 2011 | Business-IT Strategies From the executive suite, there's a virtually never-ending effort to draw on the experiences of others. Even reading articles like this represents an effort to gain from the insights of those with different life experiences. No one individual has all of the answers. The best answers can be drawn from the vast pool of talent that exists around us. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110420.html

Cloud Standards Ramp Up, Gain Key Advocates

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 20 April 2011 | Enterprise Architecture; Business-IT Strategies; Business Intelligence Cloud computing has emerged as an attractive alternative to on-premise IT, offering organizations cost savings and greater flexibility in how they license, develop, and manage applications and how they store and manage data. But the big "however" with cloud computing remains a lack of open -- and generally accepted -- set of standards, benchmarks, methodologies, and best practices. This absence is standing in the way of more widespread adoption of clouds by end-user organizations. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2011/ea110420.html

But How Will Consumers Respond?

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 19 April 2011 | Business Intelligence; Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Business-IT Strategies Last week, marketing giant Epsilon Interactive reported that hackers had gained unauthorized access to a gigantic trove of email addresses the company manages for its various clients. In fact, this might be the largest data breach ever (or at least ever reported), involving what some estimates report to be millions of customer email addresses and names. About 50 of Epsilon's clients are affected. They include stores such as Target and Walgreens; credit card firms and banks such as Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, US Bank, and Barclays Bank; and travel and amusement companies such as Hilton Worldwide and Disney. http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2011/bia110419.html

The Critical IT Management Competencies: Focusing on the "Demand" Side of IT

Benson, Robert J. | E-Mail Advisors | 13 April 2011 | Business-IT Strategies The development and nurturing of IT management (and technical) competencies has historically focused on the "supply" side of IT. Such topics as agile, architecture, infrastructure, project management, service management (e.g., ITIL), IT skills development, technical debt, and cloud computing have dominated the attention of CIOs and senior IT managers and have so since the beginning of IT. These topics primarily deal with supply-side excellence -- delivering IT on time, on budget, and according to user and business specifications -- in effect optimizing the IT resources to develop and deliver IT effectively and efficiently. And what's wrong with that? Nothing .... http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110413.html

As Unstructured Data Rises, So Does View of Text Mining

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 12 April 2011 | Business Intelligence; Business-IT Strategies Back in December, when making predictions for the upcoming year regarding important BI trends, I wrote that we could expect to see use of text mining and analysis increase in 2011, just as it has almost every year since we've measured its adoption (see "What Lies Ahead: BI and Data Warehousing Predictions for 2011," 14 December 2010). http://www.cutter.com/content/bia/fulltext/advisor/2011/bia110412.html

Changes Sweeping IT Mean Managers Face Significant Decisions

Andriole, Stephen J. | Executive Updates | 08 April 2011 | Business-IT Strategies Everyone is talking about big changes in IT. They are indeed big -- bigger, in fact, than the ones we discussed before the dot-com bubble exploded. What are you going to do about them? http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2011/bitu1104.html

Jumping the Radioactive Walrus: Nuclear Risk Mismanagement in Japan

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors | 07 April 2011 | Enterprise Risk Management & Governance; Business-IT Strategies Last year, I wrote an Advisor titled "Jumping the Walrus: When Risk Management Goes Bad" (1 July 2010), which discussed the systemic risk management blunders by BP and the oil industry in general that came to light in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy last April. I wrote then that the phrase "Jumping the Walrus" should now on be used whenever risk management is incompetently performed, done just to meet some requirement, isn't taken seriously, or is plain lackadaisical. http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2011/erm110407.html

Giving Power to the Unempowered? First, Do No Harm

Pritchard, Carl | E-Mail Advisors | 30 March 2011 | Business-IT Strategies For years, there has been a constant complaint in the project management community: the chief grief is that project managers "All this responsibility, and no authority." That's not exclusive to project management, either. Many titled personnel (managers, directors, leaders) have great business cards but don't have a sense that they have much real authority to get anything accomplished. They do, but in many cases, they just don't realize that the source of their authority is not from the organization chart. The key for those of us at an executive level is to not steal away or minimize any of the other forms of authority these individuals have. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110330.html

Business Technology Strategy: Who Owns IT Now?

Andriole, Stephen J. | Executive Updates | 29 March 2011 | Business-IT Strategies Who owns the process by which business technology strategies are developed? Who owns implementation? Who's accountable when strategies collapse? Let's look at ownership in the early 21st century -- or at least what it should look like. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2011/bitu1103.html

Events, Dear Boy, Events: Shaping the Face of Enterprise Risk Management

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors | 24 March 2011 | Enterprise Risk Management & Governance; Business-IT Strategies Back in the 1960s, then-Prime Minister of England Harold Macmillan was supposedly asked by a journalist what might blow his government's policies off course: "Events, dear boy, events," was his response. http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2011/erm110324.html

Opaque Advantage: Murky Awareness of a Firm's Secret Sauce

Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | 23 March 2011 | Business-IT Strategies I was speaking with some fellow CIOs and other business leaders recently about their sources of competitive advantage. A few were not able to articulate clearly from whence sprang their source of sustainable advantage in the market. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110323.html

The Total Solution for Integrating Architecture and Agile Teams

Rosen, Mike | E-Mail Advisors | 23 March 2011 | Enterprise Architecture; Business-IT Strategies; Agile Project Management Agile software development and agile project management have shown considerable success in helping organizations develop better software and better manage development projects in the face of changing requirements and evolving technologies. In one sense, agile is about managing rapidly changing project factors and requirements. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2011/ea110323.html

"Out Sight, Out of Mind"? Not a Solution for Aging IT Infrastructure

Orr, Ken | E-Mail Advisors | 17 March 2011 | Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Enterprise Risk Management & Governance; Business-IT Strategies; Enterprise Architecture In the US and in industrial countries around the world, the recent economic crisis has triggered the first serious consideration of national spending priorities for more than a decade. Supposedly, every option is being explored and unfortunately, in many cases deficits are being balanced out by reduction in long-term investments in existing infrastructure. There are a few bright spots, however. For example, in the US, President Obama has included new money for high-speed rail. http://www.cutter.com/content/trends/fulltext/advisor/2011/btt110317.html

For the CIO: One "Size" Does Not Fit All

Benson, Robert J. | E-Mail Advisors | 16 March 2011 | Business-IT Strategies It is all too easy to make high-level general statements about CIOs and IT organizations. Often these statements work from the assumption that all CIOs and all IT organizations are alike. For example, since the turn of the year, we've seen a lot of "CIO's Concerns for 2011" and similar articles. These can be dangerous if, in fact, CIOs aren't all alike -- or are facing similar problems or indeed playing significantly different roles in the enterprise. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110316.html

Best Buy: Its Turn in the Competitive Enterprise Risk Barrel

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors | 10 March 2011 | Enterprise Risk Management & Governance; Business-IT Strategies Once again, I am sitting here, sipping a cup of coffee at my local McDonald's, looking across the parking lot at the steady stream of people going into the H.H. Gregg electronics store that took up residence in what previously was a Circuit City electronics store. It was two years ago now when I wrote my final story about Circuit City's demise, and how a big part of its eventual fate was determined by a poorly thought out decision of replacing its higher-paid, knowledgeable sales staff with a lower-paid, less experienced one, the exact opposite of its main rival, Best Buy (see "Reinvention: McDonald's Did, and Circuit City Didn't," 12 February 2009). http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2011/erm110310.html

