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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.

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 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

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