Immerse yourself in Agile on day three of Cutter Consortium’s Summit: Executive Education+, 2-4 April 2012. You’ll find out how Agile, the software method that was conceived as a way to cope with change, is changing, how these changes can benefit your organization — and what you need to do to make that happen. Agile practice director Israel Gat has assembled an impressive team of Cutter consultants to present, including:

Patrick Debois: What Leaders Need to Know About Devops Jim Sutton: Reclaiming Business Glory through the Lean Worldview Hubert Smits: Want to be Radical? Here’s How and Israel himself: Agile 2.0: Change is Changing!

Limited-time Registration Savings

Like 2011, our best offers for Summit 2012 won’t last. Register now to bring two team members for the price Read more …

This month, Cutter unveiled its redefined BI practice, Data Integration, BI & Collaboration. I know it’s a mouthful, so let’s just call it “DBC” for short. As the new Practice Director, my aim is to shape this practice to best address your needs, but more importantly to continuously adapt as your needs change. I also suspect you are looking for Cutter to assist you in staying aware of emerging ideas and trends that might benefit your organization. Please consider this post an open invitation to join an ongoing dialogue that will help me shape this practice appropriately. I hope you’ll share your questions, ideas, and feedback to make this venture a success.

The practice name conveys the fact that traditional BI, the organization and reporting of corporate operational data, is no longer the competitive Read more …

We’re delighted to find The Cutter Blog on BizTech Magazine’s list of Must-Read IT Blogs. We’re in good, eclectic company on this list — you’ll find some sites you’d expect (large analyst firms, technology behemoths, famous smart people) — as well as some from smaller firms and up-and-coming voices. All are worth a visit, perhaps some will be must-reads for you, too.

If you’re new to Cutter, here’s why The Cutter Blog is worth a look. It’s a group blog, comprising the voices of many of our 150+ business-technology experts — folks who have done, and are doing, groundbreaking work, solving problems in organizations around the globe. You’ll find posts on topics as diverse as due diligence in selecting Read more …

Bob Dylan’s words certainly are an understatement in the IT world. The speed at which technologies and concepts move from novel to mainstream is staggering. But of course, that’s part of what makes the business technology field so intriguing: it’s never the same.

How do you keep up? Well, for one thing, you need to be agile. That’s our mantra at Cutter. Yes, Agile is one of our thriving practice areas. But it’s also a way of life for us. Since 1986 we’ve been adapting to market changes, reorganizing content, adding new products, altering formats, etc. Here’s an example: when I first came to Cutter, our Object-Oriented Strategies newsletter (16 pages in print) was one of our most widely read publications. Over time, objects became fairly widely understood, the technology moved up the maturity scale, and we re-niched the pub Read more …

Practice what you preach. Talk the talk and walk the walk. That’s what Cutter’s going to do at the end of each afternoon at Agile2011. Join Israel Gat and Cutter Senior Consultants including Ken Collier, Brent Barton, Patrick Debois, Johanna Rothman, Christopher Avery, Ward Cunningham, Gil Broza, and others for the Daily Cutter Retrospective. This team, along with anyone (that means you!) who’d like to join them, will spend a few minutes reviewing and sharing what everyone learned that day, and what impact it might have on the rest of the conference and their post-conference actions. Follow us at @cuttertweets for the exact location of this retrospective/meetup. Or Like us on Facebook and we’ll send you an update/reminder.

Congratulations to Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Ken Collier! His latest book, Agile Analytics: A Value-Driven Approach to Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing, was named one of the “11 Books to Recharge Your Leadership Skills” by CIO-Insight.

A leading expert with Cutter’s Business Intelligence and Agile Product & Project Management practices, Ken is the developer of the Agile Business Intelligence (Agile BI) methodology, which combines agile methods with data warehousing, business intelligence, and advanced analytics. He has successfully adapted agile techniques to DW/BI to create the Agile Analytics style. He continues to refine these ideas as a technical lead and project manager on several agile DW/BI project teams.

As CIO-Insight points out, Ken’s latest book is “a how-to on bringing new agility to data warehousing features, resulting in valuable business intelligence and dramatically reduced project risk.” Find CIO-Insight’s complete list Read more …

I was just asked to comment problem at Google that caused an estimated 35,000 people to lose (for a few days at least) the entire contents of their Gmail accounts. Here are my thoughts on this.

I was saddened to hear that computer industry pioneer Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), died on Sunday, a few weeks shy of his 85th birthday.

Under his 35-year leadership as CEO, Ken Olsen built Digital from US $70,000 in seed money in 1957 to become the world’s second-largest computer company with upwards of $14B in sales and 120,000 employees in more than 95 countries. In 1986, Fortune magazine named Ken “America’s most successful entrepreneur.”

Following Ken’s vision, starting with the PDP-1 in the 1960s, Digital created an entirely new segment of the computer industry with its small, powerful, and high-quality “minicomputers.” The minicomputer quickly became an alternative to the multimillion-dollar mainframe and gained favor in laboratories, academia, engineering, and other industries.

Beyond the size and price differential of the mini, DEC pioneered the concepts behind interactive computing Read more …

We’re thrilled to announce that Ron Blitstein has joined Cutter’s management team and is now Director of Cutter’s CIO practice. While this role is new for Ron, Ron is not new to Cutter! He’s been a Fellow of the Cutter Business Technology Council since 2007, and a Senior Consultant with our Business-IT Strategies practice. As Director of the CIO practice — which includes research, consulting, and training services around business-IT strategy and trends, enterprise risk management, security, sourcing, and innovation — Ron will lead the community of Senior Consultants focused in these areas and will lay out the research agenda in these domains.

Ron’s 30-year career includes extensive international operations experience and spans all aspects of information management. This includes technology strategic planning, program management, mergers and acquisitions, IT turnarounds, business process reengineering, software solutions development, ERP deployment, security/risk Read more …

The following consultants have joined the Agile Practice over the past few weeks:

Jurgen Appelo Brent Barton Patrick Debois Hillel Glazer Sebastian Hassinger Chris Sterling

In addition, I am speaking this week with two other consultants who expressed interest in joining the practice. If they come aboard they will be adding very particular skills in specialties that are not fully represented yet in the practice.

Between the old hands, the six that have just joined and those that will soon be joining, the practice is nicely positioned to offer the whole spectrum of services relevant to producing software, delivering it and delivering value through it. Think of the practice as a one-stop-shopping for engineering practices, strategic consulting and anything in between.