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The IT professionals of today and tomorrow are center stage for all of critical changes in organizational, global, and workforce trends. But are they ready? More importantly, are IT organizations in general and CIOs in particular ready?

Much has been written about the role of the 21st-century CIO. In the face of these complex, interconnected trends, the CIO is responsible for ensuring operational excellence, aligning IT with the business, and leading initiatives that transform how the enterprise operates ... all while devoting more personal time to a new role as business strategist. CIOs are being judged by their ability to leverage information technology to drive business strategy and innovation for competitive advantage. However, it is equally important that the CIO lead the development of an IT staff with the skills and experience to deliver all of this.

This issue of Cutter IT Journal examines the tremendous challenges ahead for CIOs as they determining how value is to be manifested in their organizations.

Published: September 2011, 36 pages, PDF format
Authors: Guest Editor, Robert D. Scott, R Dhakshinamoorthy, Charlie Bess, Claudio Bartolini, Raja Bavani, Gabriel Capmany, Jose Pedro Pagano, Jorge V.A. Ronchese, and Vijaykumar N
Online resource center clients: Access the report online.

Helping us make sense of the management of large volumes of data, or "Big Data," is one of our favorite academic contributors. Richard T. Watson is the J. Rex Fuqua Distinguished Chair for Internet Strategy in the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia (USA). Among other things, Rick is former President of the Association for Information Systems and the current Research Director for the Advanced Practices Council of the Society of Information Management, a forum of senior IS executives. Rick is a good friend and a real thinker, a person who is very willing to look at things differently, even if what he has to report is unpopular. He is very creative, and his work often has me scratching my head, saying, "I did not think of that!" Coauthoring with Rick in this issue is Research Assistant Tyler Williamson, a senior honors student at the University of Georgia pursuing a bachelor's degree in MIS.

Our view from the practice side in this issue is provided by April Reeve, Enterprise Architect and Program Manager for EMC Consulting. April brings to us more than 25 years' expertise in the financial services industry, with a plethora of practical knowledge in working with massive amounts of data. She is certified by Data Management Association International as a Data Management Professional (CDMP) and certified by ISACA in both Enterprise Governance of IT (CEGIT) and as an Information Systems Auditor (CISA).

Published: April 2011, 17 pages, PDF format

Authors: Gabriele Piccoli, Editor; Richard T. Watson, Tyler Williamson, April Reeve

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The report begins with a bird's eye view of the RMLC and then gives a description of the project landscape. This allows for a foundation to discuss how the RMLC and the various project management lifecycles integrate and interact.

Published: March 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Robert K. Wysocki

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The report A Structured Approach to IT Cloud Migration looks at not only the technical aspects of migrating to cloud ecosystems, but also at how migration will affect business operations. Taking a structured approach to cloud migration projects bypasses roadblocks and allows for intelligent decisions that will benefit the business.

Table of Contents:

• Enterprise Cloud Definition
• Migration Considerations
• Migration Architectures
• Cloud Migration Methodology
• Migration QA and Validation
• Database Migration Considerations
• Case Study: Migrating a Telecom
  into the Cloud
• Migration Best Practices Overview

The real-world examples and case studies offered in this report demonstrate the value of understanding the complex business factors involved and their relation to enterprise IT portfolios. These lessons will give you the tools you need to successfully navigate cloud migration projects with minimal business and technical risk.

Published: July 2011, 17 pages, PDF format

Author: Beth Cohen

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From the ownership of risk by company directors through management of risk at the source in everyday business operations, this Executive Report brings practical experience to the implementation, management, and benefit realization of a risk-based approach to business (aka enterprise risk management).

Published: July 2010, 28 pages, PDF format

Author: Keith Sherringham and Bhuvan Unhelkar

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The dark matter of the business-driven enterprise architecture BDEA comprises proper identification and clarification of value chains and value streams. As we explore in this Executive Report by Skip Boettger, the lack of proper attention to this dark matter creates a "void," compromising the integrity of the BDEA and making it impossible to achieve true accountable integration in the business-driven enterprise.

Published: July 2010, 24 pages, PDF format

Author: Skip Boettger

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This report is also available in print format.

The report Adopting a Practical Social Media Strategy: An Enterprise Guide provides a common-sense approach to developing your organization's social media strategy. You'll explore the multiple uses and benefits of social media in a business context, the issues that hinder adoption, and how to maximize the benefit/risk ratio. Plus, you'll review the six mistakes organization's make when adopting social media.

The strategies provided in this report will help you:

• Use social media to improve your connection to customers
• Move beyond your fears of confidentiality breaches and productivity losses to develop a successful social media strategy
• Create a vision of what you want your enterprise to look like as a "corporate citizen of the Internet"
• Use social media for technology watch and competitive intelligence -- intelligence that is "hidden in plain sight"
• Leverage conversational marketing to remain closely engaged with your marketplace
• Gingerly handle issues of governance
• Utilize the new product development strategy of "release and listen"

What's more, you'll look at new tools that have emerged to facilitate social search, such as SlideShare, Aardvark, Hunch, and Quora. And you'll receive links to eight online social media compliance policies, including ones at IBM, BT, the Red Cross, and Coca-Cola.

Learn how to create a reasoned social media adoption plan. Order your copy of this report today!

Publication Date: 20 October 2011, 30 pages, PDF format

Authors: Steve Andriole, Claude Baudoin, Vincent Schiavone

This report is also available as a PDF.

The report Adopting a Practical Social Media Strategy: An Enterprise Guide provides a common-sense approach to developing your organization's social media strategy. You'll explore the multiple uses and benefits of social media in a business context, the issues that hinder adoption, and how to maximize the benefit/risk ratio. Plus, you'll review the six mistakes organization's make when adopting social media.

The strategies provided in this report will help you:

• Use social media to improve your connection to customers
• Move beyond your fears of confidentiality breaches and productivity losses to develop a successful social media strategy
• Create a vision of what you want your enterprise to look like as a "corporate citizen of the Internet"
• Use social media for technology watch and competitive intelligence -- intelligence that is "hidden in plain sight"
• Leverage conversational marketing to remain closely engaged with your marketplace
• Gingerly handle issues of governance
• Utilize the new product development strategy of "release and listen"

What's more, you'll look at new tools that have emerged to facilitate social search, such as SlideShare, Aardvark, Hunch, and Quora. And you'll receive links to eight online social media compliance policies, including ones at IBM, BT, the Red Cross, and Coca-Cola.

Learn how to create a reasoned social media adoption plan. Order your copy of this report today!

Published: October 2011, 30 pages, delivered in print, by post

Authors: Steve Andriole, Claude Baudoin, Vincent Schiavone

The report Agile Business: The Final Frontier by Cutter Senior Consultant Rob Thomsett explores the positive and negative aspects of agile as an organizational model. In it, you'll discover an integrated model for business agility based on the following key elements: agile sponsorship, agile development, agile project management, the agile program office, agile support, agile finance, and other agile service groups.

Table of Contents:

• Back to the Future I: Business As Usual
• Three Powerful Change Models
• A Brief History of Agile
• Agile and Organizational Culture
• The Agile Business Proposition
• Agile Business Model
• Back to the Future II: The Power of Teams
• Implementing Agile Business: A Case Study
• The Tipping Point Revisited

This report also includes an agile business case study from a major bank in New Zealand that was built around colocated project teams. You'll discover how this agile business implementation has proven to enable faster change and a more creative and collaborative change environment.

Learn how you can adopt the principles, values, and practices of traditional agile development and agile project management as a catalyst for broader organizational change.

Published: July 2010, 21 pages, PDF format

Author: Rob Thomsett

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

CAMS involves such process elements as business management (e.g., Six Sigma), project management (e.g., Prince2), IT governance (e.g., COBIT, ITIL), and formal software processes (e.g., RUP, Process Mentor, OPEN). This Executive Report is based on exploratory interviews with 10 participants in varying consulting and permanent roles combined with the author's own experiences in using agile in practice.

Published: January 2010, 26 pages, PDF format

Author: Bhuvan Unhelkar

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The need for enterprise agility has never been greater, yet the funds for large-scale projects are hard to find. The agile enterprise requires a software development process and supporting infrastructure that is capable of meeting changes in business and technology conditions. Agile development's ability to increase the flexibility of software delivery and SOA's ability to increase the flexibility and usability of software, together provide the best hybrid of current methods for reaching this goal.

The report Agile SOA by Brian Dooley explores the benefits of an agile/SOA strategy and gives you the tools you need to implement an incremental agile/SOA approach, also known as a "meet in the middle strategy," to help your organization achieve better enterprise agility.

This report will help you:

• Understand the requirements to create a merged agile development/SOA environment.
• Overcome the challenges of existing organizational processes and values to start your agile/SOA initiative.
• Utilize a five-step plan to initiate an incremental agile/SOA implementation.
• Achieve greater modularity, efficiency, and alignment with business needs.
• Initiate projects without extreme initial costs.
• Enable greater responsiveness to changes in the business environment.

You'll also benefit from case studies that demonstrate how agile and SOA were used together succesfully to help four organizations achieve their business goals.

If your organization is seeking more efficient development in a constantly changing business environment, then Agile SOA will help you achieve this goal.

Published: June 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Brian J. Dooley

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If this is the case, your organization is likely to be missing out on a wide range of powerful business-IT transformation opportunities. Information systems transformation is delivering more strategic value than ever.

Information Systems Transformation concepts offer organizations the ability to transform complex IT architectures to achieve critical business requirements. As traditional Greenfield, middleware and off-the-shelf solutions hit the wall, information systems transformation concepts have become essential to achieving synchronized and sustainable business-IT alignment. Organizations are using these concepts to enable the move to a customer centric business model, streamlining merger and acquisition deployment, and moving to more streamlined, transparent business deployments. Join us at this important webinar as William Ulrich outlines practical approaches to business-driven, IT architecture transformation using real world case studies and examples.

Resource Center clients can Access the webinar here.

This Executive Report by Dr. Laurence Lock Lee offers a relationship-centered approach to IT governance as a profitable adjunct to traditional approaches.

Published: April 2010, 20 pages, PDF format

Author: Dr. Laurence Lock Lee

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If the technical debt is not paid up, the system's quality will rapidly deteriorate until it goes "bankrupt"; it then may be decommissioned as the cost of maintaining it will be too high. This Executive Report by Amir Kolsky introduces the concept of technical debt, what practices and attitudes cause it, and what we can do to prevent it or pay it off.

Published: September 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Amir Kolsky

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The report Becoming an Open Organization: Open Source Software, Open Content, Open Functionality, and Open Innovation explores how various open concepts are being utilized by mature organizations to produce powerful results. You’ll identify the opportunities and pitfalls of numerous open concepts and consider how they may fit into your own company’s business model.

This report will help you:

• Take advantage of new ideas in open source software, open content, and “open” Web services.
• Benefit from a royalty-free software commons that offers less lock in, greater choice, and reduced costs.
• Successfully adopt open source techniques on internal projects.
• Discover how other communities and firms are using open content.
• Identify the compelling value propositions of IP marketplaces and “crowdsourcing”.
• Gain a blueprint for the use of open innovation in your company.

You’ll learn how the following companies are exploiting open concepts:

• Oracle, Philips, and Sun are each using peer production to succeed.
• Six hybrid Web applications (mashups) -- Wii Seeker, Stock Cloud, Open Stock Photography, HousingMaps, BBC News Maps, and Babelplex -- help incubate new venture ideas.
• Three firms are emulating open source methods on internal projects:
  1. Lucent Technologies’ (now Alcatel-Lucent) development of an implementation of the Session Initiation Protocol
  2. IBM’s “Community Source” strategy
  3. HP’s “Progressive Open Source” framework.
• Proctor & Gamble has mastered the art of the inflow for open innovation.
• IBM is allowing other organizations and groups to create value on top of IBM resources.

Plus, you’ll learn three questions your organization should ask itself to help decide between proprietary versus open source software. You’ll review some of the lessons learned from the Linux kernel and other projects, as identified by Eric Raymond, author of the influential essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." And, you’ll discover what happened at one organization when a technical thread was moved out of a private e-mail conversation and into a public mailing list.

Table of Contents:

• Leveraging Peer Production: An Open Door?
• Emulating the “Bazaar”: Open Source-Style Development Within the Firm
• Open Innovation: Open for Business Yet?

Published: March 2008, 108 pages, PDF format

Authors: Joseph Feller, Gabriele Piccoli, Ana Paula Valente Pereira

This report will help you:

• Create an environment in which others will succeed
• Consider how your own leadership behaviors impact the actions of others
• Avoid poor habits, such as fingerpointing, secrecy, poor performance, and weak interpersonal relations
• Assess the organizational culture surrounding your teams' work and the leadership skills of those involved
• Respond appropriately when a leader reverts to old command-and-control habits
• Explore the six qualities of a collaborative leader and how to apply them
• Distinguish between the collaborative leader and the more traditional authoritative or technically expert type of leader

This report compares the behavioral expectations of leaders from three separate studies: 1) an agile leadership study, 2) a research project on the competencies of Certified Professional Facilitators, and 3) a study on top-performing rural community development experts.

Plus, you'll delve into case examples of two people who are differently prepared for the role of being a collaborative leader: Donna the project manager, and Robert the CEO.

Published: May 2011, 17 pages, PDF format

Author: David Spann

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Today, organizations are increasingly employing mobile BI applications. This Executive Report by Curt Hall examines the potential implications of mobile BI. It covers technology, tools, and applications and examines business benefits afforded by mobile BI, as well as important issues involved in implementing mobile BI applications.

Published: September 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Curt Hall

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The announcer's teleprompter and on-screen graphics prove that information can be both instantaneous and engaging. The sports world has also mastered mining and refining historic data for the highest possible intelligence. This Executive Report by Dann A. Maurno makes the connection between the industries, with strong recommendations for BI providers and users.

Published: May 2010, 20 pages, PDF format

Author: Dann A. Maurno

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The contrast between the beauty of the small and the requirements of the big generates systemic tension in many software projects, organizations, and companies. Resolving this conflict is the focus of this Cutter IT Journal issue, Big Agile, featuring insight from agile guru Israel Gat and his host of expert authors.

Table of Contents:

What Does It Mean to Be "Big"? The Agile Scaling Model by Scott Ambler. Explore eight scaling factors that individual teams will inevitably face in the course of doing Big Agile and why it is essential to use a disciplined approach that addresses the entire product delivery process to be successful.

Laying the Foundation for Big Agile Transformation by Dave Rooney. Find out how applying a complete rather than incremental approach to a product or system will bear continuous improvements -- starting by educating the team members, as well as the management, at all levels of the development and product management organizations.

To Be or Not to Be: That's the Leadership Question for Going "Big Agile" by David Spann. Based on a case study of the essential need for leadership in an agile transformation, you'll be provided with a blueprint for a large-scale agile rollout that you can apply to your own organization.

Big Anything Depends on the People: An Exploration of the Human Factor in Scaling Agile Methods by Tom Bragg. Explore the possibility that using a more "popular" software method such as agile attracts a more competitive and knowledgeable project team thereby increasing the chances of project success.

Big Agile Isn't "One Big Agile" by John Heintz. Examine some theories of management and technology -- encouraging learning and sharing across the organization -- that will make a big agile initiative much more likely to succeed.

Published: February 2012, 32 pages, PDF format

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The focus of business process management (BPM) has shifted from a documentation activity -- typically driven by IT -- to a business responsibility in which processes are monitored and managed against key process indicators, and capabilities are created to simulate processes directly from models. BPM is finally penetrating the business and IT cultures and is poised to help organizations achieve the elusive goal of the model-driven, real-time enterprise.

The Cutter IT Journal issue Business Process Management: The Missing Link Between Business and IT? offers advice and recommendations on how to employ BPM effectively to maximize business performance and help bridge the divide commonly found between business and IT. You'll receive insightful opinion on the best ways to understand and position BPM, and strategies for exploiting the strengths of this concept without falling prey to the hype.

• BPM: Just Another Buzzword or an Essential Business-IT Link? by Claude R. Baudoin.
• Business Process Management: The New Old Thing? by Paul Clermont. Learn why BPM often failed in the past and discover new requirements for BPM teams to succeed.
• The Business Analyst Skill Gap by Kevin Brennan. Explore the role of the "business analyst" and discover a method to assess and improve the business analyst's skills.
• What BPM Hat Are You Wearing? Perspectives on Business Process Management by Ian Gotts. Identify the four audiences for BPM and discuss the various models of the business and the connections that must exist between them.
• Value Chain Modeling: Linking Customer Value to Business Process Design and Automation by Fred Cummins. Consider business processes in the context of value chain analysis and focus on the delivery of customer value and optimizing processes across multiple lines of business.
• A Quantitative Approach to Process Improvement by Matthew Ganis and Lekha P. Panikulangara. Leverage the popularity of project retrospectives and apply them to measure and improve BPM efforts.
• Runtime Collaboration and Dynamic Modeling in BPM: Allowing the Business to Shape Its Own Processes on the Fly by Sandy Kemsley. Explore dynamic adaptation of processes on the fly and review two examples of products that include such capability.

Published: February 2010, 40 pages, PDF format

Author: Claude Baudoin

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Council Opinions are prepared by the Cutter Business Technology Council and include the commentary of each Council Fellow and the logic behind his or her concurring or dissenting opinion, as well as the strategic implications of the trend.

Published: April 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Authors: Ken Orr, Lynne Ellyn, Robert D. Scott, Karen Coburn, Jerrold Grochow, Julio César Margáin

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Table of Contents:

• Opening Statement
• The Town Planners of Enterprise Innovation
• Effective Customer Requirements Definition Using Business Architecture
• The Tale of Two BAs: Why Business Architecture Is the Business Analysis Practice's Best Friend
• A Capability-Based Approach to Strategic Transformational Initiatives
• Creating a New Multidisciplinary Cancer Center Using Business Architecture

Published: November 2011, 34 pages, PDF format

Authors: William Ulrich, Dan McClure, Carlos Villela, Andrew Guitarte, Neal McWhorter, Diana Krohn, Dr. Steven Libutti, Ron Zahavi

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

This report is also available in a print edition.

The report Business Architecture: Creating Game-Changing Opportunities for Your Organization by William Ulrich provides a rapid roadmap approach for establishing and socializing business architecture and introduces a deployment technique that your business architecture teams can use as a template for getting started.

This report will help you:

• Communicate the benefits of business architecture in business terms
• Apply business-driven transformation strategies, roadmaps, and funding models
• Leverage value streams in business transformation
• Utilize business capabilities to create a shared vocabulary between business and IT
• Build a successful business architecture team
• Adopt practice-based approaches to delivering innovative and effective business solutions

You'll learn why business executives should embrace the concept of business architecture and discover how value streams and capabilities provide the baseline for crafting common semantics for articulating current challenges and a business vision.

BONUS: This report also includes two case study approaches to using value streams in planning and deploying priority business initiatives. The first focuses on using value streams for rapid situation analysis and resolution, and the second focuses on enhancing the customer experience.

Published: January 2012, 50 pages, PDF format

Author: William Ulrich

This report is also available as a PDF.

The report Business Architecture: Creating Game-Changing Opportunities for Your Organization by William Ulrich provides a rapid roadmap approach for establishing and socializing business architecture and introduces a deployment technique that your business architecture teams can use as a template for getting started.

This report will help you:

• Communicate the benefits of business architecture in business terms
• Apply business-driven transformation strategies, roadmaps, and funding models
• Leverage value streams in business transformation
• Utilize business capabilities to create a shared vocabulary between business and IT
• Build a successful business architecture team
• Adopt practice-based approaches to delivering innovative and effective business solutions

You'll learn why business executives should embrace the concept of business architecture and discover how value streams and capabilities provide the baseline for crafting common semantics for articulating current challenges and a business vision.