Characteristics of Collaborative-Agile Business

Unhelkar, Bhuvan | E-Mail Advisors | 02 March 2011 | Business-IT Strategies Whether it is the collapse of a particular bank or the global financial crisis, weakness in critical thinking and inadequate strategic analysis in decision making appear to make significant negative contributions to corporate collapses. Business analysis (BA) offers an answer by sharpening the capabilities of critical thinking and analytical decision making. Akin to leadership, management, accounting, and IT, BA is a specific organizational function with significant impact on almost all dimensions and layers of a business. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110302.html

Webinar: The Practical Business Guide to Social CRM

Love, Jim | Events | 02 March 2011 | Business-IT Strategies Everyone is talking about Social customer relationship management (CRM). Some analysts predict that 2011 is the year that Social CRM goes mainstream. But many are still unclear as to what Social CRM is and how to practically deploy it in their enterprise. http://www.cutter.com/events/multimedia/socialcrm.html

Moving from "Nice-to-Haves" to Priorities

Pritchard, Carl | E-Mail Advisors | 23 February 2011 | Business-IT Strategies Your Web site is a mess. The social media initiative that you so desperately wanted to get going never got off the ground. You're not tweeting. You're not on Facebook, and you're not seen as a thought leader in the IT community. These were all priorities once, but now they've all fallen by the wayside. Why? Because other priorities came to the fore. It's not wrong; it's just reality. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110223.html

Webinar: The Practical Business Guide to Social CRM

Learning to Lead Collective Creativity, Part III: Entrepreneurial Leadership

Hjorth, Daniel; O'Donnell, Shannon | E-Mail Advisors | 17 February 2011 | Innovation; Business-IT Strategies In the previous Advisors in this series ("Learning to Lead Collective Creativity from Miles Davis," 13 May 2010, and "Learning to lead Collective Creativity, Part II: Leading So That No One Is Following," 24 June 2010), we described leadership practices that enable teams to engage in collective creativity toward the best possible (novel, relevant, valuable) outcome. We looked at jazz legend Miles Davis's relational techniques that made space for new creative actions to emerge, as well as the shared leadership practices of string quartets that implicate everyone in every moment of the creative process toward a synergistic whole. We suggested these practices are relevant to innovative team work across a range of industries, and promised to next take a look at the particularly entrepreneurial qualities or acts that are part of this way of leading. http://www.cutter.com/content/innovation/fulltext/advisor/2011/iea110217.html

Governance: If We are Drowning in Data What is the Lifeline?

Benson, Robert J. | E-Mail Advisors | 16 February 2011 | Business-IT Strategies I experienced an interesting challenge last week. For 25 years I have taught in a master of information management program at a European university. This program targets IS and business professionals; the median age is probably about 35 years. In short, these are seasoned managers from all kinds of businesses and government organizations. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110216.html

Webinar: The Practical Business Guide to Social CRM

Business Analysis Frameworks as Basis for a BA Profession

Unhelkar, Bhuvan | Executive Updates | 10 February 2011 | Business-IT Strategies Whether it is the collapse of a particular bank or the global financial crisis, weakness in critical thinking and inadequate strategic analysis in decision making appear to make significant negative contributions. Business analysis (BA) offers an answer by sharpening the capabilities of critical thinking and analytical decision making. Akin to leadership, management, accounting, and IT, BA is a specific organizational function with significant impact on almost all dimensions and layers of a business. Three previous Executive Updates focusing on BA illustrate its significance to enterprise architecture, business-IT strategies, and agile product and project management. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2011/bitu1102.html

Developing IT Strategy in the Context of Business Needs

Grochow, Jerrold M. | Executive Updates | 09 February 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Enterprise Risk Management & Governance Deciding the priority and funding for major IT initiatives, such as developing a new system or supporting a new technology, are among the most important functions of the IT governance process. Anyone who has been part of an IT governance committee recognizes that business needs and goals are the key basis for these decisions -- IT strategy must be synchronized with business goals. But organizations sometimes make broad statements about technology strategy without establishing that linkage, saying, for example, "Our goal is to be an innovator in the use of IT." This kind of expansive pronouncement, while no doubt intended to be inspiring, doesn't relate the indicated technology strategy (in this case, being an innovator in the use of IT) to the impact on business operations and goals, and also implies that all parts of the enterprise ought to have the same IT goal. http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/updates/2011/ermu1102.html

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Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | 09 February 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Innovation Many CIOs today feel like they are building bridges as they are walking on them. Organizations are being pressed to innovate to catch up to or to stay ahead of competitors. IT shops feel this as pressure to move at the speed of business often with changing and incomplete business requirements. Leaders inside the organization are quickly building the future imperfectly. Velocity is back in vogue and time's a-wasting. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110209.html

Move Forward by Building Bridges to the Past

Putting the Customer Front and Center in a Business

Unhelkar, Bhuvan; Sherringham, Keith | E-Mail Advisors | 01 February 2011 | Business-IT Strategies A customer-centric approach to business puts the customer at the center of activities, with business operations orientated around customers rather than operations in support of internal business structures. This approach applies to external customers, particularly the customer-supplier relationship within processes and between areas of a business. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110202.html

Some Steps Toward Designing Architectural Views

Rosen, Mike | E-Mail Advisors | 26 January 2011 | Enterprise Architecture; Business-IT Strategies In my last Advisor (see "Understand the Value Equation," 12 January 2011), I talked about the architecture value equation and the role of architectural views in creating value. To refresh your memory, the equation says that if you make it easier for someone to do their job using architecture, then they’ll use it. To achieve that requires the appropriate view. First, we need to understand what outcomes we are trying to achieve with architecture. Next, we need to understand what processes are involved (such as portfolio management, strategic planning, analysis and design, implementation) and what roles (people) are responsible for performing them. Then, we need to understand what perspective and skills the people with these roles have, and what the individual steps in the process are. Last but not least, we need to determine the steps in the process where architecture has the most leverage and opportunity to influence the outcome. Finally, we design an architectural view that supports those process steps, maximizes the leverage, and is meaningful to the person performing the process. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2011/ea110126.html

Savvy Steps for Retaining an Organization's Knowledge

Unhelkar, Bhuvan | E-Mail Advisors | 19 January 2011 | Cutter IT Journal Knowledge provides the basis for strategies and policies in an organization. Examples of knowledge that affect business strategies include new competitors, regulatory changes, innovative processes to create products and services, new ways of putting together business portfolios, and upcoming technologies. IT systems (e.g., content management, portals, document management, business intelligence, CRM, groupware, and Webcasting) help share such knowledge within and across organizations. Business organizations and individuals interacting with them are keen to make good use of codified knowledge in all their operations. The ongoing creation and use of such knowledge is part of a learning organization. http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/advisor/2011/itj110119.html

Why the CIO Needs to Help Fix the Customer Experience

Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | 19 January 2011 | Business-IT Strategies Information technology systems tend to fall into two categories: a) back-office, a-few-people-care-and-most-endure systems or b) front-office, touches-the-customer, core-competency systems that get significant attention. For decades, IT was frequently perceived as the default owner of the back-office systems. But with today's pervasive computing, the action has shifted to customer-focused systems that are a mix of homemade, commercially purchased and consumer-based solutions. Companies have less and less ability to control their customers' experience. But that doesn't mean there isn't opportunity. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110119.html

Is There Something Happening Here? (Yes, and It’s About Control)

Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | 13 January 2011 | Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Business-IT Strategies; Enterprise Architecture; Business Intelligence The last decade of bubble-induced growth was book-ended by the twin events of 9/11 and the great recession. This next decade, with this recession as one of its very own bookends, looks like it might unleash demons all its own. Where this will lead isn't exactly clear. http://www.cutter.com/content/trends/fulltext/advisor/2011/btt110113.html

