The Cutter Benchmark Review team is putting together an issue on IT’s Role in Reverse Logistics, and that means it’s survey time. The topic was new to me, so I went to the web for some education and inspiration. And bam! I found this great piece in Modern Materials Handling. In a nutshell, I learned that effectively dealing with returned materials offers companies the opportunity to bolster customer satisfaction, increase profit margins through resale (through channels like eBay or Craigslist), minimize inventory carrying costs and reduce their impact on the environment. The strategic use of IT resources can be the difference between success and failure in this endeavor. In fact, state-of-the-art technology and applying the right technology were 2 of Read more …

Last spring, when Gabe Piccoli, Rick Watson and Emily Ryan looked at whether green IT/IS was a priority for organizations, they found some good news: their survey for Cutter Benchmark Review uncovered that more than one-third of companies in the US, and over half of European companies had a long-term strategy in place for reducing their environmental footprints.

Environmental responsibilities are increasingly becoming a mandatory part of business strategies. The pressure not only comes from growing customer demand for green products and processes, but it’s also coming from industry-specific government regulations that enforce precise collection, management, and reporting of carbon data. So now Gabe, this time along with Cutter Senior Consultant Bhuvan Unhelkar and Brian Donnellan, is digging a little deeper to find out the relevance of metrics and measurements to a green organization. The team has just launched Read more …

Cutter Senior Consultant Bob Benson is researching how IT governance management practices are actually applied in organizations — and the effectiveness of those practices. We’re hoping you’ll let us know your opinions on this topic by participating in our survey. We’ll thank you with an immediate download of the Cutter Consortium article by Steve Andriole, New Governance vs. Organizational Terrorism“, when you complete the survey.

If the IT Governance Survey isn’t a good fit for you, we’re also currently surveying on Software Project Requirements, and invite you to participate.

Cutter’s constant flow of new research provides our clients with accurate forecasts about the business and technology strategies, tactics, and trends that will have an impact on their organizations in Read more …

My colleague, Kim Leonard, highlighted some of the first analyses of Cutter’s recent study on software estimation back in November (Software estimation “a tough beast to control“). Elli Bennatan‘s analysis is ongoing; here are some of the latest highlights:

In 2002, the most common remedy for schedule problems was overtime. Now, six years later, a Cutter Consortium survey has revealed some interesting news: when projects run into scheduling problems, the two most common remedies are extending the schedule and reducing functionality, with overtime relegated to third place, followed by adding staff. … To a large degree, the shift away from adding overtime indicates a positive change in culture. Organizational behavior is improving!”

Previous Cutter Consortium research has consistently shown the move toward more manageable agile software projects (short, evolutionary, customer-driven). Bennatan examined this phenomenon Read more …

In the light of the hype over Web 2.0 this past year, I want to stress that organizations are making use of the techniques to improve the collaboration capabilities of their BI and business performance management initiatives. In fact, according to the results of our recent survey, slightly more than one-quarter of end-user organizations are currently using Web 2.0 techniques to support their BI users. This finding comes from a survey conducted in October 2008 of 85 end-user organizations based worldwide. It was designed to measure the extent that organizations are implementing various types of BI, data warehousing, and other analytic technologies and practices.

Specifically, survey participants were asked “Is your organization using blogs, wikis, or other ‘Web 2.0′ technologies to support its BI efforts/users with collaboration capabilities (e.g., to provide analysts, managers, and other users with the ability to Read more …

The original research Cutter conducts helps us deliver a detailed picture of IT best practices worldwide. The data we gather make it possible to forecast the business and technology strategies, tactics, and trends that will have an impact on organizations in the near- and long-term. We make the extra effort to ensure that survey results reflect reality. When Cutter Senior Consultants analyze the data, they normalize it, toss the outliers, and eliminate responses from any sales/marketing/product management folks at vendor companies. And we always include the number of respondents when we publish analyses based on data collected through these surveying efforts. We follow this methodology so you can be confident in the validity of our conclusions. If you’d like to participate in our surveys, we welcome you to join the Cutter Research Community! When you do, Read more …

According to some observers, the new generation of workers entering organizations are different. This generation, sometimes labeled “millennials” or “digital natives,” number almost 70 million–greater than the prior “gen Xers” (51 million) but somewhat smaller than the generation of “boomers” (83 million). Some are suggesting that these digital natives, having grown up in an environment rich in information technology, approach knowledge work differently and present challenges for current management and organizational practices.

Have you noticed any differences in work habits as new hires enter your organization?

We put together a short scenario that illustrates what some see as how these new workers may be different. Here is how it begins:

Jeri Smith heads down the corridor to HighTec’s conference room for a meeting with four of her most experienced project managers. The managers, in their last monthly meeting, realized that Read more …

In our just-published Cutter Benchmark Review article (see “Linking IT Budgeting, Governance, and Value,” Vol., 8, No. 7), Tom Bugnitz and I report that only 27% of managers of large companies believe their IT is superior to that of their competition. (By “large,” we mean companies with more than US $50 million annual spend.) For all companies, regardless of size, only 39% of managers believe that their company’s IT is superior.

Wow.

Forget about the idea that a manager may not actually know what his or her competitor’s IT is and how it compares. Forget about the problem of separating IT from IT-enabled business and management process — for, of course, that’s what really matters. Forget that this survey did not touch every senior manager in the company, so that the result might Read more …

The majority of organizations that have implemented or are planning to implement business performance management solutions rely on a data warehouse to support the data integration requirements of their performance management initiatives. This finding comes from a Cutter Consortium survey conducted in January 2008 of 101 end-user organizations based worldwide. The survey was designed to measure the extent that organizations are implementing business performance management and the techniques and tools they are using and the issues they are encountering.

Specifically, when asked, “Does your organization have an existing data warehouse that you are using/plan to use to support the data integration requirements of your business performance management initiative?” survey participants responded as follows:

“We are using/plan to use our existing data warehouse” (44%) “We do not have an existing data warehouse/data integration architecture but plan to develop one ourselves to Read more …

We recently published the results of our annual Cutter Benchmark Review survey on trends and technologies for the coming year. This is the third yearly issue of CBR where we ask our contributors to look forward to the coming year and see what technologies and IT trends we can expect to endure, which ones are emerging, and which ones seem to be losing steam. Our ability to do trending and year-over-year comparisons is strengthening with every survey and the cumulating of results. We have been very careful in keeping some of the questions consistent so that we can comment on changes over time. The trends issues are particularly important in my opinion as they give us more than a spot evaluation of what is going on and instead enable us to take a more long-term view.

Read more …