BONUS: This report also includes two case study approaches to using value streams in planning and deploying priority business initiatives. The first focuses on using value streams for rapid situation analysis and resolution, and the second focuses on enhancing the customer experience.

Published: January 2012, 50 pages, delivered in print, by post

Author: William Ulrich

While we're still dealing with data issues and worrying about platform compatibility, we've now connected business intelligence to business performance management, a step that reflects rising expectations about what the BI endgame looks like. We've begun the journey toward structured/unstructured data integration/interpretation and real-time analytics -- as well as semantic processing, in anticipation of Web 3.0. In this Executive Report by Steve Andriole, we take a look at BI 2.0, which is now a reality and ready for optimization.

Published: February 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Steve Andriole

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

... but is it better data? Has BI promised much more than the insight and business objectives it has actually delivered? In this issue we have five articles, with views from several of the BI hills and a couple from some of the valleys.

Published: June 2010, 40 pages, PDF format

Authors: Dave Higgins, Kas Kasravi, Bhuvan Unhelkar, Amit Tiwary, Jan-Paul Fillié, Ralph Menzano, and Martin Bauer

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In the near future, thanks to the proliferation of sensor-based information networks, the typical opportunities and challenges linked to knowledge mining will intensify. This Executive Report by Paola Di Maio provides an overview of the essential components and architectural features of future embedded intelligence and their relevance to BI. It recommends steps that CIOs and BI professionals should consider to keep track of the rapid developments in this field.

Published: March2010, 20 pages, PDF format

Author: Paola Di Maio

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The new report Business-Oriented Service Management: A Roadmap for IT Cutter Senior Consultant Bill Keyworth lays out a roadmap that ties various levels of business maturity to prescriptions for IT action. It offers a business-oriented approach to maximizing the perception of IT effectiveness by using "business" language to tie IT deliverables to end-user objectives. This report uses both hypothetical scenarios and a real case study of a midsized energy utility to examine how you can improve business-IT alignment.

Table of Contents:

• Business-Oriented Service Management for IT
• Theory of Constraints Approach
• Using a BSM Maturity Model to Achieve Alignment
• The Acceptable Range of Business-IT Alignment: Scenarios for Success
• Case Study: Next Steps for Business-IT Alignment at a Midsized Utility
• Next Steps for Improving Business-IT Alignment

The report highlights specific recommendations to strengthen initiatives associated with each business maturity level. It provides guidelines for BSM achievement, case studies of BSM success, and recommendations for initiating your own unique path to BSM. Find out how to articulate IT's benefits in terms that are meaningful and measurable to the business executive, and make the next step for IT more intuitive and doable.

Order your copy of Business-Oriented Service Management: A Roadmap for IT today!

Published: August 2011, 16 pages, PDF format (also available in epub format.
Author: Bill Keyworth
Online resource center clients: Access this report online.

The new report Business-Oriented Service Management: A Roadmap for IT Cutter Senior Consultant Bill Keyworth lays out a roadmap that ties various levels of business maturity to prescriptions for IT action. It offers a business-oriented approach to maximizing the perception of IT effectiveness by using "business" language to tie IT deliverables to end-user objectives. This report uses both hypothetical scenarios and a real case study of a midsized energy utility to examine how you can improve business-IT alignment.

Table of Contents:

• Business-Oriented Service Management for IT
• Theory of Constraints Approach
• Using a BSM Maturity Model to Achieve Alignment
• The Acceptable Range of Business-IT Alignment: Scenarios for Success
• Case Study: Next Steps for Business-IT Alignment at a Midsized Utility
• Next Steps for Improving Business-IT Alignment

The report highlights specific recommendations to strengthen initiatives associated with each business maturity level. It provides guidelines for BSM achievement, case studies of BSM success, and recommendations for initiating your own unique path to BSM. Find out how to articulate IT's benefits in terms that are meaningful and measurable to the business executive, and make the next step for IT more intuitive and doable.

Order your copy of Business-Oriented Service Management: A Roadmap for IT today!

Published: August 2011, 16 pages print, epub format (also available as PDF)
Author: Bill Keyworth
Online resource center clients: Access this report online.

The five articles in this issue of Cutter IT Journal are qualitatively different from the first six in that they provide alternative, or perhaps complementary, views on BPM's place in the enterprise.

Published: May 2010, 40 pages, PDF format

Authors: Claude Baudoin, David Wrigh, Tushar Hazra, Fred Cummins, Mike Gammag, Ricky Cheong and Eric Tsui

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Existing glossaries are often incomplete (or spill over to cover adjacent concepts), obsolete, biased toward a specific approach, or of limited quality. Therefore, Cutter Consortium has developed a comprehensive, high-quality BPM glossary from a tool- and method-agnostic viewpoint to help clients with their BPM adoption and education efforts. The glossary is presented in this Executive Report by Claude R. Baudoin.

Published: April 2010, 24 pages, PDF format

Author: Claude R. Baudoin

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In the past few years, the managerial area of demand management, portfolio management, and IT governance have become more and more popular. Organizations are adopting these processes to better manage their expenses, reduce cost, and formalize an often chaotic relationship between IT and the business.

Published: February 2011, 13 pages, PDF format (also available in epub version)

Author: Rachel Mendelovich

Online resource center clients: Access this report online.

In the past few years, the managerial area of demand management, portfolio management, and IT governance have become more and more popular. Organizations are adopting these processes to better manage their expenses, reduce cost, and formalize an often chaotic relationship between IT and the business.

Published: February 2011, 13 pages print, epub format (also available in PDF version)

Author: Rachel Mendelovich

Online resource center clients: Access this report online.

In this edition of CITJ, our contributing authors have done an excellent job of presenting arguments for and examples of these three scenarios. They describe many of the challenges IT executives face in getting a seat at the M&A table, along with the consequences encountered when IT is not involved in M&A considerations from the beginning. They also offer practical suggestions on procedures and frameworks that, in their collective experience, have helped to achieve successful acquisition results and to improve IT's contribution to business value.

Published: October 2008, 33 pages, PDF format
Authors: Guest Editor, David Rasmussen, Ram Reddy, Michael Gentle, Steve Andriole, Pamela Hollington, Mike Sisco
Online resource center clients: Access the report online.

Council Opinions are prepared by the Cutter Business Technology Council and include the commentary of each Council Fellow and the logic behind his or her concurring or dissenting opinion, as well as the strategic implications of the trend.

DOMAIN

IT Strategy

Assertion #181

Risk management as practiced in the financial sector has now been revealed as a charade. Risk management as practiced in IT is probably little better.

Over the past two decades, the topic of risk management -- explicitly at the systems portfolio and project development levels -- has been hailed as an indication of IT's coming of age. The present economic meltdown has proved that the finance industry's practice of risk management was more about covering up risk than managing it. The factors that made financial managers want to game the system are all too similar to factors working on IT managers. We would be fools indeed to believe that risk management in our organizations is working better than its prototype in banking and insurance.

This Business Technology Trends Council Opinion by Tom DeMarco considers what went wrong with risk management in the financial and insurance industries in recent years, and how a better alignment of an executive's personal risk profile with his/her corporation's risk profile might yield more positive results. You'll learn why employees at lower levels have "other" factors in their individual risk profile -- beyond financial reward -- that can make sound risk management problematic, and how to overcome these challenges. Finally, you'll gain advice on how to avoid flawed risk management approaches and replace them with serious risk management.

Published: April 2009, 17 pages, PDF format

Authors: Tom DeMarco, Lynne Ellyn, Mark Seiden, Ken Orr, Christine Davis, and Tim Lister

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We examine the powerful trend toward further integration of technology into everyday productivity and the creative processes of this highly innovative generation. Plus, we discuss ways in which we can successfully integrate these individuals into our organizations to the benefit of all involved.

Published: August 2010, 20 pages, PDF format

Authors: Gabriele Piccoli, Robert M. Mason, Laura Schildkraut

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This Executive Report by Ning Su focuses on China's software and information services industry and investigates its current status, the unique opportunities for Western companies, and the best practices for managing outsourcing relationships in China.

Published: March 2011, 12 pages, PDF format

Author: Ning Su

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This Council Opinion, prepared by the Cutter Business Technology Council includes the commentary of each Council Fellow and the logic behind his or her concurring or dissenting opinion, as well as the strategic implications of the trend.

Published: July 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Lou Mazzucchelli, with concurrences and dissents by Lynne Ellyn, Tim Lister, Ron Blitstein, Claude Baudoin

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Corporations and government agencies need to appreciate the benefits that can be realized -- as well as the risks involved -- in seeking the benefits of the cloud. This Executive Report by Roger Clarke provides some background information, methods, and checklists to assist organizations in adopting cloud computing for the right reasons -- and in the right way.

Published: January 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Roger Clarke

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Cloud computing and agile development are both currently in a state of evolution, which is creating interesting synergies as the enterprise IT environment continues to advance. This Executive Report examines how cloud computing, in its various forms, interacts with and improves agile development. The report concludes with two case studies that demonstrate the potential in these complementary areas.

Published: May 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Brian J. Dooley

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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.

Published: September 2010, 20 pages, PDF format

Author: Bhuvan Unhelkar

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

CEP is generating greater interest as a way to increase operational efficiency. This Executive Report by Curt Hall examines CEP technology, as well as available CEP software vendors and products, and provides an overview of CEP applications.

Published: April 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Curt Hall

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The new report Corporate Cyber Attacks, Threats and Security by Arun K. Majumdar -- based on facts, evidence, and real-world cases of cyber crime -- reveals how hackers communicate and do business as well as their methods of developing vulnerabilities and attacks.

This gripping, easy-to-read report will help you achieve clear situational awareness of your organization's security risk and equip you to take the steps required to mitigate those risks. You'll learn a host of critical issues you should be aware of to immediately assess your cyber security status.

This report will help you:

• Get insight into a hacker's most popular styles of attack via a 15-point countermeasures checklist
• Architect hard-to-hack corporate infrastructures and mitigate the risk of social engineering techniques used by hackers
• Understand the 5 critical areas that a chief/cyber security officer needs to set up as a baseline for cyber security operations
• Find out if your corporate culture enables cyber threats
• Mitigate cyber threats via easy-to-use executive checklists

You'll also explore executive liabilities and accountabilities, the top eight cyber security cases, and a multitude of need-to-know issues for immediate practical use.

Published: May 2011, 19 pages, PDF format

Author: Arun K. Majumdar

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Books talk about the need to understand the mind of the highly technical employee. IT magazines have recently touted the "new" style of CIO that is shaping the organization within successful companies across the world. Despite the attention, many companies find they lack effective leadership among their midlevel and frontline managers. Our authors have differing views about what makes a good leader, but there is one common thread. The success of an IT organization is directly affected by the kind of leader you are -- and the kind of leaders you develop. As you read through these articles, I'm sure you will find many insights that apply to you or your team leaders.

Published: March 2010, 40 pages, PDF format

Authors: Bob Furniss, Pam Hager, Martin Bauer, Martha Lindeman, Johanna Rothman, Jurgen Appelo, Mark Woodman and Jason Bates

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The Cutter Consortium report Current Solutions for Unstructured Data by Brian J. Dooley explores the increasingly powerful techniques being developed for compilation, analysis, combination, and visualization of unstructured data. You'll gain tips for integrating unstructured data into a structured environment, maximizing search solutions, and analyzing unstructured multimedia data.

This report will help you:

• Derive context from data, helping you uncover hidden relationships that can explain underlying causes for complaints, opinion, actions, or sales
• Consider various analysis techniques for unstructured data, such as text mining and analytics, natural language processing, Web content mining, text categorization and classification, and more
• Explore the growth of sentiment analysis on social networks
• Better understand search solutions, such as keyword search, federated search, conceptual search, and multimedia search
• Make information relevant and accessible to decision makers
• Explore text analytics categories, including Word tree, the tag cloud, and a phrase net

This report also identifies and describes 19 text analysis software solutions, such as Attensity, Autonomy, EMC Documentation, Endeca, Exalead, Expert System, and others, including three open source solutions.

Published: February 2011, 13 pages, PDF format

Author: Brian J. Dooley

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The report Customer Experience: How Technology Can Contribute -- Or Kill It by Cutter Senior Consultant Jim Love examines the negative impact technology can have on customer service and offers advice for how your business can mitigate these negatives and leverage technology's positive potential.

Table of Contents

• The Failure of Technology
• Think Technology has Improved Customer Service? Ask a Customer
• The Battle is Raging: Technology and Customer Behavior
• Failure to Understand the Customer Experience
• What Technology Can't Teach You
• Technology Loses the Human Element ... And the Customer
• The LED at the End of the Tunnel: How to Integrate Technology Into a Positive Customer Experience
• Conclusion: Back to the Future

Find out how you can span the gap that separates the way customers and companies view customer experience, and move toward utilizing technology to engage -- not enrage -- your customers. Order your copy of Customer Experience: How Technology Can Contribute -- Or Kill It today!

Published: July 2010, 15 pages, PDF format

Author: Jim Love

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

In addition to business benefits, a customer-centric approach provides an overall framework for the design, development, operation, and management of IT. This Executive Report by Keith Sherringham and Bhuvan Unhelkar addresses the implementation and operation of a customer-centric business for aligning business and IT.

Published: October 2010, 24 pages, PDF format

Author: Keith Sherringham and Bhuvan Unhelkar

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

We Do the Research for You

CBR provides a high-level analyses of the current trends and hot-button issues you face. You'll discover the strategies and tactics of companies worldwide and, most importantly, where they're succeeding and failing.

Your Access to the Experts

Each quarterly report focuses on a different topic, presenting fresh empirical data describing the current landscape. But beyond the statistics, you'll get insight into what the findings mean. Analysis from two different viewpoints -- that of a distinguished academic and also an expert practitioner -- plus future predictions and their potential impact from editor Joseph Feller, provides you with a framework in which to apply the data to your situation. This is insider information you can't afford to miss.

With a subscription to CBR, your organization benefits from the unique opportunity to glean insight from the cutting-edge ideas being studied in some of the world's leading educational institutions, as well as the perspective that only seasoned experts with hands-on experience solving real problems in real enterprises can provide.

CBR gives you a unique opportunity to:

• Look critically, objectively, and through a variety of lenses at business technology issues impacting your enterprise
• Understand how your organization compares to others in your industry and/or around the world
• Understand the potential impact of today's trends on the future health and direction of your company
• Identify key IT initiatives that are worth pursuing and — just as importantly -- those you should avoid
• Support your IT initiatives with unbiased research and judicious statistical analysis

Nowhere else will you find a marriage of the academic and practitioner perspectives like you get in CBR. Add to this the practical and provocative guidelines from editor Joseph Feller, and you'll find CBR is a resource unlike any other available.

Subscriptions delivered outside of North America include a $100 shipping fee. CBR is published 4 times a year.

For details on digital subscriptions, contact us at sales@cutter.com or call +1 (781) 648-8700.

CBR gives you a unique opportunity to:

• Look critically, objectively, and through a variety of lenses at business technology issues impacting your enterprise
• Understand how your organization compares to others in your industry and/or around the world
• Understand the potential impact of today's trends on the future health and direction of your company
• Identify key IT initiatives that are worth pursuing and -- just as importantly -- those you should avoid
• Support your IT initiatives with unbiased research and judicious statistical analysis

Renew your CBR subscription today and receive your free report!

Renew now and you'll immediately receive a PDF copy of the report "Business-Oriented Service Management" by Bill Keyworth -- a US $150 value! Discover a business oriented approach to maximizing the perception of IT effectiveness and examine how the assumptions and recommendations of a BSM maturity model can improve business-IT alignment.

Even if you recently renewed, you can extend your subscription today and receive this valuable report. Plus, you'll avoid any impending price increases over the coming year. What's more, you'll receive upcoming issues on the potential impact of today's trends on the future health and direction of your organization.

Renew now to take advantage of this special offer. Extend your subscription today!

Subscriptions delivered outside of North America include a $100 shipping fee. CBR is published 4 times a year.

For details on digital subscriptions, contact us at sales@cutter.com or call +1 (781) 648-8700.

CITJ is unique in that it is written by IT professionals, not journalists. You get frank, honest accounts of what's working and what isn't -- from practitioners who are under the same pressures you are to get the job done. Each issue is devoted to a current IT topic and includes a thought-provoking introduction by a leading expert, followed by 5 or 6 in-depth articles that feature debate, case studies, research findings, and experience-based opinion. No other journal brings together so many cutting-edge thinkers, and lets them speak so bluntly on critical issues.

Cutter IT Journal will help you:

• Gain global perspectives and solutions to today's most critical business-technology issues
• Ensure your IT organization's success in a volatile economic climate
• Benefit from the lessons learned by others and identify pitfalls to avoid
• Develop well-supported arguments on how to get your organization to improve its IT operations
• Work smarter while under tighter constraints
• Put your IT concerns in a business context

But don't just take our word for it:

A great publication! Top writers writing about problems that IT managers have to deal with in a practical way. It's uncanny just how frequently the next issue has as its theme a problem I'm facing at the time!

— John Whiteing, Principal Information Consultant, Comalco Aluminum Ltd., George Town, Australia

I received a renewal notice after reading the Cutter IT Journal issue on the changing role of the CIO. The information was a just-in-time inspiration for our IT strategy exercise. CITJ provides such useful information and is such a great resource, how could I not renew?

— Bonnie Cooper PMP, IT Program Director, Massachusetts Medical Society

As a subscriber, you also receive the weekly Cutter IT Advisor -- an email bulletin delivered straight to your inbox. Each issue offers expert advice on hot-button issues such as IT leadership, cloud computing, risk management, organizational change, devops, enterprise architecture, agile project management, and more -- in a concise, easy-to-read format.

Gain cutting-edge and thoughtful debate on the complex issues around software development, project management, and IT management in the new global environment. Don't miss CITJ's upcoming issues.

Become a Cutter IT Journal subscriber today!

Subscriptions delivered outside of North America include a $100 shipping fee. CITJ is published 12 times a year.

For details on digital subscriptions, contact us at sales@cutter.com or call +1 (781) 648-8700.

• Gain global perspectives and solutions to today's most critical business-technology issues
• Ensure your IT organization's success in a volatile economic climate
• Benefit from the lessons learned by others and identify pitfalls to avoid
• Develop well-supported arguments on how to get your organization to improve its IT operations
• Work smarter while under tighter constraints
• Put your IT concerns in a business context

Renew your CITJ subscription today and receive your free report!

Renew now and you'll immediately receive a PDF copy of the report "What Is a Complex Project Manager -- Really?" by Robert Wysocki -- a US $150 value! Explore the traits of a complex project manager, what disciplines should be present in his or her skills profile, where these professionals come from, and how to develop a cadre of such professionals.

Even if you recently renewed, you can extend your subscription today and receive this valuable report. Plus, you'll avoid any impending price increases over the coming year. What's more, you'll receive upcoming issues on the complex topics surrounding software development, project management, and IT management in the new global environment.

Renew now to take advantage of this special offer. Extend your subscription today!

Subscriptions delivered outside of North America include a $100 shipping fee. CITJ is published 12 times a year.

CITJ is unique in that it is written by IT professionals, not journalists. You get frank, honest accounts of what's working and what isn't -- from practitioners who are under the same pressures you are to get the job done. Each issue is devoted to a current IT topic and includes a thought-provoking introduction by a leading expert, followed by 5 or 6 in-depth articles that feature debate, case studies, research findings, and experience-based opinion. No other journal brings together so many cutting-edge thinkers, and lets them speak so bluntly on critical issues.

Cutter IT Journal will help you:

• Gain global perspectives and solutions to today's most critical business-technology issues
• Ensure your IT organization's success in a volatile economic climate
• Benefit from the lessons learned by others and identify pitfalls to avoid
• Develop well-supported arguments on how to get your organization to improve its IT operations
• Work smarter while under tighter constraints
• Put your IT concerns in a business context

But don't just take our word for it:

A great publication! Top writers writing about problems that IT managers have to deal with in a practical way. It's uncanny just how frequently the next issue has as its theme a problem I'm facing at the time!

