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Management Attention Will Become Systemically Focused

Andrew Spanyi | Dec 21, 2012 No Responses

Dec 212012

Management Attention Will Become Systemically Focused

I see the emphasis on managing customer experience accelerating. Some progress has already been made in the area of customer-centric measurement, largely due to an increasing emphasis on Big Data and process analytics. In 2013, more organizations will begin to understand that this calls for a shift in management attention to a more systemic view of business. Some organizations may begin to appreciate that overall performance for customers is dependent on what the organization measures, manages, and rewards and therefore requires a systemic view that pays attention not only to customer-focused metrics, but also to business models, governance, and reward systems. [Editor's Note: This post is part of the annual "Cutter Predicts ..." series.]

You are What You Expose

Israel Gat | Dec 20, 2012 No Responses

Dec 202012

The quips “You are what you eat” and “You are what you read” capture a universal truth: for better or worse your actions define your persona. As of 2013, I believe, “eat” and “read” in these quips will be superseded by “expose.” The APIs you choose to expose will define the kind of services you, your company or your company’s eco-system will be able to offer. It is going to be an “APIs beget services” pattern rather than “Services beget APIs.” If you think I am smoking something strong, take a look at the recent articles Cutter published on the API Economy (click here, here and here). Perhaps the most striking piece in these articles …

A Changing View of Social Media

Robert Mason | Dec 20, 2012 No Responses

Dec 202012

In the coming year, instead of viewing social media as a marketing tool, similar to ads (even targeted ads), organizations will begin to recognize that the potential for social media lies in the using the tools to build communities around products and services. The resulting communities can be invaluable in providing feedback on design and level of service issues. Customers and prospective clients can become engaged from early design throughout the life cycle, becoming valued partners with the organization in a mutually beneficial community, focused on improving product and service satisfaction. [Editor's Note: This post is part of the annual "Cutter Predicts ..." series.]

Welcome Aboard, Professor Succi!

Israel Gat | Dec 20, 2012 No Responses

Dec 202012

How appropriate it is that on the eve of Christmas and New Year we add a consultant of the caliber of Professor Giancarlo Succi to Cutter’s Agile practice! Over the past couple of years the Agile practice has expanded its core expertise in software methods to include just about any aspect of software engineering that Cutter clients have interest in. We added consultants with deep expertise in Lean/Kanban, system engineering, complexity theory, devops and technical debt. We carry out technical due diligence and code audit engagements. And, in accord with Marc Andreessen’s quip “Software is eating the world,” various engagements evolve over time to address strategic aspects of product development. The recently published research report Introducing …

Enterprise Architects Will Need To …

Roger Evernden | Dec 19, 2012 No Responses

Dec 192012

Like last year, I focus my predictions on how current trends will impact Enterprise Architecture in 2013. I see three things coming: 1. Make sense of big data. Big data will continue to get a lot of press, and vendors will be keen to show off new tricks with data integration. The enterprise architecture teams need to beef up their information architecture capability and develop appropriate Enterprise Patterns to participate in this debate and to be able to respond intelligently to this pressure. 2. Mobilize for mobile. The EA team need to expand application patterns to show how a multitude of disparate apps work in conjunction with a more traditional legacy application landscape. 3. The forecast …

Call for Papers: The Emerging Cloud Ecosystem: Innovative New Services and Business Models

Christine Generali | Dec 19, 2012 No Responses

Dec 192012

Cloud computing, as an IT service delivery model, is advancing at a staggering pace. It is being adopted by a spectrum of stakeholders — individual users, businesses, educational institutions, governments, and community organizations — and is causing a paradigm shift which has huge transformational potential. To successfully and fully embrace the promise of clouds, adopters must of course use one or more of the three foundation cloud services — infrastructure, platform and software/applications. But they must also address factors including security, privacy, user access management, compliance requirements, business continuity and more. Furthermore, they may have to use services from more than one provider, aggregate those services, and also integrate them with their legacy applications/systems. They …

ERM Practice: Trying to Catch Up with the Theory

Robert Charette | Dec 18, 2012 No Responses

Dec 182012

Former Yankee baseball player Yogi Berra, known for his insightful malapropisms, once said, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” This would be an apt description of the current state of enterprise risk management (ERM). In theory, ERM is useful in addressing the question, “What is the best use of corporate resources to create or protect the most value for the enterprise?” Yet in practice — except for a few exceptions like that of the successful avionics firm Rockwell Collins – it has fallen woefully short of meeting this objective. Over the past decade-plus, organizations have found ERM extremely difficult and costly to implement, with many early ERM adopters …

Cloud Computing Commoditized

Mitchell Ummel | Dec 18, 2012 1 Response

Dec 182012

Recent developments in the Cloud Computing market space lead me to believe we are nearing the “tipping point” in the commoditization of IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) offerings. This will drive further adoption by enterprises. Earlier this year, Google, a leader in the PaaS market, publicly announced its intention to enter the already burgeoning IaaS market with its Google Compute Engine (GCE) service offering (currently available only in limited preview by Google). Most analysts interpret Google’s spin up of GCE as an aggressive move to go head-to-head with Amazon’s EC2 on all fronts: price, performance, and features. Other IaaS contenders, including HP with its recently launched OpenStack-based HP Cloud Compute, IBM, and Microsoft (notwithstanding its current focus on …

Restructuring the IT Department and its Skills

Jerry Grochow | Dec 17, 2012 2 Responses

Dec 172012

Restructuring the IT Department and its Skills

As the internet became established as a tool of commerce and industry over the past 15 years or so, IT departments fit new titles of web developer, user experience designer, and network security engineer into their existing department structure along with the many programmers, systems analysts, and technical gurus needed to keep systems running and serve the enterprise. Now along comes the cloud and IT departments are beginning to realize they may not need so much of these skills, but are going to need more of the skills associated with contract, vendor, and customer relationship management. While this won’t be news to IT departments that were stricken with the outsourcing bug a few years ago, …

Agility, the Personal Cloud, and Complex Analytics on the Horizon

Brian Dooley | Dec 15, 2012 No Responses

Dec 152012

Agility, the Personal Cloud, and Complex Analytics on the Horizon

Predictions are always difficult in interesting times, because tomorrow’s concepts depend upon activity which has not yet occurred. We expected flying cars; we are getting autonomous cars. In the 1950s, the computer revolution, robotics, GPS, and today’s traffic patterns would have been difficult to envision. Today, we are seeing rapid evolution across Information and Communications Technology, affecting every component and every meme. But we can see the direction that some areas of recent concentration are likely to take. Concepts of Agility will continue to evolve, moving beyond specific processes such as Scrum toward more comprehensive programs capable of incorporating a wider variety of projects, under more conditions and supporting greater integration with governance. This can …

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