If Past Is Prologue, the Urgent Need for 2011 Is "Precrisis" Management

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors | 13 January 2011 | Enterprise Risk Management & Governance; Business-IT Strategies Mary Kellerman would have been 41 this year. In 1982, she died at the age of 12 from a cyanide-laced Tylenol capsule, as did six others in the area of west Chicago, Illinois, USA. McNeil Consumer Products (now McNeil Consumer Healthcare), a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson that manufactured the product, pulled about 31 million bottles of Tylenol from store shelves nationwide at a cost of US $100 million as well as stopped advertising the product. http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2011/erm110113.html

Characteristics of Collaborative-Agile Business

Unhelkar, Bhuvan | E-Mail Advisors | 12 January 2011 | Business-IT Strategies "Collaboration" and "agility" are two keywords that describe what is required from a business in order for it to flourish in the emerging business environment as a result of the introduction of information and communications technologies (ICT). In transforming organizational decision making, knowledge management, and processes, ICT has allowed business to easily transcend geographical boundaries and has driven the establishment of complex business ecosystems and extended supply chains. All of this has further empowered the customer in a self-sustaining cycle. This cycle of ICT and customer empowerment begetting each other places a premium on business agility in terms of offering the appropriate customer response as well as on collaboration between businesses to meet customer need and on collaboration between customers to get the best from suppliers. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110112.html

IT Is What IT Is -- And IT's Usually Not About Technology

Andriole, Stephen J. | Executive Updates | 12 January 2011 | Business-IT Strategies; Business Technology Trends & Impacts 2010 is over. It's late and it's snowing. Time to assess where we are. Are we getting smarter, nastier, angrier, or happier? Have we learned anything at all over the past 50 years? http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2011/bitu1101.html

Understand the Value Equation

Rosen, Mike | E-Mail Advisors | 12 January 2011 | Enterprise Architecture; Business-IT Strategies Architects face many challenges in their jobs. Among them are creating architecture and applying architecture. I've said many times that creating architecture alone does not create value. Rather, the value from architecture comes when it is applied. In other words, value is delivered when architecture is used to influence the outcome of decision making, analysis, design, or implementation. Yet another challenge is that architects are often not the people who are responsible for doing the applying. So we face a conundrum: we don't create value until someone else uses the architecture. That begs the obvious question of how to get other people to use the architecture. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2011/ea110112.html

Job Outlook for 2011: Hang onto Your Talent

Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | 06 January 2011 | Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Business-IT Strategies; Sourcing & Vendor Relationships; Enterprise Risk Management & Governance Among my IT consultant associates, business is way up, with 2011 looking quite good. This is quite a turnaround from 2009, when all I heard was moaning, wailing, and grinding of teeth. But, as they say, consultants are the first to go and the first to come back. While for IT workers the current unemployment rate of 5.2% is historically high, compared to the national average of around 9.8% across all industries, IT is a tighter market. http://www.cutter.com/content/trends/fulltext/advisor/2011/btt110106.html

"How Can You Manage Without This Data?"

Benson, Robert J. | E-Mail Advisors | 05 January 2011 | Business-IT Strategies We often encounter CIOs and other senior IT executives who seem to be unable to answer simple questions about the IT activity for which they're responsible. They simply don't have the data. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2011/bit110105.html

Innovation: IT's Next Core Competency

May, Thornton | Executive Updates | 21 December 2010 | Business-IT Strategies; Innovation Innovation has been a key part of the American popular consciousness since Thomas Edison started applying the principles of mass production to the processes of invention. Innovation has been around for a long, long time -- yet innovation remains an unsolved mystery for most organizations and many executives. http://www.cutter.com/content/innovation/fulltext/updates/2010/ieau1012.html

Simplicity Revisited -- or, "It's the User, Stupid!"

Baudoin, Claude R. | Executive Updates | 21 December 2010 | Business-IT Strategies The search for simplicity is a long and arduous task, compared to which the Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail may no longer seem so daunting after all. By the time we slay one dark knight, another evil sorceress appears on our path. In this Executive Update, I want to explore the puzzling contrast between what we know is desirable and the reality of most computer-based systems -- as well as highlight a few examples of companies that actually seem to "get it." http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2010/bitu1012.html

Collaborative Business and Enterprise Agility

Unhelkar, Bhuvan | Executive Reports | 01 September 2010 | Business-IT Strategies Internet-based communications have opened up the doors for businesses to collaborate through Web services. Fuzzy boundaries of electronic organizations enable transcendence of competition and engender an era of enhanced customer experience through business collaboration. Electronic communications also enable easy shifting of noncore business processes outside the organization, rendering the business lean and agile. These innovative business approaches are the focus of this Executive Report by Bhuvan Unhelkar. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/reports/2010/09/index.html

Simplicity Revisited -- or, "It's the User, Stupid!"

Baudoin, Claude R. | Executive Updates | 21 December 2010 | Business-IT Strategies The search for simplicity is a long and arduous task, compared to which the Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail may no longer seem so daunting after all. By the time we slay one dark knight, another evil sorceress appears on our path. In this Executive Update, I want to explore the puzzling contrast between what we know is desirable and the reality of most computer-based systems -- as well as highlight a few examples of companies that actually seem to "get it." http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2010/bitu1012.html

In the Spirit of Giving Well, Revisit Meaning of Motivation

Pritchard, Carl | E-Mail Advisors | 15 December 2010 | Business-IT Strategies As one year ends and another begins, many organizations focus on the annual end-of-year bonuses for their personnel. It's a time when managers may find themselves doing more harm than good as they dip into the well of opportunity and come up dry. What constitutes the best rewards for our staff and team members? The answer to that question actually stems all the way back to 1968, with Frederick Herzberg's landmark publication, "One More Time, How Do You Motivate Employees?" http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit101215.html

Getting a Grip -- Demand Management, Part IV: Living in an Agile World

Allen, Paul | E-Mail Advisors | 08 December 2010 | Business-IT Strategies Thus far in this series we have highlighted how demand management requires a new way of thinking in analyzing business requests for IT and examining a range of factors in taking a "good idea," turning it into a "solid concept," and working progressively through the business case to project initiation (see "Part I: Basic Concepts," 15 September 2010; "Part II: Let's Get Critical," 13 October 2010; and "Part III: Leaping Like a Salmon," 10 November 2010). Effective demand management is much less a matter of shiny new business analysis tools and techniques as applying existing ones in a way that allows us to "get a grip" -- to examine demand for IT in a critical yet innovative way while balancing it with an organization's capability for meeting that demand. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit101208.html

Changing the Color of Risk

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors | 02 December 2010 | Enterprise Risk Management & Governance; Business-IT Strategies There was word last week that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was finally going to drop the color-coded terrorism alert system, also known as the Homeland Security Advisory System. This comes after more than five years of consideration of alternatives to the warning system by DHS and two administrations, which was inaugurated in 2002. http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2010/erm101202.html

Practicing Green IT in Four Dimensions

Unhelkar, Bhuvan | E-Mail Advisors | 02 December 2010 | Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Business-IT Strategies My previous two Advisors1 in this series positioned green IT within the carbon economy and explained the closeness of the lean approach to a green business. In this Advisor, I focus on green IT practice, which translates the green IT strategies, plans, and policies in the day-to-day workings of the organization by using its transformational and operational capabilities. My approach to green IT in practice is based on four distinct yet interrelated dimensions of business: economy (why), technology (what), process (how), and people (who). I have discussed this approach in detail in my book Green IT Strategies and Applications. http://www.cutter.com/content/trends/fulltext/advisor/2010/btt101202.html

How Does IT's Evolution Include Our Own?

Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | 01 December 2010 | Business-IT Strategies In last week's Advisor ("IT's Eternal Return: Circular Reference? See Reference, Circular," 24 November 2010), I looked at the management challenges that the human need for the unilateral control over events, the inability to absorb new information, and the difficulty in challenging deeply held assumptions present, and wondered at the origins of these barriers to change. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit101201.html

IT's Eternal Return: Circular Reference? See Reference, Circular

Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | 24 November 2010 | Business-IT Strategies These days it is quite fashionable to paint a dramatic picture of the sweeping changes and cataclysmic winds swirling all around us. Faced with this effective illusion of certainty of change (or do we call it a reboot now?), many heads nod in groupthink response to the shibboleths spoken by our techno-shamans. As the conventional story goes, organizations must make radical changes now as described or face a ruinous future. The end is near. Just you wait and see. End of further critical thought. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit101124.html

Getting the Most Out of Business Relationship Management

Andriole, Stephen J. | Executive Updates | 23 November 2010 | Business-IT Strategies As we move well into the 21st century, there will be several skill sets critical to the impact of IT on the businesses we enable. One of those skills is business relationship management (BRM). Others include vendor management, business intelligence, architecture, and mobility. BRM is all about relationships and collaboration. It's also about subject matter expertise, models, and methodologies. Perhaps most important, it's about soft skills. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2010/bitu1011.html

The New Governance

Andriole, Stephen J. | Executive Updates | 22 November 2010 | Business-IT Strategies; Enterprise Risk Management & Governance Not so many years ago, governance was about control exercised by "Nazi" stormtroopers. Big companies, especially, saw control as badges of honor in the fight against technology independence. Corporate IT just loved to tell the business units what they could and could not do. Command and control was the management style that supported enterprise dominance of technology infrastructure and applications acquisition, deployment, and support. CIOs over the age of 60 remember the good ol' days with fondness. It was a different time. Technology was unstable, centralized, and relatively expensive. It was also foreign to most business managers who saw technology run by a secret society that met privately in secure data centers. Yes, it had the feel of a military operation. But things have changed dramatically. Slowly but surely, the old governance models have given way to new interpretations and definitions of governance, as we explore in this Executive Update. Or, more accurately, new requirements -- the new governance is now a business necessity. http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/updates/2010/ermu1010.html

IT Governance in Tough Times Webinar

Benson, Robert J. | Webinars/Multimedia | 18 November 2010 | Business-IT Strategies Planning and decision making for IT are a challenge in the best of times. When the pressure is on for simultaneous cost containment and value delivery -- well, it's even more of a challenge. During this webinar, Cutter Senior Consultant Bob Benson will explain the ways that governance best practices have evolved over the last two years, emphasizing what Cutter research has discovered about evolving governance practices around the world. This webinar will be presented by Cutter's Bob Benson, who has extensive experience in assisting companies and government agencies in understanding IT governance, the business value of IT, strategic and financial IT management, strategic IT planning, and effective IT application development. Join Bob as he explores what governance strategies he’s found to be most effective in challenging times. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/webinar/2010/it-governance.html

Model T Decision Making in a 21st-Century World

Pritchard, Carl | E-Mail Advisors | 17 November 2010 | Business-IT Strategies Business legend has it that Henry Ford waited three days before reading any memos that appeared on his desk. It drove his managers to make autonomous decisions on anything pressing or urgent. It ensured they weren't waiting for blessings from "on high" before taking action. They knew that his responsibility was the longer term, not the short term, and they acted accordingly. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit101117.html

Getting a Grip -- Demand Management, Part III: Leaping Like a Salmon

Allen, Paul | E-Mail Advisors | 10 November 2010 | Business-IT Strategies Thus far in this series ("Part I: Basic Concepts," 15 September 2010; "Part II: Let's Get Critical, 13 October 2010), we have highlighted how demand management requires a new way of thinking in analyzing business requests for IT and in initiating IT projects that serve the best interests of the business. We require effective techniques for analyzing demand, which allow the business analyst to consider a range of factors in taking a "good idea," turning it into a "solid concept," and working progressively through the business case to project initiation. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit101110.html

Sing the Call-Center Blues: Seeking Companies That Care

Love, Jim | E-Mail Advisors | 03 November 2010 | Business-IT Strategies Having spent time as an executive in a large company, and having spent most of my career helping executives work on strategic problems, I have to say that I don't believe that companies set out to alienate customers. But I do believe that many don't know or don't realize the extent to which customers are angered by poor customer service. Those organizations that do realize it seem powerless to do anything about it. They see it as something external to their organization -- a shift in customer attitudes. They don't realize how their own actions are, if not causing then, certainly, exacerbating the problem. Or they think it's happening elsewhere but not in their company. Some are what I call "digital deniers"; they have statistics, generated by their technical systems, that prove that their customer service isn't all that bad. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit101103.html

Anatomy of an IT Turnaround: Part IV -- Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

Rau, Kenneth | Executive Updates | 28 October 2010 | Business-IT Strategies This Executive Update, the final in a four-part series,1 is about negotiating an outsourcing contract with a longtime business partner. Unexpectedly, that which has been a relationship built on trust must be converted into an arm's-length, formalized contractual agreement. Under these circumstances, as the lyric to the 1960s song by Neil Sedaka says: "Breaking up is hard to do." http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2010/bitu1010.html

IT Governance: It's Becoming More Important!

Benson, Robert J. | E-Mail Advisors | 27 October 2010 | Business-IT Strategies At least, we certainly hope this statement is so. There's no question that organizations -- both government and business -- are paying more attention. Compared to a couple of years ago, when "IT governance" didn't appear on most radar screens, this year has seen many clients coming out and looking for improvements. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit101027.html

To Map Alignment, Get Your Business-Capability Ducks in a Row

Rosen, Mike | E-Mail Advisors | 27 October 2010 | Enterprise Architecture; Business-IT Strategies One of the seemingly perpetual issues that we face is "business-IT alignment." First, we might ask what that really means. Then, we can look for ways to specify and achieve the alignment. Cutter Senior Consultant and leading business architect William Ulrich defines alignment as, "The state in which business strategies, capabilities, semantics, processes, rules, and governance structures interact in harmony with automated systems and data." I like this definition because it gets right to the point and lays out the complexity of the alignment problem. So, as an architect, I look for a model that will help handle that complexity, and a key to that model is the concept of a business capability. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2010/ea101027.html

Customer Experience: How Technology Can Contribute -- Or Kill It

Love, Jim | Executive Reports | 01 July 2010 | Business-IT Strategies Companies don't set out to alienate their customers. Unfortunately, many interactions leave the consumer feeling dissatisfied and even downright hostile. All too frequently, these customer service disasters are linked to a failure in the use of technology. There is no doubt that technology has transformed how we do business, adding tremendous value, allowing automation of repetitive tasks, and continually reducing cost. But while technology has been a godsend in terms of transaction automation, it has been nothing short of an unmitigated disaster in terms of customer experience. In this Executive Report by Jim Love we ask, "Does your use of technology engage or enrage your customers?" http://www.cutter.com/alignment/fulltext/reports/2010/07/index.html

Risk Arrogance: Stealing from the Future

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors | 21 October 2010 | Enterprise Risk Management & Governance; Business-IT Strategies There is nothing better than risk mismanagement and not learning from past mistakes to steal away from an organization's or even an industry's future. The banking and mortgage underwriting community is -- once again -- painfully relearning this truism. http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2010/erm101021.html