— John Whiteing, Principal Information Consultant, Comalco Aluminum Ltd., George Town, Australia

I received a renewal notice after reading the Cutter IT Journal issue on the changing role of the CIO. The information was a just-in-time inspiration for our IT strategy exercise. CITJ provides such useful information and is such a great resource, how could I not renew?

— Bonnie Cooper PMP, IT Program Director, Massachusetts Medical Society

As a subscriber, you also receive the weekly Cutter IT Advisor -- an email bulletin delivered straight to your inbox. Each issue offers expert advice on hot-button issues such as IT leadership, cloud computing, risk management, organizational change, devops, enterprise architecture, agile project management, and more -- in a concise, easy-to-read format.

Gain cutting-edge and thoughtful debate on the complex issues around software development, project management, and IT management in the new global environment. Don't miss CITJ's upcoming issues.

Become a Cutter IT Journal subscriber today!

Subscriptions delivered outside of North America include a $100 shipping fee. CITJ is published 12 times a year.

About Cutter IT Journal

Cutter IT Journal brings you frank, honest accounts of what it takes to improve IT performance. CITJ is unique in that it is written by IT professionals -- people like you who face the same challenges and are under the same pressures to get the job done.

Each monthly issue is devoted to a current IT topic -- not issues you were dealing with six months ago, or those that are so esoteric you might not ever need to learn from others' experiences. An expert Guest Editor delivers articles by established IT practitioners, including case studies, research findings, and experience-based opinion. No other journal brings together so many cutting-edge thinkers, and lets them speak so bluntly on critical issues.

As a subscriber, you will also receive between-issue Cutter IT Advisors -- email bulletins delivered straight to your inbox. Each edition offers expert advice on hot-button issues such as IT leadership, cloud computing, risk management, organizational change, adopting agile practices, and more -- in a concise, easy-to-read format.

Upcoming CITJ Issues

About Cutter Benchmark Review

When it comes to many of today's hot IT topics, the hype potential is significant. Cutter Benchmark Review helps you see beyond the hype.

In each quarterly report, editor Dr. Joseph Feller selects an IT topic of current concern and asks two of its foremost experts -- a distinguished academic and a practitioner in the field -- to frame the issue for you, explain how it relates to other trends, address the pressures and interests surrounding it, and provide a framework to help you make sense of the topic as it applies to your organization. These experts, often aided by the collection of fresh survey data, waste no time diving into solutions and offering real-world advice and recommendations you can immediately put into action at your company.

Upcoming CBR Issues

Subscriptions delivered outside of North America include a $100 shipping fee. Cutter IT Journal is published 12 times a year. Cutter Benchmark Review is published 4 times a year.

For details on digital subscriptions, contact us at sales@cutter.com or call +1 (781) 648-8700.

The report Delivering Business Value Through Collaboration and Teamwork provides the guidance, recommendations and best practices you need to improve team performance, encourage shared ownership of goals, and transform your team into one that delivers consistent, value-added business solutions. You’ll learn -- from the perspective of agile IT leaders -- how to best engage your team using a blend of agile and collaborative practices. And you’ll be provided with tools to help you ensure allegiance and top performance from the new model of ad hoc and virtual teams.

This report will help you:

• Foster a culture of synergy and loyalty among your team members
• Identify the top predictors of team success
• Hire technical people who will successfully integrate with your team
• Avoid the three workplace trends that can sabotage teamwork -- matrixing, multiplexing, and distributing
• Use specific metrics to quantify and predict team performance
• Build a sense of shared values and behaviors to meet common goals
• Transform cowboy coders into teammates
• Employ three proven practices to successfully lead virtual teams
• Understand teamwork differences in agile and plan-based companies
• Make changes at the systems level to support team performance
• Differentiate between high-performing and low-performing knowledge teams

This report also addresses the increased need for specialized technical skills to ensure successful product and system development. You’ll get tools and strategies to help you build more effective and collaborative teams when faced with low organizational loyalty, high turnover, skill specialization, geographically dispersed teams, and increased outsourcing. You’ll also benefit from a quick, step-by-step guide to building a team culture among ad hoc and virtual teams.

Published: November 2005, 162 pages, PDF format

Authors: Steven B. Ambrose, Christopher M. Avery, Steven W. Baker, Michael Begeman, Laurent Bossavit, Martina Ceschi, Tracy C. Gibbons, Jessica Lipnack, Mary Lynn Manns, Robert J. Marshall, Kay Pentecost, Kert Peterson, Linda Rising, Johanna Rothman, Alberto Sillitti, Jeffrey Stamps, Giancarlo Succi, Jean Tabaka, and Rob Thomsett

The Executive Brief Delivering Value with Enterprise Architecture: A Survey of Today's Best Practices and Programs by Cutter EA Practice Director Mike
Rosen provides statistical insight and opinion on the current state of enterprise architecture, its organization and programs, practices used, and the effectiveness of EA, all based on the results of a recent Cutter Consortium survey.

This brief addresses the following questions:

• Is architectural certification important?
• How does the EA work relate to agile methods in today's organizations?
• Who should own/manage business architecture?
• How effective is architectural governance?
• How is the success of EA programs currently being measured?
• What is the relative size of architecture within IT?
• Which of today's hot topics are likely to be part of the target architecture (cloud, SaaS, SOA, BPM, etc.)?

Find out how effective today's EA organizations are in influencing management decisions and identify some of the critical factors for a successful EA effort -- beyond what tools and frameworks you should use.

Order your copy of Delivering Value with Enterprise Architecture: A Survey of Today's Best Practices and Programs delivered in PDF format today!

Published: January 2011, 13 pages, PDF format

Author: Mike Rosen

The Executive Brief Delving into Technical Debt by Chris Sterling and Israel Gat explores the issues your organization should consider when devising a technical debt reduction strategy. You'll gain an excellent "3D" picture of what your technical debt initiative might look like in the context of your own business imperatives and predicaments.

This Executive Brief will help you:

• Identify the three main areas for improvement typically found in technical debt analyses and interviews.
• Discover specific processes and techniques that will aid existing and future development efforts, such as Sonar visibility, and Sonar .NET plug-in implementation.
• See the potential opportunities that arise from a technical debt assessment, such as reuse of existing C++ code and incremental builds of deployment packages.
• Implement strategic techniques that will help your teams take more responsibility for managing the build configurations with automated downstream checks.
• Being creating a sound technical debt strategy

Order your copy of Delving into Technical Debt today!

Published: October 2011, 10 pages, PDF format

Authors: Israel Gat and Chris Sterling

Online resource center clients: Access this brief online

Achieving balance between supply and consumption requires us to get a better handle on business demand for IT -- especially when demand for resources outstrips available budgets.

Compounding the problem is that too often, projects are greenlighted based on narrow business cases, bypassing the business strategy or the overall project portfolio.

In the report Demand Management: The New Imperative for Business Analysis, Paul Allen considers how business analysis can successfully raise its game to help understand and manage demand -- achieving an ongoing dialogue between IT and its customers at all levels.

In our annual predictions roundup, several Cutter experts foretold a higher profile for business analysis in 2011 and beyond.

• "The professionals who optimize strategic technology will have wide and deep expertise in business process modeling (BPM), business analysis ... among all things business." --Steve Andriole




• "Let's get some business thinking and system thinking into the mix, and stop concentrating on the software alone." --James Robertson




• "... there will be tremendous importance to formalizing the profession of Business Analysis." -- Bhuvan Unhelkar




• "Expect the cultural balance to shift ... toward much more critical, more innovative and collaborative business analysis." --Paul Allen

The trick is less about shiny new methods than about how to apply existing ones innovatively and in fresh combinations to throw light on demand management issues. The report provides astute observations and practical suggestions on how to breathe new life into your analysis techniques. Order your copy of Demand Management: The New Imperative for Business Analysis today!

Published: August 2010, 19 pages, PDF format

Author: Paul Allen

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

When data is properly maintained, cleansed, and stored in an efficient and consistent manner, it can provide key information that will assist in short-term tactical and long-term strategic decisions -- without fear that the underlying information is erroneous.

The report Developing a Master Data Management Strategy helps your organization implement a master data management (MDM) solution that delivers a consistent set of information across all operational and reporting systems in your enterprise. You’ll learn how to make a business case for MDM, what to look for in an MDM solution, and how to better define your MDM requirements.

This report will help you:

• Create an MDM master repository that is clean, labeled, and protected from accidental overwriting
• Reduce duplicate data entry, force commonality of codes, and impose better control of business processes
• Select an MDM tool that imposes the least intrusion on your organizational infrastructure
• Conduct a proof of concept to better determine MDM vendor offerings
• Ensure your MDM solution supports the different data formats required to transport data across your enterprise
• Meet the needs of BI toolkits that require refined data for the complex models in their applications

You’ll learn what enterprise data types are a good fit for an MDM solution,
the profound impact that search technology is having on the MDM world, and what mistakes to avoid when choosing an MDM vendor, such as conducting a proof of concept with a scope that is too large and complex.

You’ll explore the four MDM application layers -- end user application layer, system integration layer, business integration layer, data management layer -- and the specific tasks for each of the five project phases in each layer. And you’ll discuss a number of MDM technology enablers, such as the cost per byte of data storage, the speed of data retrieval, and grid computing.

This report also reviews three case studies detailing how these enterprises use an MDM solution to solve their critical business problems, and offers four recommendations to consider when building a business case for an enterprise MDM solution.

Published: June 2007, 90 pages, PDF format

Authors: Steve Andriole, Greg Mancuso, Al Moreno, Ken Orr

The report Developing a Practical Enterprise Architecture Curriculum by Cutter Fellow Ken Orr provides a framework for creating a core EA training curriculum that is the basis for building a world-class EA group. You get guidance on creating a down-to-earth training program that results in a team of people with all the requisite skills needed to introduce, manage and operate a state-of-the-art EA program, and provide real value to your enterprise.

This report will help you:

• Move from a general EA framework to a specific EA approach.
• Gain a view of EA that extends beyond the basic Zachman Framework.
• Define what skills you need in an EA group.
• Create a training program with reasonable metrics and performance measures.
• Train 7 major categories of people in EA: user management, users and/or subject matter experts, business analysts, enterprise architects, IT management, developers, and database administrators.
• Build a flexible EA group by defining roles, not jobs.
• Apply metaphors from urban planning for insight on the roles within EA groups.
• Teach basic EA concepts in a predetermined order -- so that you can better prepare employees to tackle complex issues.
• Bring together a team of people who can leverage each other's skills.
• Recruit architects that are able to conceptualize, communicate, design and model, are self-starters, and are persistent.

This report outlines the following 8 EA training classes:

1. An Overview of EA -- gets the basic ideas of your EA program across to the widest possible audience.
2. EA Methods and Approaches -- discusses the major EA frameworks in the marketplace.
3. Being an Enterprise Architect -- reveals the personalities and skills you need to recruit for your EA group.
4. Business Architecture Modeling -- addresses strategic intentions, business context, business value chains and business processes.
5. Data Architecture Modeling -- provides tools and techniques for understanding your enterprise's data at the highest level.
6. Application Architecture Modeling -- develops a long-term "product planning" view of your EA, including all your major applications.
7. Technology Architecture Modeling -- promotes understanding of all the technologies, including hardware, software, and communications components.
8. Managing EA -- helps you build an EA organization, establish relationships with
   the business, and build the actual enterprise architecture -- all at the same time.

This report will help you recognize talent and interest throughout your organization, match them up with your enterprise's needs, and then hire/train employees to fill the gaps. And it will show you how to practice "experimental management" of EA as an emerging discipline, allowing you to move from training, to trying, to learning, and evolving.

Published: February 2006, 25 pages, PDF format

Author: Ken Orr

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The report Developing Viable ROI Solutions to Justify New IT Infrastructure Projects by Cutter Senior Consultant Dave Higgins provides you with the tools you need to cost-justify large IT infrastructure projects. You'll find ways to discover the business value in a potential project, and learn the methods you can use to convey those value statements to financial decision makers.

The methods described in this report are designed for use by technologists to convey business value to business and financial stakeholders. You won't become a finance guru -- but you will learn to increase your odds of getting the business to approve needed infrastructure improvements.

This report will help you:

• Identify 17 hard-dollar benefits of new projects, and the only right way to present them.

• Develop project justifications that convince stakeholders on multiple dimensions.

• Examine why soft-dollar savings such as productivity gains don't always strengthen your case (and could result in everyone just working harder!)

• Identify the "as is" and "to be" costs to be included in the case.

• Figure out when and why net present value (NPV) matters -- and when it doesn't.

• Understand the three keys to developing "credible" numbers for your case.

Plus, you'll learn why even though it's the least credible benefit, most people lead with increased revenue. And you'll gain practical advice on organizing and presenting the business case, including what you should plan to leave behind when it's done. Finally, you'll determine when it's appropriate to present a benefit study rather than a full-blown ROI study or business case.

Address all the factors that will get your IT infrastructure project approved. Order your copy of Developing Viable ROI Solutions to Justify New IT Infrastructure Projects today!

Published: December 2009, 15 pages, PDF format (989KB)

Author: Dave Higgins

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Table of Contents:

• Opening Statement by Patrick Debois
• Why Enterprises Must Adopt Devops to Enable Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and Joanne Molesky
• Devops at Advance Internet: How We Got in the Door by Eric Shamow
• The Business Case for Devops: A Five-Year Retrospective by Lawrence Fitzpatrick and Michael Dillon
• Next-Generation Process Integration: CMMI and ITIL Do Devops by Bill Phifer
• Devops: So You Say You Want a Revolution? by Dominica DeGrandis

Published: August 2011, 40 pages, PDF format

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Council Opinions are prepared by the Cutter Business Technology Council and include the commentary of each Council Fellow and the logic behind his or her concurring or dissenting opinion, as well as the strategic implications of the trend.

Published: March 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Authors: Christine Davis, Tim Lister, Robert Scott, Ron Blitstein, Lynne Ellynl

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The intent of this Executive Report by Amr Elssamadisy is to describe different document categories, how they directly affect the success of software development teams, and how to start using new document types effectively.

Published: February 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Amr Elssamadisy

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Published: November 2010, 40 pages, PDF format

Authors: Mitchell Ummel, Macedonio Alani, Steven Baker, David Wyld, Doug Hadden, Pablo Lera, Mabel Ciancio, and Jorge Ronchese

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

On the academic side is Aurelio Ravarini, Senior Assistant Professor of IS at Università Carlo Cattaneo (LIUC, Italy) and Director with LIUC's CETIC, Research Center on Information Systems. Many of you will recall Aurelio as a past contributor to CBR; he was our academic expert on the issues on content management systems (Vol. 6, No. 4) and software as a service (Vol. 9, No. 4 ). Our practitioner author is Gianni Maria Strada, a former HR executive of several US corporations and current Managing Partner of PeoplePoint, a boutique HR consulting firm focused on major organizational change processes. Both contributors have considerable experience with the organizational implementation of software applications and their consequential organizational change processes.

Published: May 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Authors: Gabriele Piccoli, Aurelio Ravarini, Gianni Maria Strada

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The new report EA as an Organizational Capability: Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling by Paul Allen examines the critical success factors required for transition to a new model for EA. You'll learn how to integrate the EA function within the broader picture of demand management, software delivery, IT service management, governance, and external providers; communicate the vision and purpose of EA using accessible graphical techniques such as iconic maps; and avoid the bureaucracy that can sometimes be a part of EA.

You'll explore why so many firms that have embraced EA at an IT level have failed to break through what seems to be an intangible but very real obstacle: the glass ceiling that has proved to be a barrier to the realization of true business benefits. And you'll gain strategies for overcoming four key EA challenges that will help you break through this glass ceiling:

1. Articulating the value proposition

2. Dealing with organizational context

3. Communicating abstract and complex ideas in a simple, effective way

4. Measuring the value of EA as an organizational capability and achieving business outcomes

Ensure your EA program achieves solid business outcomes that cement its place in the business plans.

Published: March 2010, 19 pages, PDF format

Author: Paul Allen

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

In this Executive Report by Claude R. Baudoin, we look at the state of EA today, including the frameworks that have evolved in the last few years, the challenge of business-IT alignment, business process management (BPM) and master data management (MDM), and technologies such as service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud computing. We also examine the governance and maturity of an EA program and conclude with new trends and challenges for the next decade and beyond.

Published: January 2010, 28 pages, PDF format

Author: Claude R. Baudoin

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Table of Contents:

• Opening Statement
• Devops and the People Who Practice It: Winning Their Hearts and Minds
• Where is IT Operations Within Devops?
• Disciplined Agile Delivery and Collaborative Devops
• Metrics-Driven Devops
• Reducing Software Release Pain by Releasing More Often

Published: December 2011, 36 pages, PDF format

Authors: Patrick Debois, Ernest Mueller, Bill Keyworth, Scott Ambler, Alex LeQuoc, Kief Morris

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

There is a growing consensus that today's organizations have an obligation to take reasonable security measures to protect personally identifiable information. The increasing number of security and privacy incidents -- accompanied by expanding fines, penalties, and civil actions -- emphasize the need for information security and privacy programs that effectively safeguard personal data. Has your organization done all it can do to reduce the risk of a security incident or privacy breach?

The new report Ending Security and Privacy Leaks edited by Cutter Senior Consultant Rebecca Herold -- one of Computerworld's "Best Privacy Advisers" of 2008 -- offers expert advice and recommendations that will help your organization create an effective information security and privacy program. You'll get the tools you need to raise the risk-intelligence level of everyone in your company, helping you transform your organization into a privacy-conscious one.

This report will help you:

• Assist business management in understanding and taking ownership of security and privacy issues
• Understand and comply with existing privacy breach notice laws both in the United States and throughout the world
• Overcome the weakest link in information security and privacy assurance -- your own people
• Address the issue of vendor responsibility in the chain of data privacy
• Provide effective, targeted information security and privacy training to your employees, coupled with ongoing awareness communications
• Adopt secure work practices and gain budgetary approvals for security tools, enterprise policies and special information security and privacy initiatives
• Consider whether or not your organization should use managed security services providers to monitor your IT infrastructure
• Avoid wrongful termination lawsuits from disgruntled employees who have engaged in the unauthorized use of your business communications systems

You'll take a look at some real-world costly security and privacy breaches that could likely have been prevented, and you'll discuss more effective ways to motivate your employees and your contractors to support your privacy goals through the use of creative incentives.

This report also reviews the 14 mistakes organizations consistently make that render training and awareness programs ineffective and often even detrimental to information security and privacy efforts and it provides a list of 9 questions your organization should ask itself to help you determine the amount of training your organization needs to provide its business partners.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Convergence of Information Security, Privacy, and Compliance by Rebecca Herold.

Chapter 1: Cautionary Tales About Information Security, Privacy, and Compliance -- From the Archives of McCarter & English, LLP by William Zucker, with William Heller, Scott Christie, and John McKelway. Hear four (often rollicking) stories about the costly information security, privacy, and compliance mistakes real-world firms have made.

Chapter 2: All Together Now -- Converging to Build Information Security and Privacy Awareness by Ilene Switalski Klein. Receive proven strategies for creating an effective and thoroughgoing security awareness program.

Chapter 3: Driving the Point Home -- Using Privacy Dashboards to Implement Secure Work Practices by Nandita Jain Mahajan. Gain sage advice on incident reporting, remediation, and prevention.

Chapter 4: Advancing Security and Privacy Through Collaborative Risk Management by Ron Woerner. Discover how collaborative risk management can bring the right groups together to find your organization's privacy and security "sweet spot".

Chapter 5: Identity 3D3C: Confronting the Security and Privacy Challenges in Virtual Worlds by Yesha Sivan. Explore the security and privacy risks that virtual worlds present and discover a systemic approach to "identify" as a means of addressing them.

