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Do you consider information systems transformation as tactical, limited to helping enterprises achieve incremental IT productivity gains?

Cutter Fellow Ken Orr introduced Business Enterprise Architecture Modeling (BEAM), a state-of-the-art methodology that uses a business-driven strategy as the key to the long-term success of your enterprise architecture program more than five years ago.  Since then, BEAM, which is based on real-world applications, has been successfully used by organizations to create a long-view of their current and future business architecture needs.

In this webinar recording, Ken Orr talks about what’s been learned on projects that used BEAM, how BEAM’s been updated to make it an even more robust tool, and how you can use it to guide business-IT alignment, support business initiatives, enhance IT strategic planning, manage IT projects more effectively, and understand your organization’s total set of IT assets and their context. In this webinar, Ken is joined by Enterprise Architecture Practice Director Mike Rosen, and Senior Consultant Mitchell Ummel, with whom he recently completed an award-winning project using the BEAM methodology.

Are you leveraging business architecture to facilitate strategic planning, address executive priorities, deliver customer value, leverage investments in major initiatives and deploy horizontal solutions across business units? If not, you may be underutilizing and undervaluing business architecture.

When leveraged effectively, business architecture offers the cross-functional, cross-disciplinary transparency required to deliver bottom line business value. Whether you are jumpstarting your business architecture efforts or have deployments in place, this webinar (recorded live) will show you how to expand the value proposition of this critical business discipline. Listen to Cutter Senior Consultant William Ulrich as he discusses how business architecture has been used in practice and how it will evolve long-term.

The hype around cloud computing is intense. Cutting through it to determine the practical benefits for your enterprise (if there are any) is tricky. If you’re looking for a pragmatic, business-based decision-making approach, spend an hour with Cutter’s Mitchell Ummel.

In the live-recorded webinar, Cloud Computing: Separating the Hype from the Reality, Mitchell demonstrates how you can weigh the strategic opportunities, benefits, costs and risks of cloud computing. Mitchell presents a hype-free roadmap for cloud adoption and offers practical guidance, by enterprise size (small, medium, and large-size organizations) and application domains (such as line-of-business applications, development/test environments, peaking capacity, and pilot/proof of concept) for cloud computing adoption.

One of the top three, if not two, reasons for enterprises to adopt a new methodology is performance improvement. Yet there are three likely not-so-wonderful-outcomes for new adoption efforts:

• only marginal improvements
• solely localized improvements, or
• side effects that worsen other areas of the process or the enterprise.

Consider, for example, a project where increasing the amount of code produced results in an increase of technical debt. Or the implementation of an iterative discipline that results in slow handling of critical issues that surge on production.

Kanban can help avoid these traps and help your new methodology adoption truly improve performance. Kanban is a mechanism that not only enables you to rapidly detect issues that may affect the continuous flow you need to effectively deliver projects to production, but also allows you to act upon those issues immediately. Balancing and limiting the amount of work in progress  is a core part of Kanban, and makes it possible to handle risks and variability so you can avoid bottlenecks and impediments.
In this recorded webinar, Cutter Senior Consultant Masa Maeda gives you the foundation to understand what Kanban is about and why it is such an amazing productivity booster. Masa describes the what, why, and hows of Kanban, and then answers questions from the audience. Watch this webinar to find out if Kanban is a tool that will support your agile methodology adoption.

Technical debt assessments often follow a similar pattern across engagements. In contrast, technical debt reduction initiatives can vary significantly from one company to another. In addition to exposing unexpected technical challenges, the technical debt reduction initiative brings business issues, organizational considerations and methodical questions to the fore. Moreover, when a technical debt reduction initiative is expanded from reduction to prevention of downstream effects, performance measures, governance issues and cultural aspects need to be addressed. Unless all these issues are addressed in a holistic manner, their combined effect will likely stall the technical debt initiative, frustrating the efforts to wrestle technical debt to the ground at the enterprise level.

In this hour-long recorded webinar, Mike Rosen, Director of Cutter’s Enterprise Architecture Practice explains the critical links to BPM and their role in delivering on the promises of BPM — improved flexibility, productivity and performance. You’ll get a glimpse of future directions that extend these benefits to knowledge workers within the enterprise.

If agility is about delivering customer value by being flexible, then how can adherence to a traditional scope, schedule, and cost plan be the best way to measure performance? It can’t be. With pervasive change the norm, we can no longer “follow the plan with minimal changes.” Instead, our focus needs to be on successfully adapting to inevitable changes. We need to move beyond the classic Iron Triangle measures to an Agile Triangle that focuses on Value, Quality, and Constraints.
In this webinar recording, Jim Highsmith explores the necessity for and the rationale behind moving to this new set of agile performance measures. In 40-minutes, he touches on

• The components – value, quality, and constraints – of the Agile triangle;
• Why performance measures need to change for Agile to gain wide adoption;
• Why technical quality is so important;
• How focusing on a releasable product results in the most value for the least cost.

Are your Agile teams are asked to be agile, flexible, and adaptive, but then told to conform to planned scope, schedule, and cost goals? Are they asked to adapt – but inside a very small box? If so, be sure to watch this webinar to discover why, to bring true agile values to organizations you must change performance measures. Afterall, it’s not that scope, schedule, and cost are unimportant, but that value and quality are more important.

Take an in-depth look at where enterprise risk management has been, where it is today, and where it needs to go if it wishes to become relevant to organizations today, and more importantly, tomorrow.

Do you really govern the software development process in your IT organization or do its uncertainty and unpredictability leave you, your internal customers and your company’s customers aghast? Do you manage to bake in quality in every build? Can you assess the quality of your software in a way that quantifies the risk?

Spend an hour with David Coleman and get some new ideas on how to run your projects more successfully.

In this webinar, recorded live, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Bob Benson reveals two often-overlooked areas business and IT exec can carefully explore to uncover the less-obvious opportunities for IT cost reduction: the project’s capital and expense budget, and the ongoing IT expense budget.

In this 40-minute recorded webinar, Cutter Senior Consultant Sara Cullen looks at the state of outsourcing and how a recession changes the outsourcing landscape — both current and future contracts as well as the provider market.

Sara Cullen’s 20 years of hands-on, global experience supporting organizations in countries experiencing an economic slump gives her unique insight into the effect recession has on outsourcing. She explores some predictions, the types of contracts likely to become more common, and the long-term implications.

Some analysts predict that 2011 is the year that Social CRM goes mainstream. But many are still unclear as to what Social CRM is and how to practically deploy it in their enterprise.

There are many issues relating to the cloud and affecting its adoption — integration, security, data integrity, reliability, accountability and responsibility.