Continue 1.2 Miles and Then Turn Left: Autopilot and Executive Decision Making

Pritchard, Carl | E-Mail Advisors | 20 October 2010 | Business-IT Strategies On a recent drive to a client site, my navigation system suggested that I drive away from my destination rather than drive toward it. In clear, succinct, familiar tones, my online guide told me to "Continue 1-point-2 miles. Then turn left." Like a lemming, I obeyed. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit101020.html

Getting a Grip -- Demand Management, Part II: Let's Get Critical

Allen, Paul | E-Mail Advisors | 13 October 2010 | Business-IT Strategies As I outlined in my previous Advisor ("Getting a Grip -- Demand Management, Part I: Basic Concepts," 15 September 2010), demand management means handling business demand for IT in such a way that it reaches a harmonious and beneficial relationship with IT supply. Analogies with the need to manage demand in everyday life, such as reducing energy consumption and traffic flow, are useful in highlighting the need to manage IT demand. However, we also need to challenge the view that IT is "stuff" that comes out of a pump that can be controlled in the manner of filling your automobile with fuel. The "IT as commodity" trap is an easy one to fall into. Vendors of demand-management tools are especially prone to falling into this trap. There are several dimensions to demand management that a tool should support, such as defining and publishing standardized services via a service catalog, controlling demand through guided self-service, and providing visibility into sourcing and usage. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit101013.html

Gulf Spill Reflections: What's Your Canary?

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors | 07 October 2010 | Enterprise Risk Management & Governance; Business-IT Strategies In BP's major operational blunders, such as on the Deepwater Horizon, after-action assessments reveal that there were ample warning signs that unacceptable operational risk was building up. Yet, no one really took any action until it was just too late to do any good. What BP needed was a "canary" (or maybe a flock of canaries) that could visually and unmistakably indicate that something was urgently needed to be done to keep a risk or a series of risks from turning into a major problem. http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2010/erm101007.html

Bold Advice for IT Leaders: Avoid Quiet Servitude

Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | 07 October 2010 | Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Business-IT Strategies "Every IT leadership institute I have ever been to has drilled into me that we serve the business." So said a CIO to me recently with a both mildly defiant yet puzzled look. She was not quite appreciating my advice to be bold and dare to lead, yes, the business. Why not take the perspective of the CEO? Or the majority shareholder? Why not have a strong point of view about how the place ought to be run. "But no!" she protested. "We have to mind our own shop." http://www.cutter.com/content/trends/fulltext/advisor/2010/btt101007.html

The Wisdom of Reducing Barriers for Novices

Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | 06 October 2010 | Business-IT Strategies The consumerization of IT is placing new demands on traditional IT shops. Such companies as Apple, Google, Sony, and Microsoft understand that in the consumer world, users of the technology don't have to buy what they offer. They have to find ways to reduce barriers to adoption. So our users bring these danged devices in and expect the IT shop to support them. Why? Because they love the ease of use in the consumer gadget. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit101006.html

CIO As Hero? A Crucial Role As Process Emerges At C-Level

Gammage, Mike | E-Mail Advisors | 06 October 2010 | Cutter IT Journal; Business-IT Strategies Some people label it as Enterprise 2.0; others see it just as a new faster pace in ongoing business transformation. Whatever you call it, there’s a seismic shift underway. Process is at the heart of it, and CIOs have a critical role in enabling the enterprise to ride this incoming tide. http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/advisor/2010/itj101006.html

Can You Hear Me Now? The High Price of Not Listening to the Folks in the Trenches

Pritchard, Carl | E-Mail Advisors | 30 September 2010 | Innovation; Business-IT Strategies It's amazing how organizations spend vast sums in the interest of discovering the newest, latest, and most advanced business practices and technologies. They throw their energies behind radical change, while ignoring the improvements that can be made through effective implementation of existing practice. Existing practice generally came about through trial and error and through the investment of staff across the organization. Existing practices are rooted in history and experience, and yet organizations are often willing to throw such insight away because it is flawed. http://www.cutter.com/content/innovation/fulltext/advisor/2010/iea100930.html

Leap to Acceptance: Strategies for Success with Social Media

Maurno, Dann A. | E-Mail Advisors | 29 September 2010 | Business-IT Strategies If social media is unimportant to a company, the company must consider that it is enormously important to its prospects and customers. But a company cannot simply tack it on and expect it to foster satisfied customers and a more innovative enterprise. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100929.html

Basel III: Managing the Risks of Risk Management

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors | 23 September 2010 | Enterprise Risk Management & Governance; Business-IT Strategies A little less than two weeks ago, the international banking community in the form of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (which is part of the Bank for International Supervision) came together to finalize the Basel III agreement on the minimum capital banks will now need to have. The agreement reached (see "Group of Governors and Heads of Supervision announces higher global minimum capital standards," PDF, 12 September 2010) means that banks will now need to carry the equivalent of 7% of their risk-weighted assets, up from the current 2%. http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2010/erm100923.html

Deep in the Heart of ITIL

Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | 22 September 2010 | Business-IT Strategies Here at University of a Kentucky (Lexington, Kentucky, USA), we are deep into the early stages of IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) adoption. As it is at any point in time and with nearly any IT team, these sorts of things become equated with process control, with metrics, with improvement, with thickness, with complexity, with rigor, and then usually with rigor mortis. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100922.html

Getting a Grip -- Demand Management, Part I: Basic Concepts

Allen, Paul | E-Mail Advisors | 15 September 2010 | Business-IT Strategies The idea of managing demand has gained much traction in recent years -- especially with demand for resources outstripping the budgets for those resources. It is an idea that increasingly has become part and parcel of our everyday lives. We are urged to control our energy consumption to better match generation capacity and efficiency. The introduction of water meters is a familiar example. We are persuaded to limit our use of highways, with busy cities introducing congestion charges to reduce traffic flow. As employees, we are told to fly economy and stay in budget hotels when making those potentially expensive business trips, as well as to book well in advance to take advantage of discounts. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100915.html

New Developments Address Cloud Security and Regulatory Compliance

Hall, Curt | E-Mail Advisors | 15 September 2010 | Enterprise Architecture; Business-IT Strategies; Business Intelligence; Sourcing & Vendor Relationships Security and data privacy/regulatory considerations are two of the biggest bottlenecks standing in the way of more organizations adopting cloud computing. Simply put, many organizations have serious misgivings about using cloud computing -- in particular, software as a service (SaaS) offerings -- due to regulatory requirements prohibiting them from using the cloud for storing sensitive data, or due to concerns about the privacy and security of data residing in the cloud. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2010/ea100915.html

Utilizing Air Cover: How the Invisible Hands Can Generate Approval

Andriole, Stephen J. | Executive Updates | 14 September 2010 | Business-IT Strategies; Business Technology Trends & Impacts There are ways to make decisions and ways to avoid them. We tend to avoid decisions that make people unhappy or -- worse -- really angry. We do this for obvious reasons: careers can be shortened if we step on the wrong political mines. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2010/bitu1009.html

Should You Hire an IT Specialist or Generalist?

Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | 08 September 2010 | Business-IT Strategies David Van De Voort, a partner in human capital consulting services at Mercer, recently authored a report in Workforce Solutions Review summarizing a study of 193,283 employees representing 1,033 organizations ("Generalist or Specialist? Managing Talent to Support Business Results an Empirical Test," [PDF] Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 28-35). Mercer data, large study, really, really large data set. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100908.html

Beware the Silver Bullets

Rosen, Mike | E-Mail Advisors | 08 September 2010 | Enterprise Architecture; Business-IT Strategies; Business Intelligence Sometimes I wonder if, as an industry, we ever learn. Two recent projects that I've worked on got me thinking about this. In both cases, the companies are replacing existing custom-built applications with new commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications. And while that in itself is not necessarily a bad strategy (in fact, I absolutely agree with that approach for one of these clients), problems arise when the expectations and promises are out of line with reality. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2010/ea100908.html

Agile Business: The Final Frontier

Thomsett, Rob | Executive Reports | 01 July 2010 | Agile Project Management; Business-IT Strategies The agile movement has reached a tipping point. It can either remain a powerful approach to software and business product development, or it can evolve and expand into an even more powerful business and cultural paradigm. In this Executive Report by Rob Thomsett, we will present an integrated model for business agility and, using an ongoing engagement with a major bank implementing agile business as a case study, explore the positive and negative aspects of agile as an organizational model. http://www.cutter.com/project/fulltext/reports/2010/07/index.html

IT Budgets Are Increasing for 2011? Really?