Chapter 6: Getting Their Act Together -- A Retailer Takes a Cross-Organizational Approach to Information Security and Privacy Compliance by Graydon McKee. Learn how a midsized online retailer, still reeling from lawsuits and a highly public data breach, righted its course by implementing a formal risk management program.

Chapter 7: From Sticks to Carrots -- Creating Business Incentives for Security and Privacy Programs by Lee Imrey. Gain ways to motivate business leaders and the rank and file to support your security and privacy goals through the use of creative incentives.

Chapter 8: Security and Privacy Convergence -- A Global Governance Perspective by Richard Baskerville and Ed McPherson. Explore a host of ways companies can engage outside resources -- professional societies, universities, law enforcement agencies, and others -- to further your security and privacy governance goals with little additional organizational investment.

Chapter 9: Securing the Information Border -- An SDLC Approach to Security and Privacy Protection by Stacey Banks. Discover a six-step process for ensuring that each of your organization's systems is protected according to the needs of the information housed within.

Chapter 10: In Search of Low-Hanging Fruit: Improving Security and Privacy with Penetration Testing by Bryan Miller. Hear from a professional penetration tester, who will tell you why it's in your best interests to have someone like him break into your network.

Chapter 11: Heightening Information Security Along with Privacy Training and Awareness by Rebecca Herold. Learn how to create a more effective information security and privacy defense by building a culture of employee awareness.

Published: October 2009, 170 pages, PDF format

Authors: Stacey Banks, Richard Baskerville, Scott S. Christie, William J. Heller, Rebecca Herold, Lee Imrey, Ilene Switalski Klein, Nandita Jain Mahajan, Graydon McKee, Ed McPherson, John M. McKelway, Jr., Bryan Miller, Yesha Sivan, Ron Woerner, and William A. Zucker

In Enterprise 3.0: How IT's All Going to Change, Andriole explores how current trends in information technology are influencing the future of business technology management. The report begins by reviewing the latest state of the IT world -- the rise of open source software, the importance of business process modeling, the growing role of business intelligence, the emergence of cloud computing, the benefits of digital mobility. It then considers how these IT trends are combining to define our business technology future, or what Andriole calls "Enterprise 3.0".

This report identifies some of the specific changes you can expect in business technology management -- the diminishing role of the CIO, the movement of strategic technology to the business units responsible for profit and loss, the emergence of new mashup development environments, the increasing use of thin clients -- and the general effect that all of these changes will have on business technology and its relationship to business models, processes, and outcomes.

You'll consider the following seven questions:

1. Where will software come from?
2. What devices will we use?
3. What becomes of "data"?
4. How will Web 2.0, social media, and Web 3.0 be optimized?
5. How will we innovate?
6. How will we acquire technology?
7. How we will organize?

Benefit from Steve Andriole's expert insight so that your firm can optimize current and future trends in IT. Order your copy of Enterprise 3.0: How IT's All Going to Change today!

Published: November 2009, 13 pages, PDF format

Author: Stephen J. Andriole

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Creating a new enterprise architecture (EA) is a time-consuming process that will hopefully align your organization's current and future IT systems so they will support its business strategy and goals. But it's easy to overlook one of the most critical success factors for an enterprise architecture -- the development of an EA program that enables the organizational changes required to introduce an architecture, support it, and demonstrate its true value.

But how are you going to gain support for your new EA program from your organization's battle-hardened skeptics of yet another new technology initiative?

The report Enterprise Architecture Rollout and Training written by Mike Rosen provides you with a rollout strategy, architecture program, and training curriculum that will help you overcome the challenges of introducing an enterprise architecture to your enterprise, your business, and your development organizations.

This report will help you:

• Create a successful EA program that supports your new architecture
• Deliver small parts of the architecture over numerous projects
• Bridge the gap between EA and application development
• Debunk the myth that an enterprise architecture doesn't provide value
• Train internal architects
• Collect metrics on the architecture itself, the EA program, and the development process
• Leverage the roles of application architects
• Establish an EA governance organization
• Avoid the common mistake of too much process
• Choose a pilot project that addresses the technical direction and standards layed out by the enterprise architecture
• Include performance measurements as a specific set of requirements when designing your architecture

You'll discover a straightforward formula for a successful enterprise architecture rollout: start small, empower the users, demonstrate value, incorporate lessons learned, roll out to a larger audience, and repeat. And you'll discuss the responsibilities of the three main organizational groups within an EA program, including the architecture development group, the governance group, and the enablement group.

ACT NOW and order your copy of this report today!

Published: July 2005, 26 pages, PDF format

Author: Mike Rosen

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The report Enterprise BI Architecture Groups: The Key to Effective Agile Data Warehousing Programs by Cutter's Ralph Hughes helps you create an environment where an enterprise data warehouse will naturally emerge from multiple agile data mart development projects. To do this, you'll learn how to evolve the commonplace architecture review board into an EBIA function that can align the deliverables of the agile development teams.

The guidelines in this report will help you:

• Improve the speed and quality of your projects
• Discover the challenges and benefits an EBIA group can offer agile teams
• Deliver your crucial BI applications more efficiently
• Forecast the services and productivity tools you'll need ahead of time
• Persuade your development teams to voluntarily align with corporate warehousing goals
• Gain insight into your organization's collective operations and competitiveness

You'll also be provided with a clear set of methodological patterns, design decisions, and prepopulated data components that an EBIA can offer your project architect that will shave months off prep work and the team's delivery.

And you'll get a suggested 120-day plan for implementing an EBIA function in the average organization as a starting vision for the work, milestones, and funding that an effective enterprise warehouse alignment program will require.

Order this report today!

Published: September 2011, 23 pages, PDF format

Author: Ralph Hughes

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The report Enterprise Integration with the Business Architecture by Ralph Whittle discusses enterprise integration with the BA and in the formal context of an engineering discipline. It describes the BA as a reusable asset that can bring about a "new order of things." Several BA models that illustrate the integration of enterprise components -- the manifestation of an engineering discipline -- support the discussion.

Table of Contents:

• The Business Architecture’s Organizing Principle
• The Business Architecture to BPM Relationship
• Business Architecture Leads to Systems Thinking
• The Business Architecture to Business Intelligence Relationships
• The Business Architecture to Strategy Nexus
• The Business Architecture to IT Architecture Nexus

Integrating the BA throughout the enterprise within an EA framework creates an asset that is used over and over again and improved over time. The BA is changing corporate behavior, creating a new unifying structure, delighting customers, integrating the enterprise, and achieving a competitive advantage.

Published: September 2011, 19 pages, PDF format

Author: Ralph Whittle

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No organization operates in a risk-free environment, and ERM does not create such an environment. The goal of this Executive Report by Ken Doughty is to provide a practical view of ERM and its components in order to gain an understanding of what is required to assist organizations in managing and surviving their risks.

Published: January 2010, 28 pages, PDF format

Author: Ken Doughty

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

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.

Published: February 2010, 28 pages, PDF format

Author: Bhuvan Unhelkar

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Companies dramatically improve service and agility when they focus on the role people, process, organization and culture play in tandem with the technology itself. In fact, according to Cutter Fellow Steve Andriole, "technology and the processes we use to optimize IT are fairly meaningless unless you're surrounded by the right people allowed to do the right things."

In the Executive Brief Finding IT's Strategic Opportunities: What's Next, Dr. Andriole examines the current state of business-technology and brings his expertise (delivered in his inimitable no-holds-barred style) to the concrete steps organizations must take to thrive in the next decade.

In this fast-moving and practical brief, you'll learn:

• The five new risk quotients that you need to manage more aggressively than the ones you're already addressing.
• The best practices truly innovative companies employ, and the questions you need to ask yourself to join their ranks.
• Why business relationship management is a critical skill set for the 21st century, and what it takes to get it right.
• How governance has changed, and what the new requirements mean to you.
• The ten trends that will define IT in 2015, and how they shape technology acquisition, deployment and support processes.

This Brief is designed for those of you who have been in the trenches for a long time, as well as for those who want to jump right into the "advanced course in gonzo technology management".

Find out about the new opportunities you can leverage (as well as the pitfalls to avoid) in setting your IT strategy for the next decade.

Order your copy of Finding IT's Strategic Opportunities: What's Next? delivered in PDF format today!

Published: February 2011, 17 pages, PDF format

Author: Steve Andriole

This Executive Report by Joseph Feller examines a wide variety of ways in which we can engage with crowds and takes a look at the technologies, processes, and other factors that make such engagements possible.

Published: November 2010, 28 pages, PDF format

Author: Joseph Feller

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Council Opinions are prepared by the Cutter Business Technology Council and include the commentary of each Council Fellow and the logic behind his or her concurring or dissenting opinion, as well as the strategic implications of the trend.

Published: June 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Authora: Robert D. Scott, with concurrances and dissents by Tom DeMarco, Lynne Ellyn, Ken Orr, and Richard L. Nolan

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Agile methods have had a huge impact on the software industry by evolving the way we think about software development, and the results are hard to ignore. Now business leaders are looking for ways to reap the benefits of agile principles in whole-organization governance and management. This is difficult without a tangible methodology to make agile principles concrete and accessible.

This Executive Report by Brian Robertson examines the governance aspects of holacracy, which provides a complete and practical system for achieving agility in all aspects of organizational steering and management.

Published: July 2006, 21 pages, PDF format

Author: Brian J. Robertson

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

In this Executive Report by Phil Simon, a case study is utilized to examine these issues at one organization, along with data quality and data governance.

Published: January 2010, 20 pages, PDF format

Author: Phil Simon

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The Cutter Consortium report How to Align the Project Portfolio to the Strategic Plan defines a simple, integrated process for selecting the initial portfolio and maintaining its alignment to the strategic plan using an agile approach.

In this report, you'll discuss the barriers to maintaining portfolio alignment to the strategic plan, you'll gain a four-level architecture for a strategic plan, and you'll discover how to adjust your project management lifecycle (PMLC) models so that they align to a quarterly portfolio review cycle.

Build project portfolios that align with your organization's strategic plan and a process to maintain that alignment. Order your copy of this report today!

Table of Contents:

• Barriers to Maintaining Portfolio Alignment to the Strategic Plan
• A Robust Architecture for a Strategic Plan
• Agile Project Portfolio Process
• Selecting Projects for the APP
• Performance Review Process
• Putting It All Together

Published: October 2011, 13 pages, PDF format

Author: Robert K. Wysocki

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The new Cutter Consortium report How to Settle Your Technical Debt: A Manager's Guide will help you understand what technical debt is and how it can affect both operational and development costs. This report will help you quantify your technical debt through code analysis, put processes in place that make sure you prevent technical debt from growing (without valid business reasons), and weigh the cost of repaying your technical debt versus maintaining the recurring interest and compounding interest that you are paying on it.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Technical Debt -- A New Paradigm for Software Development by Israel Gat.

Chapter 1: Modernizing the DeLorean System -- Comparing Actual and Predicted Results of a Technical Debt Reduction Project by John Heintz. Examine the validity of technical debt techniques and discover a remarkable correlation between actual effort and assessed effort.

Chapter 2: The Economics of Technical Debt by Stephen Chin, Erik Huddleston, Walter Bodwell, and Israel Gat. Gain a framework and tools for understanding, controlling, and communicating the costs and consequences of technical debt in your projects.

Chapter 3: Technical Debt -- Challenging the Metaphor by David Rooney. Be cautioned about the potential to abuse the technical debt metaphor and why this metaphor can lead to "piling garbage upon garbage."

Chapter 4: Manage Project Portfolios More Effectively by Including Software Debt in the Decision Process by Brent Barton and Chris Sterling. Discover how technical debt techniques can be applied at the portfolio level and how to use the software debt dashboard to enhance the decision-making process.

Chapter 5: The Risks of Acceptance Test Debt by Ken Pugh. Extend the technical debt concept to acceptance tests and explore the potential use of statistical process control techniques not only within respect to Intrinsic Quality, but with respect to Extrinsic Quality.

Chapter 6: Transformation Patterns for Curing the Human Causes of Technical Debt by Jonathon Michael Golden. Examine the root causes of technical debt at two levels -- individual and institutional, and learn why an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Chapter 7: Infrastructure Debt -- Revisiting the Foundation by Andrew Clay Shafer. Differentiate between the manifestation of technical debt in development versus its manifestation in "devops."

Chapter 8: Revolution in Software -- Using Technical Debt Techniques to Govern the Software Development Process by Israel Gat. Learn how to tie software quality to cost and value through a common denominator: the dollar.

Chapter 9: Technical Debt Assessment -- A Case of Simultaneous Improvements at Three Levels by Israel Gat. Gain a first-hand account of what happened when a leading software firm asked Cutter Consortium to conduct a Technical Debt Assessment and Valuation just as this organization was about to release ~200K lines of Java code.

Chapter 10: Avoiding System Bankruptcy -- How to Pay Off Your Technical Debt by Amir Kolsky. Explore the cause of technical debt and the various forms such debt can take, including design-related debt, testing-related debt, defect-related debt, and organizational and administrative-related debt.

Published: November 22, 2010, 146 pages, PDF format

Authors: Brent Barton, Walter Bodwell, Stephen Chin, Israel Gat, Jonathon Michael Golden, John Heintz, Erik Huddleston, Amir Kolsky, Ken Pugh, Dave Rooney, Andrew Clay Shafer, and Chris Sterling

The new Cutter Consortium report How to Settle Your Technical Debt: A Manager's Guide will help you understand what technical debt is and how it can affect both operational and development costs. This report will help you quantify your technical debt through code analysis, put processes in place that make sure you prevent technical debt from growing (without valid business reasons), and weigh the cost of repaying your technical debt versus maintaining the recurring interest and compounding interest that you are paying on it.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Technical Debt -- A New Paradigm for Software Development by Israel Gat.

Chapter 1: Modernizing the DeLorean System -- Comparing Actual and Predicted Results of a Technical Debt Reduction Project by John Heintz. Examine the validity of technical debt techniques and discover a remarkable correlation between actual effort and assessed effort.

Chapter 2: The Economics of Technical Debt by Stephen Chin, Erik Huddleston, Walter Bodwell, and Israel Gat. Gain a framework and tools for understanding, controlling, and communicating the costs and consequences of technical debt in your projects.

Chapter 3: Technical Debt -- Challenging the Metaphor by David Rooney. Be cautioned about the potential to abuse the technical debt metaphor and why this metaphor can lead to "piling garbage upon garbage."

Chapter 4: Manage Project Portfolios More Effectively by Including Software Debt in the Decision Process by Brent Barton and Chris Sterling. Discover how technical debt techniques can be applied at the portfolio level and how to use the software debt dashboard to enhance the decision-making process.

Chapter 5: The Risks of Acceptance Test Debt by Ken Pugh. Extend the technical debt concept to acceptance tests and explore the potential use of statistical process control techniques not only within respect to Intrinsic Quality, but with respect to Extrinsic Quality.

Chapter 6: Transformation Patterns for Curing the Human Causes of Technical Debt by Jonathon Michael Golden. Examine the root causes of technical debt at two levels -- individual and institutional, and learn why an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Chapter 7: Infrastructure Debt -- Revisiting the Foundation by Andrew Clay Shafer. Differentiate between the manifestation of technical debt in development versus its manifestation in "devops."

Chapter 8: Revolution in Software -- Using Technical Debt Techniques to Govern the Software Development Process by Israel Gat. Learn how to tie software quality to cost and value through a common denominator: the dollar.

Chapter 9: Technical Debt Assessment -- A Case of Simultaneous Improvements at Three Levels by Israel Gat. Gain a first-hand account of what happened when a leading software firm asked Cutter Consortium to conduct a Technical Debt Assessment and Valuation just as this organization was about to release ~200K lines of Java code.

Chapter 10: Avoiding System Bankruptcy -- How to Pay Off Your Technical Debt by Amir Kolsky. Explore the cause of technical debt and the various forms such debt can take, including design-related debt, testing-related debt, defect-related debt, and organizational and administrative-related debt.

Published: November 22, 2010, 146 pages delivered in print, by post

Authors: Brent Barton, Walter Bodwell, Stephen Chin, Israel Gat, Jonathon Michael Golden, John Heintz, Erik Huddleston, Amir Kolsky, Ken Pugh, Dave Rooney, Andrew Clay Shafer, and Chris Sterling

In this webinar (live recorded), Dr. Israel Gat introduces the Cutter Technical Debt Framework and demonstrates how it enables an organization to move onward and upward from assessing technical debt to reducing it and preventing its propagation. The framework ties the measurement of technical debt to the fabric of the software process at six levels:

1. Technical Practices
2. Iteration Management
3. Project Management
4. Release Management
5. Product Planning
6. Portfolio Governance

By so doing, the framework ensures sustainability of the technical debt initiative.

Dr. Gat also describes the experiences of real-world organizations that have already applied the framework and the insights they have gained. Special emphasis is put on the critical success factors for making a technical debt initiative work for an organization, its partners, and its customers.

Recorded: June 2011

Presenter: Israel Gat

Online resource center clients: Access this webinar online

The report Implementing Organizational Change for Agile Development by Brian J. Dooley provides advice and guidance on how to leverage existing organizational change processes to help you successfully implement agile practices at the enterprise level. You'll gain tips on how to obtain top-level support, develop your change team, create a vision, motivate change, and revise and sustain the effort.

This report will help you:

• Utilize standard change management practices to assist your agile implementation effort.

• Bring change resistance out into the open and address it immediately.

• Understand the impact that agile methods will have on your development environment, including what it means for development managers, developers, quality assurance and testing personnel, and subject matter experts.

• Benefit from techniques that have already been developed at other firms to address the challenges of their agile implementation.

• Overcome senior management's fear of measuring project success based on satisfactorily delivered code, rather than on reaching established project objectives.

• Consider the advantages and limitations of an incremental approach to agile adoption versus an all-at-once, "big bang" approach

• Use SMART goals to achieve organizational change: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound

This report includes two real-world case studies: a large-scale, all-at-once agile implementation at Salesforce.com; and a large-scale incremental agile initiative at BMC Software.

Plus, you'll receive 7 questions your organization should ask itself to help create a clear vision of the change required for agile adoption. And you'll gain strategies for addressing four different attitudes toward organizational change: 1) opponents 2) promoters 3) hidden opponents, and 4) potential promoters.

Ensure your agile implementation is successful by applying the lessons learned from previous organizational change projects. Order your copy of Implementing Organizational Change for Agile Development today!

Published: November 2009, 14 pages, PDF format (970KB)

Author: Brian J. Dooley

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

This Executive Report provides an alternative for improvement that involves three areas: (1) lean-agile thinking, (2) the system of profound knowledge, and (3) systems thinking. Their application results in more effective improvements -- not only in software development or IT but in diverse management practices as well.

Published: March 2011, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Masa K Maeda

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

It's no secret that these are tough times. Yet the need to develop new products, solve tough R&D problems, creatively improve customer service and reengineer business processes has never been greater.

The tension between spending money to innovate and improve and the absolute requirement to cut costs to survive and remain competitive is electric.

This brief looks at 5 ways to accelerate affordable innovation:

1. BPM initiatives that are neither time-consuming nor expensive.
2. Expanding your team (without expanding your team).
3. Create metrics that motivate the troops to innovate.
4. Leverage social media as poor man's marketing, customer service and innovation.
5. Using talent development as a "force multiplier."

Plus, you'll benefit from Steve's 5-pronged approach to setting parameters for your innovation programs: incentives, governance, funding, initiatives and assessment.

Find out how you can take advantage of relatively low-cost, low-risk innovation investments that can pay off in high-impact opportunities. Order your copy of Innovation Under the Radar: Fast, Cheap and High Impact by Cutter Fellow Steve Andriole today. Place your order now, and receive your copy immediately!

Published: 2010, 6 pages, PDF format (363 K)

Author: Stephen J. Andriole

In a world some people call "hypercompetitive" -- with little time to rest on one's laurels -- it is increasingly difficult to achieve sustainable competitive advantage without world-class, integrated business processes. But getting from today's inefficient and fragmented processes to tomorrow's integrated and well-defined business processes involves a fair amount of chaos and pain.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Business Process Modeling Fundamentals by Ken Orr. Discover the key concepts and strategies involved in business process innovation; explore the major threads of business process thinking and the diagrams/tools used in modeling; and get tips for avoiding business process (re)modeling failure.

Chapter 2: Integrating BPM and SOA: The Emerging Role of OMG and MDA by Michael K. Guttman and John H. Parodi. Leverage the Object Management Group's Model Driven Architecture (MDA) to help unify BPM and SOA. Understand how the BPM, SOA, and MDA paradigms are likely to converge in the near future and where and when to step into that process.

Chapter 3: The Key to SOA Governance: Understanding the Essence of Business by Keith Swenson. Learn how to combine BPM and Enterprise Service Bus to create processes that can easily be deployed by IT while leveraging your existing systems and infrastructure without significant rework.

Chapter 4: Business Process Management: A Broken Promise or the Building Blocks of Modern Enterprise Architecture? Introduction by Bartosz Kiepuszewski

Sections:

• Enterprise Architecture: Business Process Management, SOA and MDSD by Michael Hartges, Dirk Krafzig, Michael Kunz, Florian Mösch, Dirk Slama, and Thomas Stahl. Discover how business process management supports T-Mobile in its efforts to innovate by rethinking and simplifying processes.
• Adaptive Process Management Architecture: Enabling Enterprise Innovation by Borys Stokalski and Marcin Strozanski. Explore the four key capabilities that constitute the adaptive process automation frameworks and how to partner SOA with business rules to enable enterprise innovation.
• Is Business Process Management Ready for Prime Time? Lessons from a Proof of Concept by Olivier Brousseau. Hear how Schlumberger, a multimillion-dollar oilfield services company, put six vendors of business process management suites through their paces -- and found them all wanting.
• Business Process Management: Defining the Basics for Success by Mark Fung-A-Fat. Learn how the Massachusetts Medical Society successfully implemented a business process management strategy to manage processes as diverse as its online e-commerce business flows to its time-off request process.
• All That Glitters Is Not Gold: Selecting the Right Tool for Your Business Process Management Needs by Nick Russell, Wil M.P. van der Aalst, and Arthur H.M. ter Hofstede. Discover how to use workflow patterns to benchmark the capabilities of business process management technology offerings to select the tool that's best for your organization.

Chapter 5: Business Modeling and Analytics by Brian J. Dooley. Sidestep the confusion created by modeling convergence, as process models are merged with models created to chart data for software development and again with analytic models used to predict outcomes of processes under a given set of conditions.

This report will also provide you with six evaluation criteria to assess the strengths and weaknesses of business process management suite vendors, and help you avoid falling into the trap of thinking there is only one right business process solution.

Finally, you'll explore common business process management misconceptions, and get steps that will lead you toward success, including better understanding your business imperatives before choosing a business process management solution, identifying mandatory and desired capabilities, establishing satisfaction criteria, benchmarking potential solutions, and choosing the right tool for your organization.

Authors: Olivier Brousseau, Brian J. Dooley, Mark Fung-A-Fat, Michael K. Guttman, Michael Hartges, Arthur H.M. ter Hofstede, Bartosz Kiepuszewski, Dirk Krafzig, Michael Kunz, Florian Mösch, Ken Orr, John H. Parodi, Nick Russell, Dirk Slama, Thomas Stahl, Borys Stokalski, Marcin Strózanski, Keith Swenson, and Wil M.P. van der Aalst

Published: December 2007, 170 pages, PDF format

The report Is Agile Shortchanging the Business? by James Robertson and Suzanne Robertson explores why a growing number of organizations are concerned about business value and worry that the software they take delivery of is not fully exploiting the potential value.

Table of Contents:

• The Work
• Ownership
• Agile Techniques
• Business Needs
• Business Value
• Product Owner
• Understanding the Business
• User Stories as Requirements
• Systemic Thinking
• Introducing Business Stories
• Nonfunctional Needs
• Continuous Value Analysis
• Innovation
• Maximizing Business Value
• Recommended Reading

Make sure the connection between your development teams and the business is strong. Order your copy of this report today!

Published: November 2011, 15 pages, PDF format

Authors: James Robertson and Suzanne Robertson

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Because we have been able to keep our team of experts intact and to maintain the core set of survey questions we ask of the respondents, we have learned quite a bit about the manner in which modern organizations react (and should react) to these kinds of events. We have learned, for example that the knee-jerk reaction typical of past crises whereby the firm would slash IT budgets seeking to "trim the fat" and "reduce overhead" wasn't exactly the case. In last year's survey, we found that "while organizations are indeed cutting projects and limiting their exposure by reducing investments in IT, they are also limiting reductions in the IT shop as much as possible knowing that IT assets and knowledge lost during a downturn cannot be readily rebuilt and scaled once the economy turns. As a consequence, the shape that this downturn has been taking for IT and IT professionals is likely different than the historical pattern of deep cost-cutting measures."

Published: July 2010, 36 pages, PDF format

Authors: Gabriele Piccoli, Dennis A. Adams, Robert J. Benson

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As you know if you have been following CBR, at the beginning of every year we ask our practicing and academic contributors to take stock of current trends. Based on our benchmarking survey of investment priorities, we ask them to explain the results and extrapolate some guidelines for our readers on how to tackle the new year in the IT shop.

Published: January 2010, 32 pages, PDF format

Authors: Gabriele Piccoli, Dennis A. Adams, Mike Sisco

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

As usual, we have enlisted the help of a pair of top-notch experts to assist with interpreting the results of our survey and provide us with answers to these crucial questions. They analyze and predict the trends that are likely to surface in 2011 and discuss past years' highs and lows in technology development and use, paying particular attention to our most recent past. Our academic contributor is Dennis Adams, Associate Professor in the Decision and Information Sciences Department at the University of Houston (USA). Providing our view from the business side of the table is Mike Sisco, a Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium's Enterprise Risk Management & Governance and Business-IT Strategies practices. Mike’s real-world experience and practical guidance offer us much to think about.

Our contributors offer you insight into both emerging and receding IT trends that you either have considered or most likely will consider in the coming months, including green technology, cloud computing, business intelligence, innovation, new tools, outsourcing, hiring and staffing. And you’ll get a solid set of guidelines and suggestions to consider this year.

Published: February 2011, 28 pages, PDF format

Authors: Gabriele Piccoli, Editor; Dennis A. Adams; Mike Sisco

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The IT industry as a whole, and its professionals can improve the lives of billions of people at the bottom of the pyramid and thereby gain significant benefits. The articles presented here help create an awareness of what has been done and what can be, and should be, done. Guest Editor San Murugesan invites you to share your thoughts on and experiences in putting IT to real work in emerging markets for the benefit of one and all.

Published: July 2010, 36 pages, PDF format

Authors: San Murugesan, David Croslin, Radhika Jain, Chaka Chaka, Sherif Kamel, Hao Zhao, Sead Muftic, and Feng Zhang

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Will it be an improvement over the processes we currently have in place? Will the time, energy, and resources that we invest now in implementing it prove worthwhile in the long run? These are all questions each of us as IT and business professionals must consider as we make decisions to move our organizations forward. Keeping operations humming along in the face of change and (sometimes) major budget crunches and keeping business practices current and in line with industry practices and technology progress are perhaps the greatest ongoing challenges we face. In this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review, we discuss one of the most recent methodologies to enter the spectrum of possible choices for systems development: Kanban.

Published: September 2010, 28 pages, PDF format

Authors: Gabriele Piccoli, Laurie Williams, Masa K. Maeda

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Knowledge synchronization is a crucial aspect of knowledge management (KM) that bridges the gap between the tacit, subjective knowledge stored in people's heads and the explicit, objective knowledge stored within the organization's IT systems. This Executive Report lays out the four specific characteristics of mobility -- location independence, real-time interactions, formation of dynamic user groups, and provision of dynamic organizational context -- and demonstrates how they are utilized in this model to pave the path for a dynamic learning organization.

Published: August 2010, 17 pages, PDF format

Author: Bhuvan Unhelkar

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Published: December 2010, 48 pages, PDF format

Authors: Don Estes, Richard Bender, Corby James, Lawrence Fitzpatrick, Tom Love, John Wooten, Matthew Simons, Jonny LeRoy, Tom Bragg, Michel Vanden Bossche and Ian MacLarty

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The report Making Agile "Sticky": Strategies for Long-Term Success with Agile Adoption by Amr Elssamadisy addresses the foundations of successful agile projects and provides strategies that will help you create an environment that is conducive to adopting agile practices. You'll discover six attributes that will help you succeed: 1) Allowing visible success and failure 2) Clearly communicating goals 3) Applying learned experience 4) Exhibiting ownership behavior 5) Having trust 6) Suspending disbelief.

This report will help you:

• Create a safe environment where agile teams learn and continue to be effective and deliver value
• Encourage team ownership of problems and discourage relying on experts/gurus for every answer
• Focus on the bottleneck (because you can't slow down to speed up)
• Recognize breakthroughs

This report also explores some of the common human behaviors and people problems that can derail an agile initiative. You'll learn why agile teams are more fragile than others, and you'll explore some of the reasons why many firms quit midstream through an agile adoption, such as unrealistic expectations, a J-curve that is too large, and the inability to take ownership of problems that are uncovered.

Ensure that agile practices take hold and last in your enterprise. Order your copy of Making Agile "Sticky": Strategies for Long-Term Success with Agile Adoption today!

Published: October 2009, 13 pages, PDF format (989KB)

Author: Dave Higgins

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

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.

Published: May 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Moshe Cohen

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

This Executive Report by Moshe Cohen provides the frameworks, tools, and skills you need for effective stakeholder management. This report will help you navigate the multiple and sometimes conflicting interests on projects, understand the balance of forces within your organization, and garner the support you need to ensure project success.

Table of Contents:

Published: July 2011, 13 pages, PDF format

Author: Moshe Cohen

Online resource center clients: Access this report online.

Most senior executives ignore these less headline-grabbing roles at their own peril. The most recent outsourcing research shows MMs having general roles as coordinators, repositories of knowledge and experience, social capitalists, and change agents to varying degrees depending on the task at hand. We begin the report by reviewing the general roles of MMs and identifying the 12 supplier capabilities that are highly dependent on MM skills and experience. We then look at nine retained client capabilities, with MMs performing business-facing, technical, supplier-facing, and governance roles to ensure control over the organization's IT and process destiny. The report concludes with five key lessons for the practicing manager.

Published: March 2010, 20 pages, PDF format

Author: Dr. Leslie P. Willcocks and Catherine Griffiths

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

In this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review, we focus at the intersection of three topics discussed previously: mobile technology (Vol. 9, No. 3) on the one hand and privacy (Vol. 6, No. 1) and security (Vol. 5, No. 12) on the other. We do so because we feel that these topics, interesting each on its own, take on renewed relevance when combined. It is undeniable that mobile form factors, from the laptop to the smartphone to the iPad and who knows what next, will continue to gain prominence in the personal and organizational technology arsenal. As they do so, the importance of securing the mobile platform while ensuring the privacy of its users will continue to increase commensurably. In short, given the unabated trends toward continued miniaturization, connectivity, and battery longevity, it is undeniable that mobile security and privacy are only going to grow in importance.

Published: June 2010, 20 pages, PDF format

Authors: Gabriele Piccoli, Katia Passerini, Lanse E. LaVoy

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

While all the articles take a positive view of the opportunities opened up by mobile technologies, the stories they narrate also show that challenges persist, and that organizations are slowly dealing with them by expanding their strategies, scoping their markets, implementing better security, or piloting enhancements and new business models supported by novel architectures. As you read the articles, we are confident that you will recognize this tension. We hope that they will be a starting point for further reflection on how to join an evolution that will require agility, flexibility, and working at increasing data transfer rates, from anyplace and at anytime.

Published: September 2010, 40 pages, PDF format

Authors: Katia Passerini, Charlie Bess, Jesse Greco, Niel Nickolaise, David Lineman, Phillip Whisenhunt, Ronald Vetter, Edmund Schuster, Hyoung-Gon Lee , and Chaka Chaka

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

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.

Published: March 2010, 20 pages, PDF format

Author: Roger Clarke

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The Cutter Consortium report Modern IT Leadership: Surviving Chaos and Delivering Value provides effective leadership strategies for all those in charge of the IT function and identifies the unique skills and knowledge that will be required of the future CIO. You'll receive numerous case examples of IT leadership initiatives that succeeded and failed -- and why this happened -- and you'll gain specific advice for managing IT in times of economic uncertainty, rapidly advancing technology, and self-organizing teams.

Table of Contents

Part I: The Great Recession Fallout: Will CIOs Be Elevated or Exterminated?

Introduction: The Role of IT in Shaping and Reshaping Corporate Culture by Vince Kellen.

Chapter 1: Who's IT Gonna Be? CIOs Past, Present, and (Poof!) Future by Steve Andriole. Discover why CIOs may become inevitable "roadkill" somewhere after the year 2015.

Chapter 2: The Future CIO and the Evolving Leadership Landscape by Thornton May. Consider what types of CIOs will have difficulty over the next few years, which will go extinct, and which will thrive.

Chapter 3: The Right Way to Recruit CIOs by Bob Gariano. Compare the attributes companies rank highly when hiring CIOs, and whether the right level of attention is given to each.

Chapter 4: Back to the Future -- The Future Role of the CIO by Robert N. Charette. Explore why the CIO role should not be linked to a misguided conception of automation.

Chapter 5: Yielding to Darwin -- The Evolution of the CIO by Patrick E. Moroney. Uncover some of the characteristics today's CIOs must have to succeed in their evolving role.

Chapter 6: The Futureproof CIO by Eric D. Brown and Gene De Libero. Identify some of the tools that future CIOs will use to create competitive advantage for their organizations, such as commodity platforms, open systems, and cloud computing.

Chapter 7: Taking Action During an Economic Decline -- Strategies for the IT Team with Gabriele Piccoli, Dorothy Leidner, and Thomas H. Murphy. Evaluate the optimal strategies for setting the course for IT in a financial and economic storm.

Chapter 8: The 2010s -- Is Your Staff Ready? with Rob Austin, Ron Blitstein, Christine Davis, Lynne Ellyn, Tim Lister, Ken Orr, Robert Scott, and Borys Stokalski. Gain advice and opinion aimed to help IT management prepare for the future, with a focus on people strategy.

Chapter 9: Leadership During Tough Times by Moshe Cohen. Draw lessons from historical examples, share wisdom from successful leaders, and receive guidance on how to get your firm on track for a prosperous future.

Part II: Cultivating Leadership Throughout the IT Organization

Introduction: Leading Inside an IT Organization -- Putting People First by Bob Furniss.

Chapter 10: If It Weren't for People, Being a Leader Would Be Great! by Pam Hager. Explore a three-part process to help leaders connect with people and create an effective plan and process for change.

Chapter 11: How Culture Affects Leadership by Martin Bauer. Consider how company culture affects leadership and gain strategies for overcoming the challenges that culture presents.

Chapter 12: How to Cultivate Leadership in Yourself and Others by Martha J. Lindeman. Gain a psychological view of effective leadership, including four leader types and the response of followers to each type.

Chapter 13: Agile Managers -- The Essence of Leadership by Johanna Rothman. Discover what it takes to be an agile leader and learn how to make the hard decisions.

Chapter 14: In Search of Complexity -- Why Self-Organization Requires Leadership and Governance by Jurgen Appelo. Take a "systems" view of leadership and learn how to manage complexity through self-organization.

Chapter 15: IT Project Leadership -- Feeling Your Way by Mark Woodman and Jason Bates. Learn how to "feel" leadership as it goes on in projects and how to use stories to become an effective leader.

Authors: Steve Andriole, Jurgen Appelo, Rob Austin, Jason Bates, Martin Bauer, Ron Blitstein, Eric D. Brown, Robert N. Charette, Moshe Cohen, Christine Davis, Gene De Libero, Lynne Ellyn, Bob Furniss, Bob Gariano, Pam Hager, Vince Kellen, Dorothy E. Leidner, Martha J. Lindeman, Tim Lister, Thornton May, Patrick E. Moroney, Thomas H. Murphy, Ken Orr, Gabriele Piccoli, Johanna Rothman, Robert Scott, Boris Stokalski, and Mark Woodman

Published: June 2010, 233 pages, PDF

This report is also available in a print edition.

This in-depth report provides expert, practical advice on how to successfully modernize your legacy applications. You'll expand your knowledge of legacy solutions to include new approaches such as rearchitecting, rewrite methodologies and internal and external rationalization. And you'll benefit from the best practices and lessons learned on real-world modernization projects, helping you develop a "best-fit" modernization strategy for your company.

This report will help you:

• Expand the legacy application modernization discussion beyond choosing between packaged solutions and redesign/rewrite projects
• Grasp new concepts -- semiautomated rearchitecting, agile rewrite with DSL, BRE for packages, and the four types of internal rationalization
• Better understand the underlying problem of project complexity
• Determine the right size team for your project
• Learn why internal rationalization is where some of the most interesting and innovative work is being done
• Avoid the temptation to apply tactical integration approaches with minimal regard for the end-to-end architecture

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Alternative Approaches to Modernizing Legacy Applications by Don Estes.

Chapter 1: Correct and Comprehensive -- Testing Software Rewrites and Redesign/Rewrites by Richard Bender. Explore real-world examples of how to successfully conduct testing in a modernization project.

Chapter 2: Portfolio Management for Legacy Systems by Corby James. Gain a methodology for identifying and prioritizing applications from your portfolio to be modernized -- and determine which applications should be left alone.

Chapter 3: Breaking the Cycle of Failure -- Best Practices to Drive Successful Legacy System Replacement by Lawrence Fitzpatrick. Walk through the ten best practices to drive success in replacing critical legacy systems.

Chapter 4: Agile Legacy Reengineering -- A Repeatable Technique for Managing Modernization Risks by Tom Love and John Wooten. Discover an agile approach to rewriting legacy applications that sharply reduces application complexity and enhances flexibility.

Chapter 5: Contending with Creaky Platforms by Matthew Simons and Jonny LeRoy. Review a number of metrics visualization methods that will help you determine where your problems are, prompt management to take action, and drive your remediation efforts.

Chapter 6: Rewriting and Rearchitecting as Alternatives to Code Translation by Tom Bragg. Compare and contrast the benefits of rearchitecting against code translation or manual rewrites.

Chapter 7: Ontology-Driven Legacy Modernization by Michel Vanden Bossche and Ian MacLarty. Discover a completely different way of conceptualizing applications via the Semantic Web.

Chapter 8: Validating Legacy Code -- Modernizing Strategies Through Technical Debt Assessments by John Heintz. Dive into a case study on the DeLorean project, a project explicitly chartered with cleaning up the architecture of a production system, removing duplication, improving code quality, building in testing, and improving reliability -- in short, to remove technical debt.

Chapter 9: Successful Application Modernization and Rationalization, Part I -- Short-Term Tactical Approaches by Don Estes. Gain a blueprint for successful legacy modernization via an intense program of test-driven modernization.

Chapter 10: Successful Application Modernization and Rationalization, Part II -- Long-Term Strategic Approaches by Don Estes. Examine both the conventional and promising unconventional approaches to legacy application modernization, along with their pros and cons.

Chapter 11: Performing "Heart Surgery During Marathons" -- Core Banking System Modernization by Scott Simmons. Gain recommendations for maintaining and managing current core banking solutions while working to transform the core system functionality.

Chapter 12: Guaranteed Success in Legacy Modernization -- Baby Steps by Don Estes. Examine a project design for a major US federal agency that is undertaking its second attempt to modernize an application.