Benson, Robert J. | E-Mail Advisors | 01 September 2010 | Business-IT Strategies We’ve just completed the fifth annual Cutter Benchmark Review (CBR) issue on IT budgets (see "IT Budgets on a Roller-Coaster Ride," Vol. 10, No. 7). In this survey we asked -- among a lot of interesting questions about IT financial management, governance, and value -- specifically about whether respondents expect their budgets to increase or decrease next year. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100901.html

Managing Change in the Organization

Cohen, Moshe | Executive Reports | 01 May 2010 | Business-IT Strategies Change is a fact of life and has many benefits, but it is hardly ever easy and brings huge stress. How you manage the change process can determine not only the ultimate success of the change effort, but also the health of your organization during and after the change. Many change efforts fail, especially in the long term, and can exact a heavy toll on the organization. By taking a strategic approach in which you set up for the change, engage stakeholders in initiating the change, and institutionalize the change into the culture, you can dramatically improve the success of your change initiatives. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/reports/2010/05/index.html

Seeking Out Systemic Risk, Part II

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors | 26 August 2010 | Enterprise Risk Management & Governance; Business-IT Strategies In the previous Advisor (see "Seeking Out Systemic Risk," 12 August 2010), I discussed the US Congress's establishment of a Financial Stability Council (FSC), one of the main purposes of which is to put an end to, or at least minimize, the effects of firms considered "too big to fail." The FSC intends to do this by identifying, monitoring, and addressing systemic risks posed by large, complex financial firms as well as financial products and activities that spread risk across firms. It will also make recommendations to regulators for increasingly stringent rules about companies that grow large and complex enough to pose a threat to the financial stability of the US. http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2010/erm100826.html

To Lead: Match Your Skills to the Organizational Culture

Bauer, Martin | E-Mail Advisors | 25 August 2010 | Business-IT Strategies If you want to be a leader, how successful you are will depend greatly on the culture where you work. "But wait," you might say. "Doesn't it matter more that you have the ability to lead? That you have the traits that make a leader?" Perhaps, but if the culture you work in doesn't allow you to practice those traits -- or worse still, discourages those traits -- they become irrelevant. To be able to lead, first you need leadership skills. Second, these skills need to match the values of the culture where you work. Finally, you need the authority to exercise those skills. As IT consultant Tim Bryce writes: http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100825.html

Setting Priorities: Go Beyond Chicken-or-Egg Questions

Pritchard, Carl | E-Mail Advisors | 18 August 2010 | Business-IT Strategies; Agile Project Management In client consulting engagements, I frequently find that the root cause of a lot of frustration among managers, team members, and executives stems from the inability (or unwillingness) to choose what's most important. I had the interesting experience of trying to build a value-based priorities model with a client, and had the following exchange: http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100818.html

Training vs. Learning and Their Implications on Change Management

Ravarini, Aurelio | E-Mail Advisors | 11 August 2010 | Business-IT Strategies The complex relationship between IT and the business is a critical issue for any business process, especially when it comes to allocating funds to the related IT solution (e.g., a DSS for a strategic decision process; an e-commerce solution for a sales process). But the issue becomes particularly problematic when dealing with a training or learning process. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100811.html

Attributes of Great IT Leaders Start with Trust

Lindeman, Martha J. | E-Mail Advisors | 04 August 2010 | Business-IT Strategies The value of "soft" people skills is often severely underestimated in IT organizations. For example, the psychoanalyst Erik Erickson identified trust as the foundational characteristic for identity and relationships.1 A great IT leader at any level must be able to trust and be trusted. A leader's breach of trust will rapidly spread like a fungus throughout the project team to lower morale and decrease productivity. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100804.html

The BP Oil Spill: Could ERM Have Helped Avoid It? Part II

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors | 29 July 2010 | Enterprise Risk Management & Governance; Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Business-IT Strategies At the end of Part I ("The BP Oil Spill: Could ERM Have Helped Avoid It?" 15 July 2010), I asked whether BP PLC Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward -- or at least BP's risk management committee -- should have been made aware of the significant operational risk incurred on the company's behalf by his operational managers -- in this case, managing the risks associated with a so-called "troublesome well." http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2010/erm100729.html

The More Things Change ... Reexamined

Benson, Robert J. | E-Mail Advisors | 28 July 2010 | Business-IT Strategies; Business Technology Trends & Impacts Two decades ago, I moderated a panel discussion of CIOs interested in better understanding the challenges IT faces and initiatives they might take to successfully address them. During the panel discussion we agreed on six basic themes as being critical to successful IT management. The question is: have things changed much since? I return in this Advisor to those six themes to explore them from a 2010 perspective. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100728.html

"I Want My Life Back" ... A Case for Shutting Up

Pritchard, Carl | E-Mail Advisors | 21 July 2010 | Business-IT Strategies; Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Business Intelligence; Innovation Of Cutter Consortium consultants, I believe I may have a unique distinction: I’m a former member of the inside-the-beltway media. I was the news director at WASH-FM and the community affairs director of news radio WTOP for a number of years before jumping into the "real world" as a manager, project manager, and, later, executive. The journalistic prism through which I view the world often causes me to shake my head, but no more so than with the recent episode involving British Petroleum’s Tony Hayward, who said (shortly after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster began) that he wanted "his life back." http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100721.html

Business Analysis in the Information Age: Mapping to an SFIA Skill Set

Unhelkar, Bhuvan | Executive Updates | 21 July 2010 | Business-IT Strategies In an earlier Executive Update entitled "Relating Business Analysis to Enterprise Architecture,"1 I mapped business analysis (BA) activities and enterprise architecture (EA) activities within an organization. Mapping these areas is important because both BA and EA activities are crucial and relate to an organization's success. While BA deals primarily with the behavioral aspects of an organization, EA provides the structural base. Business analysis encompasses a wide range of activities within an organization and is performed at various levels. The need to understand, define, describe, and use the BA skill set could not be any higher than now. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2010/bitu1007.html

Zen and the Art of the New Social CRM

Love, Jim | Executive Reports | 01 April 2010 | Business-IT Strategies A new generation of customer relationship management (CRM) is emerging. Social CRM brings the promise of Web 2.0 together with the allure of social networks. Is this a breakthrough for CRM? Or is it just another case of overpromise and underdeliver? In this Executive Report by Jim Love, we take you through the practical issues involved in making CRM and social CRM a success. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/reports/2010/04/index.html

Value-Added Decisions Need Not Be Cost-Driven

Maeda, Masa K. | E-Mail Advisors | 15 July 2010 | Agile Project Management; Business-IT Strategies; Enterprise Risk Management & Governance It's all about the money! This is one of most common ideas in the minds of enterprise executives. It is one of the tenets that has driven enterprises for decades because, well ... of course, businesses want to make money. Although this is true, that doesn't mean the company and its products or services need to be cost-driven. http://www.cutter.com/content/project/fulltext/advisor/2010/apm100715.html