Published: May 2011, 218 pages, PDF format

Authors: Richard Bender, Tom Bragg, Don Estes, Lawrence Fitzpatrick, John Heintz, Corby James, Jonny LeRoy, Ian MacLarty, Tom Love, Scott Simmons, Matthew Simons, Michel Vanden Bossche, and John Wooten

This report is also available as a PDF.

This in-depth report provides expert, practical advice on how to successfully modernize your legacy applications. You'll expand your knowledge of legacy solutions to include new approaches such as rearchitecting, rewrite methodologies and internal and external rationalization. And you'll benefit from the best practices and lessons learned on real-world modernization projects, helping you develop a "best-fit" modernization strategy for your company.

This report will help you:

• Expand the legacy application modernization discussion beyond choosing between packaged solutions and redesign/rewrite projects
• Grasp new concepts -- semiautomated rearchitecting, agile rewrite with DSL, BRE for packages, and the four types of internal rationalization
• Better understand the underlying problem of project complexity
• Determine the right size team for your project
• Learn why internal rationalization is where some of the most interesting and innovative work is being done
• Avoid the temptation to apply tactical integration approaches with minimal regard for the end-to-end architecture

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Alternative Approaches to Modernizing Legacy Applications by Don Estes.

Chapter 1: Correct and Comprehensive -- Testing Software Rewrites and Redesign/Rewrites by Richard Bender. Explore real-world examples of how to successfully conduct testing in a modernization project.

Chapter 2: Portfolio Management for Legacy Systems by Corby James. Gain a methodology for identifying and prioritizing applications from your portfolio to be modernized -- and determine which applications should be left alone.

Chapter 3: Breaking the Cycle of Failure -- Best Practices to Drive Successful Legacy System Replacement by Lawrence Fitzpatrick. Walk through the ten best practices to drive success in replacing critical legacy systems.

Chapter 4: Agile Legacy Reengineering -- A Repeatable Technique for Managing Modernization Risks by Tom Love and John Wooten. Discover an agile approach to rewriting legacy applications that sharply reduces application complexity and enhances flexibility.

Chapter 5: Contending with Creaky Platforms by Matthew Simons and Jonny LeRoy. Review a number of metrics visualization methods that will help you determine where your problems are, prompt management to take action, and drive your remediation efforts.

Chapter 6: Rewriting and Rearchitecting as Alternatives to Code Translation by Tom Bragg. Compare and contrast the benefits of rearchitecting against code translation or manual rewrites.

Chapter 7: Ontology-Driven Legacy Modernization by Michel Vanden Bossche and Ian MacLarty. Discover a completely different way of conceptualizing applications via the Semantic Web.

Chapter 8: Validating Legacy Code -- Modernizing Strategies Through Technical Debt Assessments by John Heintz. Dive into a case study on the DeLorean project, a project explicitly chartered with cleaning up the architecture of a production system, removing duplication, improving code quality, building in testing, and improving reliability -- in short, to remove technical debt.

Chapter 9: Successful Application Modernization and Rationalization, Part I -- Short-Term Tactical Approaches by Don Estes. Gain a blueprint for successful legacy modernization via an intense program of test-driven modernization.

Chapter 10: Successful Application Modernization and Rationalization, Part II -- Long-Term Strategic Approaches by Don Estes. Examine both the conventional and promising unconventional approaches to legacy application modernization, along with their pros and cons.

Chapter 11: Performing "Heart Surgery During Marathons" -- Core Banking System Modernization by Scott Simmons. Gain recommendations for maintaining and managing current core banking solutions while working to transform the core system functionality.

Chapter 12: Guaranteed Success in Legacy Modernization -- Baby Steps by Don Estes. Examine a project design for a major US federal agency that is undertaking its second attempt to modernize an application.

Published: May 2011, 218 pages delivered in print, by post

Authors: Richard Bender, Tom Bragg, Don Estes, Lawrence Fitzpatrick, John Heintz, Corby James, Jonny LeRoy, Ian MacLarty, Tom Love, Scott Simmons, Matthew Simons, Michel Vanden Bossche, and John Wooten

Published: January 2011, 12 pages, PDF format

Author: Moshe Cohen

Online resource center clients: Access this report online.

While differences in power do exist in negotiations, power is complex, with some factors acting for you and others against you. You need to be able to understand and exploit these dynamics. Even when you don't have much power, there are tools you can use to influence matters in your favor. Your success in a negotiation is therefore largely based on your ability to identify and use every point of power, skill, and influence to your advantage, so you can negotiate as effectively as possible under any set of circumstances.

Published: January 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Moshe Cohen

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The report Next Practices in Modern Project Management: Supporting Communication, Collaboration and Collective Intelligence provides advice and recommendations on how to get current with the project management field and improve your organization's chances of delivering successful projects. You'll explore the impact that agile methods are having on the practice of project management, identify the Web/Enterprise 2.0 tools that can help make project management more collaborative, and address the continued absence of effective organizational leadership in many firms -- and how to overcome it.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Using Agile, Enterprise 2.0, and Other Modern Methods to Manage Today's Projects by Rob Thomsett.

Chapter 1: My PMO's Midlife Crisis by Bonnie Cooper. Explore how one IT executive is improving the value of IT project management by shifting her focus from project execution and metrics to portfolio oversight and business relationship management.

Chapter 2: What Can We Do About Our Project Managers? by Alistair Cockburn. Learn how your projects can reduce their "Feature-Time-to-Benefit" through a combination of lean, agile, and Toyota Production System (TPS)-inspired techniques.

Chapter 3: Project Management 2.0: It Won't Go Anywhere Without Project Leadership 1.0 by Mark E. Mullaly. Discover why agile project management -- like traditional project management before it -- is a poor substitute for the truly critical element in successful projects: project leadership.

Chapter 4: What Lifecycle? Selecting the Right Model for Your Project by Johanna Rothman. Learn how different projects have adopted elements of both the waterfall and agile methods to adjust for their inherent risk and business environment.

Chapter 5: Beyond Agile Project Management: The Way Forward by Darren Dalcher. Hear a "typical agile failure story" and learn why we need to go beyond agile project management to ensure that the value project teams deliver represents coherent and complete content.

Chapter 6: My Avatar Is Agile -- Is Yours? Using Scrum to Manage Projects in Virtual World Development by Matthew Ganis and David McNeill. Witness a compelling example of how Scrum and Second Life's immersive 3D environment were combined to develop and deploy ibm.com's Virtual Business Center estate in Second Life.

Chapter 7: Discovering the Benefits of Project Management 2.0 by Andrew Filev. Learn why Web/Enterprise 2.0 tools offer better opportunities for communication and collaboration by leveraging collective
intelligence.

Chapter 8: Social Project Management by David Coleman. Discover a new class of emerging project management tools that support more rapid interactions between project team members and cut down on overall task and project duration.

Chapter 9: Moving the Herd: Facilitating Multiparty Project Teams Toward Common Goals by Moshe Cohen. Recognize the importance of developing relationships, a common vision, channeling people based on interests, and managing interpersonal dynamics in achieving project success.

Chapter 10: Managing Projects Through Influence in a Distributed Work Environment by Moshe Cohen. Identify the behaviors of effective project leaders and discover how they inspire and guide their project teams.

This report reviews a list of project management practices every manager should know and actively practice, such as incremental development, creating a "walking skeleton", reflection workshops, "burn-up" charts, project charters, colocation, cross-functional teams, and more. And it discusses some of the mistakes that upper managers make that often lead to project failure.

Finally, this report takes a look at the current project management tools, including LiquidPlanner and Viewpath. And it provides an overview of the various Web 2.0 collaboration technologies that can help make project management more social, giving your organization a competitive edge.

Published: July 2008, 175 pages, PDF
Authors: Alistair Cockburn, Moshe Cohen, David Coleman, Bonnie Cooper, Darren Dalcher, Andrew Filev, Matthew Ganis, David McNeill, Mark Mullaly, Johanna Rothman, and Rob Thomsett

We are now living in a world, as insurer Lloyd's of London says, where what were previously independent and unrelated risks are now interconnected and interlinked. The intellectual need for enterprise risk management has never been higher; yet, ERM as a relevant and effective organizational practice is seen by many businesses as having no "there" there.

Business is in a situation of not being able to live without ERM, but not being to live with it either.

Presented by: Dr. Robert N. Charette, Enterprise Risk Management & Governance Practice Director

Resource Center clients can Access the webinar here.

These premium cards are just like those used at the world’s luxury casinos — crisp, sturdy and coated — except each of the decks has four suits, identified by color, containing number cards 0, ½, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100, and the face card "?". Packaged in a sturdy clear plastic box, these high-quality cards will stand up to more estimating than we can even estimate!

Price includes shipping within North America. Order decks to be shipped outside of North America here. For pricing on quantities over 10, contact us at service@cutter.com or @cuttertweets or call +1 (781) 648-8700.

Planning Poker® is a registered trademark of Mountain Goat Software, LLC. Sequence of values is ©2007 Mountain Goat Software, LLC.

These premium cards are just like those used at the world’s luxury casinos — crisp, sturdy and coated — except each of the decks has four suits, identified by color, containing number cards 0, ½, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100, and the face card "?". Packaged in a sturdy clear plastic box, these high-quality cards will stand up to more estimating than we can even estimate!

Price includes shipping outside of North America. Order decks to be shipped within of North America here. For pricing on quantities over 10, contact us at service@cutter.com or @cuttertweets or call +1 (781) 648-8700.

Planning Poker® is a registered trademark of Mountain Goat Software, LLC. Sequence of values is ©2007 Mountain Goat Software, LLC.

This brief reviews the 9 critical planning principles:

• Fit the plan to the need
• Define the langauge
• Answer the seven essential questions
• Play the right CARDs
• Manage stakeholder expectations
• Delegate responsibilities
• Improve forecast predictability
• Manage by walking around
• Bend the rules (for the right reasons)

You'll get a 10 point planning checklist that will help you ensure your plans will serve as effective tools to guide the work needed to effectively solve the right business challenges. And you'll discover why every plan, once it's finished and approved, is wrong -- and why it's critical to build flexibility into your plans.

The absence of planned, coordinated efforts is the surest path to lengthy schedules, blown cost budgets, and unhappy stakeholders. Order your PDF copy of Principles of Planning by Cutter Senior Consultant David Rasmussen today.

The felt phenomenon of "group coherence" and the ingredients associated with it provide a framework with which to address collective capacity -- directing the attention of the group's participants to create collective performance.

Published: January 2011, 23 pages, PDF format

Authors: Joanna Zweig, Priya Marsonia, and César Idrovo

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

As readers of CBR know, we get our inspiration and ideas for topics from two sources. First, we get inspiration from current events, new trends, new technologies, and generally from being aware and plugged into what is going on in the world of IT. At the same time, we maintain a constant ear to the ground and stick with a reality check by being attentive and responsive to the Cutter Consortium client base. We pay close attention to the kinds of jobs that Cutter Consortium Senior Consultants are bidding for and working on. We also monitor the types of requests that Cutter clients make and we apply firsthand research at Cutter Summits held across the globe.

Published: April 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Authors: Gabriele Piccoli, Jo Ellen Moore, David Spann

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Council Opinions are prepared by the Cutter Business Technology Council and include the commentary of each Council Fellow and the logic behind his or her concurring or dissenting opinion, as well as the strategic implications of the trend.

Published: May 2010, 20 pages, PDF format

Authors: Lou Mazzucchelli, Robert D. Scott, Ken Orr, Ron Blitstein, Allan H. Weis, JP Rangaswami

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

After viewing the Cutter Consortium Reining in Technical Debt webinar presented by Israel Gat and John Heintz (recorded live), you will understand how the combination of recent developments in software engineering and in software governance enable you to tie quality, cost, and value together to form a simple and effective governance framework for software.

The Reining in Technical Debt webinar gives you a preliminary understanding how quality can be assessed through technical debt techniques, familiarizes you with state of the art tools for measuring technical debt and  demonstrates how value delivery is affected when the technical debt is not "paid back" promptly. Israel and John also introduce you to a governance framework that ensures you can rigorously manage your software development process from a business perspective. This governance framework reduces a large number of complex technical considerations to a common denominator that is easily understood by both technical and non-technical people -- dollars.

This tie enables the governing of the software development process with great effectiveness at both the tactical and strategic levels, as we examine in this Executive Report by Israel Gat. Such governance is applicable to any software method/process, enabling "apples to apples" management across a diverse portfolio of projects. It also lends itself to insightful comparisons with industry benchmarks.

Published: April 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Israel Gat

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The report Scaling Agile Technical Practices: Implementing Continuous Integration to Enable Lean by Jonathon Golden examines how the implementation of an enterprise continuous integration system and related organizational and cultural transformation truly enable organizations to apply lean manufacturing principles. The focus is on where the metaphor makes sense. The aim is to get past the fluff and focus on real-world lean software production practices.

Table of Contents:

• “Traditional” Integration
• Continuous Integration
• Continuous Integration Is Testing
• Source Control Management and Test-Driven Development
• Lean Metaphors and Continuous Integration
• Implementation Details
• A Final Metaphor
• Endnotes

Discover which software production practices are right for your organization. Order this report today!

Published: June 2011, 11 pages, PDF format

Author: Jonathon M. Golden

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

This Council Opinion, prepared by the Cutter Business Technology Council includes the commentary of each Council Fellow and the logic behind his or her concurring or dissenting opinion, as well as the strategic implications of the trend.

Published: January 2011, 11 pages, PDF format

Author: Robert Scott, with concurrences and dissents by Lynne Ellyn, Tim Lister, Ron Blitstein, Ken Orr, Israel Gat

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The Smart Grid is to be borne upon the innovations and technologies of the Internet, melding with traditional electric utility generation, transmission, and distribution protocols of the past century. How will the Smart Grid influence consumers in their use of energy? Who will collectively manage (and secure) the Smart Grid's "digital exhaust"? These, among a host of other compelling questions, are explored within this Executive Report by Mitchell Ummel, Mike Rosen, and Ken Orr.

Published: February 2010, 20 pages, PDF format

Author: Mitchell Ummel, Mike Rosen, Ken Orr

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The new report Social Business Intelligence: Why Every Company Needs Social Media by Steve Andriole and Vince Schiavone focuses on the roles that social media can play in the execution of your business strategies and the improvement of your business processes and
models. The report introduces a social media optimization blueprint consisting of strategy, architecture, skills assessments, and project slates. Special emphasis is placed on the value of "listening" to internal and external social media.

This report will help you:

• Match social media applications to short- and long-term business requirements.
• Develop two different strategies for the adoption of social media -- internal and external.
• Improve conventional processes such as marketing, customer service, innovation, training, and R&D.
• Determine how to acquire, store, and analzye the structured and unstructured data and knowledge created by social media.
• Utilize the seven characteristics of an effective social media listening platform.
• Make informed decisions on how your social media architecture will look.

Gain expert insight that will help you understand, track, apply, and measure social media. Order your copy of Social Business Intelligence: Why Every Company Needs Social Media today.

Published: June 2010, 16 pages, PDF format (867 KB)

Authors: Stephen J. Andriole and Vincent J. Schiavone

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

This Executive Report describes a process that should lead to the optimization of social media in your company. It recognizes the role that social media can play in improving conventional processes such as marketing, branding, customer service, innovation, training, and R&D, as well as how social media can fundamentally refine old processes for business value. The report also provides a social media optimization blueprint consisting of strategy, architecture, skills assessments, and project slates. Special emphasis is placed on the value of "listening" to internal and external social media. Ultimately, the report argues that social media is a relentless trend that all companies must understand and exploit. There's no hiding from the social media tsunami.

Published: June 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Stephen J. Andriole, Vince Schiavone

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Those communities — through an “amplification effect” — foster innovation and process improvements far more quickly than companies can achieve with traditional improvement mechanisms. Social media appears to be a marketing function but, when used internally, can foster improvement in engineering, R&D, and project management — as discussed in this Executive Report.

Published: June 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Dann A. Maurno

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

In this hour-long recorded webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant David Coleman show you how some of the Web 2.0 tools -- tools that are easy enough for a non-professional to use -- that can support non-linear projects and help with better estimation. You'll also discover how project communities or networks offer a new way to run projects more successfully.

They argue that you learn professional programming not only from a textbook, but also by collaborating with skilled peers. Of course, there are rules for good code, but building good code requires more than theoretical knowledge of these rules -- it requires tacit knowledge and experience. And this is where craft enters the scene: craftsmanship is the traditional means of teaching and transferring tacit knowledge and experience. So is this a battle cry against software engineering? Some people think so. This issue of Cutter IT Journal aims at providing you with an overview of the different aspects of the current discussion of software craftsmanship.

Published: April 2010, 36 pages, PDF format

Authors: Jens Coldewey, Matthew Stuempfle, J. David Gibson, Ken Orr, Paul Bassett, Gil Broza, Lawrence Fitzpatrick, Stefan Roock and Michael Hughes

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The report Software Projects: When to Jump Ship, When to Stay the Course helps you identify projects that are likely to overrun cost, scope or schedule, and those that are beyond recovery. You'll get specific advice on how to de-escalate failing projects, and how to cancel failing projects proficiently and with minimal consequences for you and your organization. You'll also get guidelines to minimize or even eliminate the root causes of project failure.

This report will help you:

• Identify projects signaling eventual and expensive failure
• Implement project management controls to start a project off right
• Determine who in your organization should be responsible and accountable for canceling the project
• Take corrective action to mitigate a failing project
• Use a one-minute test to determine your software project escalation risk
• Increase the likelihood of success with public-sector IT projects
• Learn the failure points for most IT projects

You'll also get insight into why smaller software projects experience more success than larger ones, especially when agile practices are employed. You'll also learn to use engineering and management practices that will lead to success, and avoid those with the potential for failure.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Killing IT Projects
by Lynne Nix

Chapter 1
Software Project Escalation and De-escalation: What Do We Know?
by Mark Keil

• Project Management Factors That Promote Escalation
• Behavioral Factors That Promote Escalation
• A One-Minute Test for Factors That Can Promote Escalation
• Understanding the Dynamics of Escalation and De-Escalation
• Summary

Chapter 2
Why Flawed Software Projects Are Not Cancelled in Time
by Capers Jones

• How Software Projects Go Bad
• Poor Estimation and Schedule Planning
• Inaccurate and Optimistic Status Reporting
• External Schedule Pressures
• Summary and Conclusions

Chapter 3
Project Management, The Movie
by Laurent Bossavit

• Tragedy in Three Acts
• You've Read the Book; Now See the Movie!
• Ignored Omens
• Missed Opportunities for Termination
• The Agony
• It's Not Luck
• Lessons Learned

Chapter 4
Cancelling a Project in Four Not-So-Easy Steps
by Eileen Strider

• Awareness: Breaking the Project Trance
• Accountability: Will Someone Please Step Up?
• Articulation: Delivering the Bad News
• Action: You Can't Walk Away Yet
• Not Easy, But the Right Thing to Do

Chapter 5
A Losing Gamble with Public Funds: Why Large Public-Sector IT Projects Are More Likely to Fail and Are Harder to Cancel
by Payson Hall

• Approach To Risk: "To Err Is Human, to Forgive Is Not the Policy of this Administration"
• Initial Business Case: "Ready, Set, Ready, Ready, Set, Ready, Ready ..."
• The Megaproject: "If Some Is Good, and More Is Better, Then Too Much Must Be Just Right."
• Sponsorship/Stakeholder Complexity: "Everyone with a Nickel Invested Wants a Dollar's Worth of Say-So."
• Procurement: "Lie to Me."
• Vendor Management: "Don't Make Me Pull This Car Over ..."
• Managing Change: "Success Is Unlikely When the Rate of Change Exceeds the Rate of Progress."
• Project Status: "If We Punish the Bearers of Bad News, Bad Things Will Stop Happening."
• Improving Project Outcomes in the Public Sector

Chapter 6
Organizational Factors of Software Project Failure
by Dennis Linscomb

• Case 1
• Case 2
• Case 3

Chapter 7
Finding Success in Small Software Projects
by Khaled El Emam

• Introduction
• Are Small Projects Successful?
• Agile Practices for Small Projects
• Small Project Practices
• Conclusions

Order your copy of Software Projects: When to Jump Ship, When to Stay the Course today!

Published: March 2004, 108 pages, PDF format

Authors: Lynne Nix, Mark Keil, Capers Jones, Laurent Bossavit, Eileen Strider, Payson Hall, Dennis Linscomb, and Khaled El Emam

In the specific case of the IS strategy, not only is it already difficult to get clarity about the objectives (the elusive alignment quest), but the interdependence of people (and their varying attitudes and competencies), technologies (with the dizzying pace of their evolution), and existing organizational structures must all be thought about as part of the planning process. That's a lot to consider -- and constantly reconsider as conditions change. Strategic IT planning is hardly an emerging item on the executive's agenda. However, given its important and recurrent appearance on the CIO's top agenda items, it is the kind topic that we at Cutter Benchmark Review believe is important to revisit from time to time. More specifically, in this issue of CBR, we set out to examine the ways in which strategic IT planning influences the value that IT delivers to the organization, as well as the degree to which the planning process is perceived to affect organizational outcomes and results. With this focus, we can both benchmark the planning process itself and, at the same time, tackle the question of its relationship to IT value. Given the current and ongoing economic struggles facing businesses both large and small around the world, this seemed like an excellent time to discuss the value of strategic IT planning.

Published: April 2011, 31 pages, PDF format

Authors: Gabriele Piccoli, Editor; Dorothy Leidner, Bob Benson

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

This report is also available in print format.

The report Strategies and Guidelines for Assessing and Improving IT leadership Skills provides you with expert insight into the characteristics, skills and behaviors that contribute to effective (and ineffectual) IT leadership, viable approaches to selecting and training IT leaders, and recommendations for motivating and empowering your project teams.

Some highlights from this report:

• Learn how to use a methodical approach to select and train IT leaders -- called leadership husbandry -- as well as a leadership model -- to help you motivate and influence your team members to achieve your business objectives.

• Gain insight from 11 UK-based CEOs on what traits were necessary for them to progress through the ranks of IT and beyond to the position of CEO.

• Explore a unique approach to leadership at DTE Energy -- adopting agile best practices as a style of organizational governance -- resulting in a culture of teamwork excellence as well as phenomenal business success.

• Examine the three key ways IT leaders can transform their mindset to develop a true partnership with the business and become an integral part of the leadership team.

• Get real-world confessions from a study of 250 IT executives in corporations worldwide revealing the reasons behind leadership failure, the attributes of effective leaders, why leadership matters, and the differences between leaders across industries and geography.

Improve your IT leadership skills with the timeless insight and recommendations found in this exciting resource. Order your copy today!

Published (Second Edition): January 2012, 85 pages, PDF format

Authors: Christopher Avery, Steven Baker, David Caruso, Robina Chatham, Kerry Gentry, and Richard Hordern

This report is also available as a PDF.

The report Strategies and Guidelines for Assessing and Improving IT leadership Skills provides you with expert insight into the characteristics, skills and behaviors that contribute to effective (and ineffectual) IT leadership, viable approaches to selecting and training IT leaders, and recommendations for motivating and empowering your project teams.

Some highlights from this report:

• Learn how to use a methodical approach to select and train IT leaders -- called leadership husbandry -- as well as a leadership model -- to help you motivate and influence your team members to achieve your business objectives.

• Gain insight from 11 UK-based CEOs on what traits were necessary for them to progress through the ranks of IT and beyond to the position of CEO.

• Explore a unique approach to leadership at DTE Energy -- adopting agile best practices as a style of organizational governance -- resulting in a culture of teamwork excellence as well as phenomenal business success.

• Examine the three key ways IT leaders can transform their mindset to develop a true partnership with the business and become an integral part of the leadership team.

• Get real-world confessions from a study of 250 IT executives in corporations worldwide revealing the reasons behind leadership failure, the attributes of effective leaders, why leadership matters, and the differences between leaders across industries and geography.

Improve your IT leadership skills with the timeless insight and recommendations found in this exciting resource. Order your copy today!

Published (Second Edition): January 2012, 85 pages, delivered in print, by post

Authors: Christopher Avery, Steven Baker, David Caruso, Robina Chatham, Kerry Gentry, and Richard Hordern

The report Strategy, Governance, and Execution Excellence: Best Practices for Leveraging Business and Technology by Patrick E. Moroney discusses how to use best practices to improve processes for maturing and communicating strategy, for choosing the right projects to invest in to execute that strategy, as well as for organizing, executing, and measuring project investments until return on invested capital can be put in the bank.

The report begins by looking at what is required of the modern business leader. It then details best practices in strategy, governance, and excellence execution, which are the foundational components we must master for the highest chance of success.

Table of Contents:

• The Role of the Modern Leader
• Calling All Real Business Leaders! Discover the Foundations You Need to Master
• Conclusion
• Endnotes
• Appendix: Governance Framework

Step up your game, your competencies, and the practices you employ to strategize the future, govern and make decisions about how to achieve that future, and execute to make sure it happens. Order your copy of this report today!

Published: August 2011, 17 pages, PDF format

Author: Patrick E. Moroney

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The first stage of a project must reproduce the business functionality of the legacy application and pass rigorous acceptance testing validated against the legacy system. Then a second stage can provide enhanced functionality by refactoring the results of the first stage. A variety of conventional and unconventional approaches are discussed in depth with their respective pros and cons.

Published: January 2011, 25 pages, PDF format

Author: Don Estes

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

This Cutter Consortium Executive Report focuses on the strategies for modernization that deliver the greatest business value by examining both conventional and promising unconventional approaches in depth, along with their respective pros and cons. Since conventionally modernized applications will inevitably become "legacy" again, this report also analyzes how rationalization approaches can avoid this fate. Finally, you'll be introduced to a methodology for selecting an optimal project strategy.

Table of Contents:

• Functionality-Preservation Strategies
• Rationalization
• Other Issues
• How to Decide
• Conclusion

Published: March 2011, 26 pages, PDF format

Author: Don Estes

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The report Successful ROI with Agile and Lean Adoption, discusses the financial returns of successful adoption initiatives. You'll read about typical impediments that lead to a lack of results, which will help you diagnose your initiatives. The report will leave you with clearer expectations of your agile and lean initiatives and provide one or more starting points to diagnose and eventually address any roadblocks
your organization may face.

Table of Contents:

• A Catalog of Successful Agile and Lean Adoptions
• A Catalog of Unsuccessful Agile and Lean Adoptions
• Business Values
• Stepping Back: What Does This Mean for Your Current Adoption Efforts?
• Putting It All Together and Making the Right Decisions

This report will help you focus on your business values instead of on an agile method; understand that local changes alone will not last; and discuss, demonstrate, and teach human dynamics skills and relate them to most technical practices and tools they
introduce.

Published: September 2011, 13 pages, PDF format

Author: Amr Elssamadisy

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

This special issue of Cutter Benchmark Review offers benchmarking data on the state of the adoption and use of tablets in the enterprise, in an attempt to understand whether they have become pervasive and how organizations are approaching their integration in the firm's overall infrastructure.

You'll receive insightful and provocative analysis on the applications of tablets in the enterprise, their use (or nonuse) as workstation replacements, and the possible barriers to adoption, such as concerns over data security.

Table of Contents

• The Tablet: A Solution in Search of a Problem by Joseph Feller
• A Storm Is Coming In by Niel Nickolaisen
• Tablet Excitement Is Here, Uses Still Emerging by Gabriele Piccoli
• Tablets in the Enterprise Survey Data collected by Cutter Consortium

Published: August 2011, 22 pages, PDF format

Authors: Gabriele Piccoli, Joseph Feller, and Niel Nickolaisen

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Amidst all the turmoil, IT shops within firms and governmental institutions have to keep the operations humming while contributing to the survival of the organization. Setting the course for the IT function in a financial and economic storm is a subject that requires insight from some special contributors. We have assembled one of the best duos of CBR contributors since I took over editing of the publication in 2006. On the academic side we have Dorothy Leidner, the Randall W. and Sandra Ferguson Professor of Information Systems and Director of the Center for Knowledge Management at Baylor University (USA). On the practitioner side, we have one of my favorite IT leaders: Tom Murphy, Senior VP and CIO of AmerisourceBergen, a US $54 billion wholesale distributor of pharmaceuticals and related healthcare products.

Published: February 2010, 32 pages, PDF format

Authors: Gabriele Piccoli, Dorothy E. Leidner, Thomas H. Murphy

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The seven articles in this issue of Cutter IT Journal explain how not to neglect technical debt, what to do in case neglect has already taken place, and how technical debt techniques could be applied in domains where they have not been used before.

Published: October 2010, 44 pages, PDF format

Authors: Israel Gat, John Heintz, Stephen Chin, Erik Huddleston, Walter Bodwell, Dave Rooney, Brent Barton, Chris Sterling, Ken Pugh, Jonathon Golden, and Andrew Shafer

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Table of Contents:

• Opening Statement
• You've Come a Long Way, Baby -- But Hold the Applause
• Contextability: The New Usability
• Enriched Customer Engagement at the Table
• Achieving Customer Centricity: Technologies and Practices
• The Politics of Customer Experience

Published: February 2011, 33 pages, PDF format

Authors: Jim Love, Paul Clemont, Michael Hughes, Neil Roodyn, Suresh Malladi, Martin Bauer

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Technology is racing ahead at breakneck speed, competition comes from every corner of the planet, and new business ventures are constrained only by the creativity of its promoters. As the need to innovate accelerates, so does project complexity, and the ability to manage effectively in an uncertain business climate becomes even more critical.

The 12 Basic Tenets That Characterize Complex Project Management by Robert Wysocki explores in detail the 12 principles that enable you to successfully manage complex and high-risk projects. You'll discover how your organization can thrive by taking an adaptive approach to complex project management (CPM).

This report will help you:

• Determine your organization's readiness for integrating a CPM approach into your management processes.
• Realize greater business value, project efficiency, and higher team morale by adopting a CPM approach.
• Exploit untapped business opportunities with a better understanding of the project world in which you operate.
• Develop a strong and consistent infrastructure to support your CPM implementation.
• Use "adaptive thinking" rather than "fixed stepwise" approaches to accommodate unexpected changes and keep your projects on schedule and budget.

You'll also learn how to conduct a dynamic risk assessment, allowing you to recalculate and prioritize project risk as your project evolves. A proven template to conduct this assessment is provided in the report.

Get ready for a distinctly different project experience! Order your copy of The 12 Basic Tenets That Characterize Complex Project Management today!

Published: October 2010, 13 pages, PDF format

Author: Robert K. Wysocki

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

CEOs and CIOs have many responsibilities and priorities, but the two most important ones are defining strategy and building the best team to achieve strategic goals and objectives. This Council Opinion is the first of two omnibus issues focused on helping CIOs and IT managers prepare for the future. In this Opinion, we will highlight significant trends and changes that will be affecting IT organizations with a focus on people strategy. The next omnibus issue will focus on technology trends for the 2010s. The goal is to greatly increase the odds of strategic success by hiring and developing the best staff while employing the right technologies. IT will have many new challenges and new opportunities during the next 10 years. Now is the time to prepare to take advantage of what is known and develop a plan to survive the many unknowns ahead.

Published: February 2010, 20 pages, PDF format

Authors: Christine Davis, Tim Lister, Lynne Ellyn, Robert Scott, Robert D. Austin, Ron Blitstein, Borys Stokalski, Karen Coburn

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

We consider the pressures on organizations to master the art of change and present a fractal metaphor for the tandem role of strategy and architecture. Combining a fractal and emergent approach allows for an organic, dynamic way to express organizational intentionality to orchestrate waves of change, while embracing the need to respond extemporaneously and locally to opportunities and changes that demand surges of responsiveness.

Published: May 2010, 28 pages, PDF format

Author: Ruth Malan and Dana Bredemeyer

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

This report by Cutter's William Ulrich and Michael Rosen reveals how capability mapping enables business analysis and business/IT architecture alignment. You'll gain step-by-step guidance that will help you:

• Define your business capabilities using 10 basic capability principles
• Discover why capability is the missing link in business-IT transformation
• Map business capabilities
• Incorporate capability into business architecture and enterprise architecture
• Conduct capability-based analysis and planning
• Use business capabilities to drive business-IT transformation initiatives.

Among the topics discussed are capability mapping, IT architecture transformation, the use of capabilities to specify service-oriented architecture, the transformation of core IT architectures, and more.

Published: February 2011, 26 pages, PDF format

Authors: William Ulrich and Michael Rosen

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The debate includes whether offshoring actually saves money or not, what activities are and are not good candidates for offshoring, and most controversial of all, its effect on employment in the consuming countries. This Executive Report discusses the offshoring phenomena in an historical context, investigates whether offshoring has actually resulted in IT-related job losses, and examines its effect on IT-related occupations in the US and Europe.

Published: August 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Sara Cullen, Nupur Gupta, Madina Manap, Alejandro Rosales

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

People and technology have complementary forms of intelligence, and in an intelligent organization these abilities are coordinated and mobilized to the best advantage. This Executive Report by Richard Veryard surveys the six key capabilities of organizational intelligence and shows how a range of organizational and technological innovations each contributes toward the whole framework.

Published: July 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Richard Veryard

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Both the enterprise risk environment and the IT risk environment are growing in complexity. Factors such as the global financial crisis, an increase in regulation, cloud computing, and the demand for mobile devices are creating new threats. And since isolated silos of protection weaken overall security, companies should do everything humanly possible to unify their risk management strategies under one enterprise risk management (ERM) scheme.

The report The Emerging Risk Environment and What You Need to Know About It by Brian J. Dooley explores the increasing demand for centralized ERM systems and considers how IT risks and IT processes are contributing to current risks, as well as providing the tools for a solution.

This report will help you:

• Get up to speed on the evolving enterprise threat environment
• Understand the growing relationship between enterprise risk and IT
• Explore how new threats are intertwined with risk elements affecting other areas of the business
• Review some of the frameworks that aid risk management consolidation across the enterprise
• Address new threats to the enterprise that do not originate in IT, but will create IT concerns

Published: October 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Brian J. Dooley

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

At one end of the pool, we hear all the paranoid negatives. IT is not strategic, so CIOs will be reduced to technology caretakers and vendor managers, as they should be. CIOs are strategically dim-witted and not as sharp as the business in matters of IT and business value, so good riddance to the role. IT is now a consumer product that business leaders will buy themselves, bypassing a central IT purchasing and EA regime that seemed to exist only to stymie the strategy artisans in the business units. Web and Enterprise 2.0 have freed the business from the clutches of central IT and enabled so many benefits that we can stop thinking about corporate IT in the old way.

Published: January 2010, 32 pages, PDF format

Authors: Vince Kellen, Stephen J. Andriole, Thornton May, Bob Gariano, Robert N. Charette, Pat Moroney, Eric Brown and Gene De Libero

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The new Cutter Consortium report, The Indoor Garden: Cultivating Openness Inside the Organization, by Joseph Feller, examines organizational and community-based openness and collaboration practices -- maximizing the power and intelligence of crowds -- and applies it behind the firewall to create the "internally open" organization. You’ll learn how you can improve problem solving and encourage innovation in your organization by applying these strategies to your own knowledge sharing, information processing and product/service co-creation practices.

This report will help you:

* Understand how peer production of open content (such as Wikipedia) can be applied to knowledge sharing in your organization.

* Use collaborative filtering and social navigation to improve intranets, content management systems, and document repositories.

* Create Web portals specific to your organization's interests and goals.

* Develop internal software products using the principals of peer production processes -- and get five lessons for doing it right.

* Learn how to use co-creation techniques to enhance the quality of your products and stimulate innovation.

Get key issues and insights to identify and harness the power of your internal communities and crowds.

Order this report today!

Published: December 2011, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Joseph Feller

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

This report is also available in print format.

In this report, they flip the equation, and examine the things suppliers wish clients would know or do (as well as the things they'd rather not have them know or do). In this report, Lacity and Willcocks take the top 20 statements suppliers make about outsourcing relationships, then tease out the advice that, if followed, would actually benefit the client.

The authors back their assertions with findings of their own 22-year research program as well as from a recent meta-analysis they conducted on 741 findings from rigorous academic research. In this report, you'll find statements from suppliers about the "ideal" customer, outsourcing strategies, and contract negotiations, as well as a peek inside delivering the outsourced service.

Contents:

• Client Profiles
• Outsourcing Strategy
• Contract Negotiations
• Conclusion
• Recommended Reading

Chapter Two: Delivering the Outsourced Service

• Client Capabilities and Management
• Supplier Capabilities and Management
• Relational Governance
• Outsourcing Outcomes
• Conclusion
• Recommended Reading

Find out if you are the type of client who gets the best outsourcing results; how to win the "innovation debate" in negotiations, and how much of your risk you can expect a supplier to absorb.

In addition, you'll uncover how suppliers identify "faux proposals" (and why creating them is not in your interest); why your RFP is too long and has too tight a deadline to work for either the supplier or you; how to choose an advisor to improve your outsourcing outcome; why there is such a thing as a fixed price when the agreement is structured properly, and what length contract has a higher frequency of success.

Leverage decades of outsourcing research from the client and supplier perspectives, along with a wealth of real-life examples to improve your organization's odds of creating arrangements that work. Order "The Inside Scoop: What Suppliers Wish You Knew About Outsourcing" today.

Publication Date: 27 October 2011, 30 pages, PDF format

Authors: Mary Lacity, Leslie P. Willcocks

This report is also available in pdf format.

In this report, they flip the equation, and examine the things suppliers wish clients would know or do (as well as the things they'd rather not have them know or do). In this report, Lacity and Willcocks take the top 20 statements suppliers make about outsourcing relationships, then tease out the advice that, if followed, would actually benefit the client.

The authors back their assertions with findings of their own 22-year research program as well as from a recent meta-analysis they conducted on 741 findings from rigorous academic research. In this report, you'll find statements from suppliers about the "ideal" customer, outsourcing strategies, and contract negotiations, as well as a peek inside delivering the outsourced service.

Contents:

• Client Profiles
• Outsourcing Strategy
• Contract Negotiations
• Conclusion
• Recommended Reading

Chapter Two: Delivering the Outsourced Service

• Client Capabilities and Management
• Supplier Capabilities and Management
• Relational Governance
• Outsourcing Outcomes
• Conclusion
• Recommended Reading

Find out if you are the type of client who gets the best outsourcing results; how to win the "innovation debate" in negotiations, and how much of your risk you can expect a supplier to absorb.

In addition, you'll uncover how suppliers identify "faux proposals" (and why creating them is not in your interest); why your RFP is too long and has too tight a deadline to work for either the supplier or you; how to choose an advisor to improve your outsourcing outcome; why there is such a thing as a fixed price when the agreement is structured properly, and what length contract has a higher frequency of success.

Leverage decades of outsourcing research from the client and supplier perspectives, along with a wealth of real-life examples to improve your organization's odds of creating arrangements that work. Order "The Inside Scoop: What Suppliers Wish You Knew About Outsourcing" today.

Publication Date: 27 October 2011, 30 pages, PDF format

Authors: Mary Lacity, Leslie P. Willcocks

The Business Technology Trends Council Opinion The Neuroscience of Leadership asserts that with an advanced understanding of neuroscience, smart companies will develop software that capitalizes on the real nature of the brain, leading to greater usability, customer satisfaction, and improved human performance.