The BP Oil Spill: Could ERM Have Helped Avoid It? Part I

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors | 15 July 2010 | Enterprise Risk Management & Governance; Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Business-IT Strategies BP PLC Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward did not come across very well in his testimony in June before the US House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is looking into the loss of the oil-drilling platform Deepwater Horizon. Time and time again, Hayward said in response to questions, "I simply was not involved in the decision-making process." http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2010/erm100715.html

Enliven a Project: Get from Architecture to Execution

Rosen, Mike | E-Mail Advisors | 14 July 2010 | Enterprise Architecture; Business-IT Strategies One of the biggest problems we face as architects is enabling the transition from architectural specification to executing systems. As I've said many times, the value of architecture does not come from creating the architecture, but rather from applying it. By applying it, I mean influencing the selection, analysis, design, and implementation of an enterprise's IT systems. This influence on other enterprise IT processes provides the alignment of IT systems to business strategies, the rationalization and convergence of application, information, and technology portfolios, and the simplification of operations, maintenance, and enhancements. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2010/ea100714.html

Four Express Ways to Put People First

Furniss, Bob | E-Mail Advisors | 07 July 2010 | Business-IT Strategies In the chaotic world of IT, frontline leaders sometimes struggle to keep up with the pace. Projects and productivity expectations can push the most important asset -- people -- to the back of the pack. Successful organizations know, however, that no matter how good the technology, it is the people who make it work. When people come first, customers win. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100707.html

Mobilizing for a (Mostly) Mobile Future

Clarke, Roger | Executive Reports | 01 March 2010 | Business-IT Strategies People born in the last two decades have grown up with electronic devices in their hands. Their patterns of device use, thought, and behavior are different from those of previous generations. As they become customers and employees, they expect to be able to interact with people and organizations using the devices and interfaces with which they are familiar. Meanwhile, executives, managers, operational staff, and customers from earlier generations will expect to keep using older technologies. Enormous challenges to organizations arise from the transition from wired to wireless, the diversity of apparatus and their patterns of use, the ongoing technological change, the rapid adaptation and convergence, and the security risks that accompany the mobile, wireless world. Those challenges are compounded by the need to support older generations of users and their modes of interaction. This Executive Report by Roger Clarke explores these challenges and the implications they have on business processes, security, authentication, and architectures. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/reports/2010/03/index.html

Jumping the Walrus: When Risk Management Goes Bad

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors | 01 July 2010 | Enterprise Risk Management & Governance; Business Technology Trends & Impacts; Business-IT Strategies Back in the 1970s, there was a very popular show called "Happy Days," starring Ron Howard and Henry Winkler, who played Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli. Five years into the series, an episode aired in which Fonzie is shown improbably water skiing and jumping a shark to show his bravery. A few years later, the phrase "Jumping the Shark" came to mean that point in a television series where the program had reached its peak, and it was going to be all downhill from then on until it got canceled. I think risk management in the oil industry has reached that moment, except in this case, I think the appropriate phrase is "Jumping the Walrus." http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2010/erm100701.html

The Gulf Between Us: The Tyranny of Cost

Benson, Robert J. | E-Mail Advisors | 30 June 2010 | Business-IT Strategies Recent media coverage of BP and the spill in the Gulf of Mexico reveals that BP's management decisions and actions have been dominated by cost considerations. Rather than taking lower-risk actions or investing in better solutions, BP apparently took the low road. The low-cost road, that is. We in IT of course are very familiar with this. Some of us Cutter folks have been working recently with clients for whom lower cost is perhaps the only mantra. It's pretty frustrating when clear opportunities for IT business contributions and risk reduction are derailed by managers for whom the only issue is the bottom line -- and the short-term bottom line at that. The result is missed opportunities, higher risks, and skimpy investments and implementations. It's the latter that is most dangerous, when IT initiatives go forward with the lowest-cost solutions. Or, in the case of infrastructure, when critically important risk-reducing IT initiatives don't go forward at all. So what is to be done? This question dominates the current uproar over the Gulf, and much of the direction seems to be toward more governmental review -- that is, more rules and regulations. Is this what we need in IT as well? Probably not. But IT can certainly do things that move the agenda beyond a single-minded focus on cost in decision making. What are these things? http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100630.html

Learning to Lead Collective Creativity, Part II: Leading So That No One Is Following

Hjorth, Daniel; Austin, Robert D.; O'Donnell, Shannon | E-Mail Advisors | 24 June 2010 | Innovation; Business-IT Strategies In our previous Advisor ("Learning to Lead Collective Creativity from Miles Davis," 13 May 2010), we considered jazz legend Miles Davis’s minimalist management style as an example of leading collective creativity through the focused energy of presence. By guiding attention to the intensity of the work, he made space for musicians to alternately take the lead and to develop their responsiveness to one another and the unfolding event of music. We suggested his leadership style enabled the musicians to achieve "ensemble," a particularly immediate and interdependent form of collaboration, which enables a group to act as one coherent responsive entity that is greater than the sum of its parts. http://www.cutter.com/content/innovation/fulltext/advisor/2010/iea100624.html

The Lotto Temptation

Pritchard, Carl | E-Mail Advisors | 23 June 2010 | Business-IT Strategies; Enterprise Risk Management & Governance The problem that exists is that there's often an enormous disconnect between the people making the decisions and the folks who will ultimately be responsible for making the work happen. And that's a gap that needs to be bridged before we get in line for the next great opportunity. The connection is not a hard one to make, but it's one that has to exist in order to truly know if we're picking up a "winning ticket." The three tests that need to exist are: http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100623.html

A Sustainability Strategy That BITES -- Creating an Actionable Agenda: Part II

Murugesan, San | E-Mail Advisors | 16 June 2010 | Business-IT Strategies In the earlier Advisor in this series ("A Sustainability Strategy That BITES -- Creating an Actionable Agenda: Part I," 2 June 2010), I outlined the need for a business, IT, and environmental sustainability (BITES) strategy and discussed what green IT means and how IT (besides itself being green) as an effective tool or means could help in many different ways to enhance enterprise environmental sustainability. In this Advisor, I discuss an enterprise green IT strategy and how to create and implement it. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100616.html

The Reality of Business/IT Integration ... And It Isn't Just "Alignment"

Benson, Robert J. | E-Mail Advisors | 09 June 2010 | Business-IT Strategies Last month, I wrote about the difficulty IT organizations have in achieving effective integration with business (see "An Attitude Persists: Thinking Business? -- Hah!" 5 May 2010). I took the position that 1) it's not happening much, 2) there are a lot of anecdotal cases of a continuing gap between business and IT, and 3) it's more pronounced with younger IT professionals. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100609.html

How Risk Management Can Go Green

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors | 06 June 2010 | Enterprise Risk Management & Governance; Business-IT Strategies Because this week is "International Green IT Awareness Week," I thought I would take a look at how "green IT" and enterprise risk management intersect. http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2010/erm100603.html

A Sustainability Strategy That BITES -- Creating an Actionable Agenda: Part I

Murugesan, San | E-Mail Advisors | 02 June 2010 | Business-IT Strategies There has been much talk and action about business-IT alignment and misalignment and their impact on business. Now, one more factor -- environmental sustainability -- needs to be included in the business-IT nexus. With growing concern about the deterioration of our environment, businesses -- IT and non-IT, small and large -- are required to minimize their environmental impacts and take on a new agenda, environmental sustainability, into their portfolio. Business executives are now required to develop business, IT, and environmental sustainability (BITES) strategies for their business enterprises that are aligned with each other. This linkage is the key to the successful realization of their business goals and the fulfillment of their environmental and social responsibilities. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100602.html