This Council Opinion will help you:

• Discover how the use of neuroscience will change the usability game, and smart companies will outcompete the clueless competition.
• Learn why leadership should not be turned over to left-brained people.
• Understand that there are three components of attention: alerting, orienting, and executive.
• Consider how the use of neuroscience applied to user response to computer interfaces impacts design.
• Understand that software development is being driven by gaming and virtual technologies -- technologies that clearly reflect a different way to think, problem solve, create, and learn.

Published: July 2011, 13 pages, PDF format

Authors: Ron Blitstein, Lynne Ellyn, Israel Gat, Lou Mazzucchelli, Ken Orr, and Robert D. Scott

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

This report from Cutter Consortium explores the latest innovations in environmentally sustainable IT and provides expert recommendations that will help your company define its green IT strategy and create realistic guidelines for its implementation.

You'll receive 155 pages chock-full of tips and advice on how your company can decrease its energy consumption and increase its organizational efficiency.

Some actions your organization can take now to decrease its environmental footprint include:

You'll learn of policy modifications you can make immediately to reduce the environmental impact of IT's use in the company, as well as cultural changes that take longer to enact. And you'll learn how you can make the best use of your existing resources and plan for growth accordingly.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Can IT Go Green? by San Murugesan.

Chapter 1: Building Sustainable IT by Emily Jane Ryan. Gain strategies for mobilizing a sustainable IT movement within your organization.

Chapter 2: Understanding the Linkages Between IT, Global Supply Chains, and the Environment by Joseph Sarkis and Jacob Park. Discover the profound -- and often hidden -- environmental impacts of the different stages of a typical IT supply chain.

Chapter 3: The Greening of the IT Sector: Problems and Solutions in Managing Environmental Compliance by Tom Butler and Damien McGovern. Examine the design and features of an ideal environmental compliance management system.

Chapter 4: The Perceived Dichotomy Between Current Green IT Initiatives and Information Security by David Biros, David Sikolia, and Michael Hass. Learn how to meet the seemingly conflicting demands of both energy efficiency and security.

Chapter 5: Lessons in Implementing "Green" Business Strategies with ICT by Bhuvan Unhelkar and Annukka Dickens. Receive advice on how to leverage information and communications technology to minimize the effect of enterprise business activities on the environment.

Chapter 6: Being Green -- A Duty and an Opportunity by Marie-Claude Boudreau, Adela Chen, Gabriele Piccoli, Emily Ryan, and Richard T. Watson. Benchmark current practices in green IT and receive guidelines on what you can do tomorrow in your organization.

Chapter 7: CIO Eyes Only -- One More Case for Green IT by Deborah Grove. Discover a three-week approach for establishing a strategy for solving data center energy emergencies.

Chapter 8: The Green Data Center -- Taking the First Steps Toward Green IT? by Ian Osborne. Explore the developments in grid computing underway in the UK and European Commission.

Chapter 9: Green Requirements for IT and Telecom by Brian J. Dooley. Gain strategies for treating green issues as part of your overall risk management program.

Order your copy of The Organizational Benefits of Green IT today!

Published: September 2008, 155 pages, delivered electronically as a PDF.

Authors: David Biros, Marie-Claude Boudreau, Tom Butler, Adela J.W. Chen, Annukka Dickens, Brian J. Dooley, Deborah Grove, Michael Hass, Damien McGovern, San Murugesan, Ian Osborne, Jacob Park, Gabriele Piccoli, Emily Jane Ryan, Joseph Sarkis, David Sikolia, Bhuvan Unhelkar, and Richard T. Watson

A successful Social CRM implementation can help companies get closer to their current clients and spur their sales efforts -- helping to acquire new customers and hold onto existing ones. But success isn't easy. There have been many analysts and experts who have looked at the reasons why these projects fail. But with all due respect, these analysts are focused on the obvious.

The real question of Social CRM is not what goes wrong, but why -- when we all know the problems -- we continue to repeat them over and over again. The solutions to these issues are complex, deceptive, and often counterintuitive. Join Senior Consultant Jim Love as he walks you through solutions you can put to use in your organization.

Presented by: Jim Love, Business-IT Strategies Senior Consultant
Resource Center clients can Access the webinar here.

Such a relationship assures the business sponsor and the client that the probability of delivering acceptable business value will increase as a result of encouraging their relationship. We spend too much energy tossing responsibilities back and forth rather than looking at the benefits to the client from leveraging the PM and BA capabilities to create a synergistic and dynamic partnership. This is a decision that should be made only by the PM and BA once they are assigned to the project. They are in the best position to weigh the alternatives for sharing the requisite management roles and responsibilities.

Published: June 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Robert K. Wysocki

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Table of Contents:

• Opening Statement
• Reacting to a Crisis: The Role of Planning and Technology in Crisis Communication
• The Multifaceted Role of IT in Crisis Response: Lessons from the Asian Tsunami Disaster
• Managing Information Flow Challenges in the Supply Chain
• Emergency Management Task Complexity and Knowledge-Sharing Strategies
• Toward a Framework for Crisis Decision Support Systems: Information Requirements for Contextual Team Situation Awareness

Published: January 2011, 33 pages, PDF format

Authors: Dorothy E. Leidner, Catherine Szpindor, Gary Pan, Jamison Day, Leiser Silva, Weidong Xia, Irma Becerra-Fernandez, Jose Rocha, Yasir Javed, Tony Norris, David Johnston, and Emma Hudson-Doyle

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

How do we manage in this environment where so many of the contributing factors are not within our control? And how do we use the information we can gather from social media monitoring (SMM) to set ourselves up for success?

To benchmark current practice, we conducted a survey of business managers and IT professionals to see what their experiences with social media have been thus far. For practical guidance, we then asked our academic and practicing expert contributors to interpret the survey results and provide us with some insight and recommendations for moving forward. Our academic contributor is Rajiv Sabherwal, University of Missouri Curators Professor at the College of Business Administration at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Providing our view from the field is Vince Kellen, CIO at the University of Kentucky and current Senior Consultant for Cutter's Business-IT Strategies and Business Intelligence practice areas.

Whether or not you have already jumped onto the social media bandwagon, you will find this installment of Cutter Benchmark Review helpful as you attempt to get a broad overall view of the potential benefits and pitfalls social media represents for your organization. Hearing about the supposed prospects to move your business forward may not be enough to move you toward any kind of implementation just yet, but learning from the candid responses of your colleagues from a wide swatch of organizations, as well as from the insightful analysis of those responses by our expert contributors, will hopefully allow you to gauge the potential that SMM holds for you in the near future. After all, who better to learn from than those who have already leaped into the fray?

Published: January 2011, 28 pages, PDF format

Authors: Gabriele Piccoli, Editor; Rajiv Sabherwal; Vince Kellen

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Government is the largest institution on the face of the Earth. Citizens worldwide now expect more from their governments than ever before. Perennially, we struggle in the pursuit of government efficiency and cost-effectiveness. We find new levels of government accountability, with renewed mandates for government transparency. Unlike the business world, within government, we find programs and services exist in a universe where there are no natural laws of selection. As we examine the "state of the states" in this Executive Report by Mitchell Ummel, we find that the answers exist within a rising movement, one that the author refers to as "Transformative E-Government 3.0."

Published: February 2011, 20 pages, PDF format

Author: Mitchell Ummel

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The Cutter Consortium report The Truth About Cloud Computing: Adoption Strategies, Security, and Reliability delivers a comprehensive assessment of cloud computing's actual strengths, weaknesses, benefits, and risks. You receive 258 pages packed with balanced insight and opinion, presented by a diverse group of industry experts, real-world practitioners and cutting-edge service providers. You gather the expertise you need to determine where (or if) cloud computing fits in your firm's overall business-technology strategy and how to begin the adoption process.

This report will help you:

• Gain a greater understanding of the cloud computing environment so that you may make more rapid decisions
• Think strategically, not tactically, about how your organization wants to leverage technology
• Launch a traditional due diligence process to determine your cloud computing adoption strategy
• Leverage cloud computing to reduce hardware and application software maintenance and update issues
• Identify opportunities to mix and match services
• Discover why -- contrary to popular belief -- cloud computing's security benefits outweigh its security risks
• Dispel the eight common myths regarding software-as-a-service
• Avoid purchasing servers, software, data center space, or network equipment, instead buying these resources as a lower-cost, fully outsourced service
• Scale on-demand to meet peak and uncertain computing demands

Table of Contents

Introduction: Cloud Computing -- IT's Day in the Sun? by San Murugesan.

Chapter 1: Seeing Through the Fog -- The Language, Claims, Myths, and Realities of Cloud Computing by Jeffrey J. Hardy. Understand what cloud computing is and what it is not. Cast a skeptical eye on some of the claims made for cloud computing.

Chapter 2: Clearing Up the Cloud -- Adoption Strategies for Cloud Computing by Ed Reynolds and Charles E. Bess. Outline a cloud solution and discover four broad strategies your organization can use to embrace cloud computing.

Chapter 3: Making the Cloud Case -- Building the Right IT Infrastructure Services by Beth Cohen. Create a successful infrastructure that integrates all the required services seamlessly to the end user.

Chapter 4: Cloud as a Service Delivery Platform -- The Must-Haves for Getting to Value by Jason Liu. Explore how a leading telecommunications service provider is using a cloud enablement platform to bring a variety of new services to the market.

Chapter 5: Entering the Cloud -- Phased Adoption to Computing Nirvana by Steve Andriole. Rethink core competency, sourcing strategies, technology funding, and the role that technology should play in your company, by adopting a 5-step cloud computing implementation plan.

Chapter 6: Security Dynamics of Cloud Computing by Khaled M. Khan. Analyze the cloud computing security requirements of different types of stakeholders and address the security challenges.

Chapter 7: Managing Compliance and Security for Cloud Computing by Jim Hietala and Mark Willoughby. Gain strategies for managing the various compliance and security requirements that will be impacted by cloud computing.

Chapter 8: Understanding SLAs for Cloud Services by G.R. Gangadharan. Explore real-world instances of cloud service-level agreements, what clauses you should look for, and how to avoid agreements that give your provider most of the rights and hardly any liability.

Chapter 9: Cloud Computing -- A New Paradigm in IT by San Murugesan. Gain an overview of cloud computing and its potential and limitations.

Chapter 10: Cloud Computing and Software as a Service -- The Hyper, the Hype, and the Facts with Gabriele Piccoli, Jeffrey M. Kaplan, Luca Mari, and Aurelio Ravarini. Discover the enablers and drivers behind the software-as-a-service and cloud computing trends, as well as the process by which customer acceptance evolves over time.

Chapter 11: Here Comes Cloud Computing with Rob Austin, Christine Davis, Tom DeMarco, Lynne Ellyn, Tim Lister, Andy Maher, Lou Mazzucchelli, Ken Orr, and Mark Seiden. Review the operational economics of cloud computing, its benefits and drawbacks, and receive food for thought as you consider utilizing cloud applications at your organization.

Chapter 12: A Cloud in the Data Center and Services from the Cloud by Brian J. Dooley. Discover the implication that cloud architectures have for the enterprise, and review some of the cloud services vendor offerings, including offerings from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com, AT&T, HP, Sun, and Yahoo!.

Chapter 13: Analytics in the Cloud -- Products, Issues, and Considerations by Curt Hall. Explore some of the issues concerning the use of cloud-based/on-demand data warehousing and analytic applications.

Chapter 14: Up, Up, and Away -- Technology Life in the Clouds by Steve Andriole. Learn to think strategically, not tactically, about how you want to leverage technology.

Authors: Steve Andriole, Rob Austin, Charlie Bess, Beth Cohen, Christine Davis, Tom DeMarco, Brian J. Dooley, Lynne Ellyn, Dr. G.R.Gangadharan, Curt Hall, Jeffrey J. Hardy, Jim Hietala, Jeffrey M. Kaplan, Khaled M. Khan, Tim Lister, Jason Liu, Andy Maher, Luca Mari, Lou Mazzucchelli, San Murugesan, Ken Orr, Gabriele Piccoli, Aurelio Ravarini, Ed Reynolds, Mark Seiden, and Mark Willoughby

Published:

July 2009, 258 pages, PDF

Table of Contents:

• Opening Statement
• An Agile Evolution: Why Kanban Is Catching On in Germany and Around the World
• Demystifying Kanban
• Kanban at an Insurance Company in the Netherlands
• Kanban for Help Desks: Managing the Unplannable
• Use of Kanban in Distributed Offshore Environments

Published: March 2011, 33 pages, PDF format

Authors: Masa K. Maeda, David J. Anderson, Arne Roock, Alan Shalloway, Dan Verweij, Olav Maassen, Roland Cuellar, Siddharta Govindaraj and Sreekanth Tadipatr

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Council Opinions are prepared by the Cutter Business Technology Council and include the commentary of each Council Fellow and the logic behind his or her concurring or dissenting opinion, as well as the strategic implications of the trend.

Published: January 2010, 24 pages, PDF format

Authors: Lynne Ellyn, Tom DeMarco, Lou Mazzucchelli, Tim Lister, Ken Orr, Ron Blitstein, Christine Davis, and Andrew Fried

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The report Transitioning to Agile and Complexity at Cisco VTG by Hubert Smits and Kathleen Rilliet summarizes and explains the implementation of agile software development practices in the large and complex Cisco Voice Technology Group (VTG). The chosen solutions as well as the efforts required to implement them are discussed. The report follows John Kotter's 8 Step Process for leading change, listing results, experiences, successes, and failures.

Table of Contents:

• Project Description
• Analysis of the Situation at Hand
• Implementing the Change to Create an Agile Software Development Lifecycle
• The Act of Changing
• Work of the Change Implementation Team
• Conclusion and Final Thoughts

In the case of any major transition, there are steps forward and steps back. Persistence in the face of resistance, patience in the face of mistakes, and an open-minded, solution-oriented attitude are all key human factors in any successful change. Create your own successful transition to agile software development. Order this report today!

Published: July 2011, 15 pages, PDF format

Authors: Hubert Smits and Kathleen Rilliet

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Companies that have adopted agile methods have realized faster throughput and higher business customer satisfaction on individual projects. Yet despite undeniable wins at the project level, sustained large-scale adoptions of agile methods are fewer and further between. What is preventing more comprehensive adoption of agile within organizations? Many agile experts point to a significant misalignment between the way agile projects are run and the way IT projects are governed in general. IT program and portfolio management, in particular, seem to be at the root of many of these alignment issues.

In this issue we'll explore ways to scale agile methods beyond individual projects so that their associated programs and portfolios can thrive. Hear how one agile consultant saved a failing 100-person company by introducing an agile portfolio planning game - and convincing the company to stop acquiring new customers (a much tougher sell)! Learn effective methods for ranking your projects - and the equally important lesson that "ranking isn't forever."

Published: January 2009, 39 pages, PDF format

Authors: Guest Editor Sanjiv Augustine, with Scott W. Ambler, Johanna Rothman, Jens Coldewey, Jamie Duke & Sam Bayer, Bob Benson & Tom Bugnitz

Online resource center clients: access the report online

In this issue of Cutter IT Journal, we aim to shed some light on how value chain relates to both business architecture and enterprise architecture, and as a result, how it can contribute to aligning or integrating business priorities and IT programs. In the following articles, six experts from varied backgrounds will help you understand and explore the contribution of value chain. Their analyses provide guidance to those who are seeking a different way to revive or reinforce the dialogue between the CIO and the rest of the C-suite, or to ensure that the portfolio of business systems, as well as infrastructure projects, uses business imperatives rather than the appeal of new technology as its justification.

Table of Contents:

• Opening Statement
• Value Streams: Business Architecture's Guidepost to Business-IT Transformation
• Building Competitive Advantage Using the Enterprise Business Architecture
• Optimizing Business Architecture with Value Stream Analysis
• Capability Analysis with the Value Delivery Modeling Language

Published: April 2011, 39 pages, PDF format

Authors: Guest Editor Claude R. Baudoin, William Ulrich, Neal McWhorter, Ralph Whittle, Kraig Parkinson, Fred A. Cummins and Henk de Man

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Let me take a tangent here. Have you ever noticed how there are largely two broad sets of people: those who talk and those who do? OK, that may be an oversimplification (how uncharacteristic for an academic you may say), as there are plenty of variations between these two extremes, but go with me here for a minute. I'm sure you remember the many people you have met in your life who have told you how good they are, how much they have achieved, how close they were to getting that new position, and so on. Very often this façade of certainty and bravado hides a relatively thin record of real accomplishments; conversely, there is a broad group of extremely accomplished people who let the facts speak for themselves.

Published: March 2010, 28 pages, PDF format

Authors: Gabriele Piccoli, Joseph Feller, Mark S. Choate

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Published: August 2010, 32 pages, PDF format

Authors: Joseph Feller, Tadgh Nagle, Dave Sammon, Claude Baudoin, Lakshmanan G, Pradeep Kumar M, and Harish K, Simon Woodworth and Rohan Beckles

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

This Executive Report by Payson Hall examines the diverse skills and knowledge necessary to manage complex projects effectively and explores essential aspects of the decision-supporting relationship between an organization's PMs and its executives to offer insights into what constitutes a "good" project manager.

Published: August 2010, 13 pages, PDF format

Author: Payson Hall

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The report What Is a Complex Project Manager -- Really? by Robert K. Wysocki explores the role of a complex project manager, what disciplines should be present in his or her skills profile, where these unique professionals come from, and, finally, what can be done to develop a cadre of such professionals to meet the ever-growing demand for their services.

Table of Contents:

• What Is a Complex Project?
• What Is the Need for Complex Project Managers?
• Who Is a Complex Project Manager?
• What Are the Disciplines of a Complex Project Manager?
• Where Do Complex Project Managers Come From?
• How Should We Develop Complex Project Managers?
• How Should an Organization Prepare?

Be prepared to support complexity and uncertainty in your organization. Order this report today!

Published: June 2011, 17 pages, PDF format

Author: Robert K. Wysocki

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The report What Is the Adaptive Project Framework -- Really? by Robert K. Wysocki introduces APF as an umbrella framework that encompasses all project management methodologies. Included in APF is a process for choosing and adapting the best-fit project management approach tailored to a specific project. In addition to providing a model for managing complex projects just as RUP, Scrum, and several others do, APF is a structure that embraces all project management methodologies.

Table of Contents:

• APF Background
• Project Setup
• Project Execution
• Variations and Challenge
• Putting It All Together
• Endnotes

Benefit from a framework for understanding, analyzing, planning, and continuously adapting the best-fit management approach to any project. Order this report today!

Published: February 2011, 15 pages, PDF format

Author: Robert K. Wysocki

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

This report by Dana Bredemeyer and Ruth Malan spells out the necessary qualities for great enterprise architects in the context of a historical story. It is the story of James Madison and the creation of the US Constitution. The story is told in narrative form, giving you the opportunity to discover its lessons for yourself as you shape how the architect's role is perceived in your organization.

The key characteristics for success that emerge from the Madison story and resonate with our experience with top architects around the world are:

• Domain expertise
• Political acuity
• Strategic ability
• Leadership skills

Having a clear, articulated strategy, and a way to move from that strategy to activities and decisions that align with it, will help you make a strategic difference in your organization. Order your copy of this report today and find out how!

Published: August 2004, 22 pages, PDF format

Authors: Dana Bredemeyer and Ruth Malan

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Some think it the cloud means virtualization, others think it means scalable infrastructure, and still others think it means software-as-a-service. Sometimes, the business has a different and dangerous perspective, thinking that the cloud provides a new way to source IT solutions without having to go through the IT department.

This webinar will present an overall enterprise architecture that incorporates the many different perspectives of the cloud, addresses the range of issues, and describes a framework to govern what can be moved to the cloud, what should not be moved, what IT should do proactively, what the business can do on its own, and what it must coordinate with IT.

Presented by: Mike Rosen, Enterprise Architecture Practice Director

Resource Center clients can Access the webinar here.