Anatomy of an IT Turnaround: Part II -- Using Judo in Process Improvement

Rau, Kenneth | Executive Updates | 02 June 2010 | Business-IT Strategies This is the second in a series of Executive Updates about how the management unit of a nonprofit organization, finding itself faced with a problematic IT function, turned adversity to advantage over a 12-month period. Part I described how the organization used the existing IT council to set a new direction for IT.1 This Update examines how recommendations received from the organization's auditors concerning two poorly defined processes were fixed -- one encountering resistance, the second with widespread support. What was changed is less important to our examination of the anatomy of the turnaround than how the changes were accomplished. Nonetheless, the "what" concerned the need to fix existing procedures for processing user requests for changes to the system. This Update describes the "before" situation, the steps taken to improve the procedure, and ends with a couple of useful takeaways for your environment. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2010/bitu1006.html

Transform Your Enterprise? Consider 5 Steps First

Hazra, Tushar K. | E-Mail Advisors | 26 May 2010 | Business-IT Strategies If you are embracing transformation as an approach to make your business operations more effective, you are not alone. In fact, a majority of companies and government agencies in the US and other countries are considering transformation. However, it is absolutely essential that you recognize the reasons for the transformation before jumping onto the bandwagon. As there is no real consensus for defining the term "transformation," you must know what a transformation would mean to your business before you take one on. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100526.html

Environmentally Responsible Business Strategies for a Green Enterprise Transformation

Unhelkar, Bhuvan | Executive Summaries | 01 February 2010 | Business-IT Strategies As presented in this Executive Report by Bhuvan Unhelkar, an Environmentally Responsible Business Strategy (ERBS) for green business transformation starts with four drivers -- sociocultural/political, regulatory/legal, enlightened self-interest, and responsible business ecosystem -- and is followed by four dimensions -- economy, technology, process, and people. This report presents the policies, practices, systems, and support of an ERBS architecture. Particularly, this Executive Report suggests the expansion of business intelligence (BI), using Web services and the cloud, toward what is called environmental intelligence (EI). http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/reports/2010/02/index.html

Gung Ho, Marshmallows, Outliers, and Ever-Moving Cheese

Pritchard, Carl | E-Mail Advisors | 19 May 2010 | Business-IT Strategies There's a certain element of frustration associated with staying focused on what matters at a management level, and it's been exacerbated of late as I've begun a quick swim through the books I've finally pulled off my shelf. None of them is a deeper read, as is the statistical joy of Jim Collins's Good to Great, but each has its own bent on how we can step up to the challenges of our fast-paced world if we'll just adopt a slightly different perspective on our business approaches. My late-spring library has included: http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100519.html

Cloud Computing Commoditized: Part II -- CIO as Concierge

Ummel, Mitchell | Executive Updates | 19 May 2010 | Business-IT Strategies Part I of this two-part Executive Update series showed how cloud computing is maturing to become commoditized across multiple solution and service domains.1 Here in Part II, we discuss how the CIO of tomorrow becomes a concierge for information services, considers the full breadth of cloud business use cases, and boldly champions cloud computing solutions when they make practical business sense. In this decade, forward-thinking CIOs will find it beneficial to adopt a mindset of "default cloud" for new service provisioning. At the same time, they can consider what may become more costly, or less flexible, internal service provisioning only when factors of time, cost, or quality of service (QoS) prohibit a cloud solution. In this vain, the CIO will become a champion and promoter for cloud computing, when and if it makes business sense for the enterprise. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/updates/2010/bitu1005.html

Learning to Lead: Collective Creativity from Miles Davis

Hjorth, Daniel; Austin, Robert D.; O'Donnell, Shannon | E-Mail Advisors | 13 May 2010 | Innovation; Business-IT Strategies When you watch live video recordings of jazz legend Miles Davis, he walks among the assembled musicians on stage during performances, guiding the focus or center of gravity of the music that they collectively create; he performs leadership. The dramatic sweeping gestures we are accustomed to associate with dynamic business leadership style are rarely displayed. It seems more appropriate to describe Davis's leadership style by adopting a term from art criticism: minimalist. The energy of his presence, in the form of both his shifting physical proximity and his attentiveness to individual musicians, serves to reinforce choices they are making, both as they happen and as they are about to happen. He moves the center of intensity by himself listening intensively to the music as it is made, and by walking from one colleague to another to indicate when he would not mind if they took the lead in a particular section of the music. Performing becomes a relational act, between colleagues. Creating happens collectively, on stage, within the act of making music, out of which emerges a coherent and utterly unique ensemble creation. http://www.cutter.com/content/innovation/fulltext/advisor/2010/iea100513.html

Strategic Technology Is an Oxymoron

Kellen, Vince | E-Mail Advisors | 12 May 2010 | Business-IT Strategies How many times have you heard the phrase "strategic technology"? Every time I read it or hear it, I bristle, especially right after I wrote it or said it and committed the error I am about to rail against. If everyone would just say "strategic uses of technology," I would feel much better. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100512.html

Breeding Grounds for Future Risk Management Lessons

Charette, Robert N. | E-Mail Advisors | 06 May 2010 | Enterprise Risk Management & Governance; Business-IT Strategies "It's like déjà vu all over again." So spoke the former Yankee great Yogi Berra about his teammates Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris repeatedly hitting back-to-back home runs. For the past several weeks, I have had the same feeling, watching events unfold that demonstrate why enterprise risk management is so critical as well as illustrating its limitations. http://www.cutter.com/content/risk/fulltext/advisor/2010/erm100506.html

An Attitude Persists: Thinking Business? -- Hah!

Benson, Robert J. | E-Mail Advisors | 05 May 2010 | Business-IT Strategies We have heard a lot recently about the ongoing and imminent integration of business and IT. Some example discussions range from "the CIO is dead" to the "cloud eliminates the IT department" and "business unit IT alignment won't matter" -- even to the agile argument that there aren't any IT projects any more, just business projects with an IT component. Actually, we've been hearing about all this for decades. But I'm really starting to doubt all of it. At least, I'm really starting to doubt that the IT folks will deal with it and that the business unit folks actually care. Most seriously, though, is that I continue to work with IT organizations that, by and large, have disdain for even talking with the business, much less occupying the same conceptual space with them. Most recently, I worked with senior IT project and management individuals who continue to see their future in technical terms: doing projects and managing IT. In another case, I worked with IT managers for whom the thought of including senior business managers in a planning and governance exercise was deemed irrelevant and was very strongly resisted. Oh no, they said, we (the IT folks) can provide the business input. A third example this month: the IT managers didn't know exactly who the appropriate business managers were who might be included in a planning exercise. They didn't know anyone other than their "business contact" in the organization. http://www.cutter.com/content/alignment/fulltext/advisor/2010/bit100505.html

Establishing Enterprise Architecture Governance: Getting Started

Hazra, Tushar K. | E-Mail Advisors | 05 May 2010 | Enterprise Architecture; Business-IT Strategies Many practitioners recognize that IT governance is the cornerstone in achieving success when it comes to creating and delivering the right business value for their enterprises. In other words, IT governance is the key to business and IT alignment. It provides a conduit for performing three interrelated tasks that make organizational operations most effective: compliance enforcement, risk management, and investment control. In a broad sense, IT governance helps companies and agencies raise their bars in being collaborative, innovative, and competitive, while executing the above-mentioned tasks. In IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results, Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross define IT governance as specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in using IT. In practice, enterprise architecture (EA) governance is a subset of IT governance. http://www.cutter.com/content/architecture/fulltext/advisor/2010/ea100505.html