Cutter's Philosophy

Cutter Consortium's philosophy is that there is no single right solution for all enterprises, or all departments within one enterprise, or even all projects within a department. Cutter believes that the complexity of the business-technology issues confronting corporations today demands multiple detailed perspectives from which a company can view its opportunities and risks in order to make the right strategic and tactical decisions. The simplistic pronouncements other analyst firms make do not take into account the unique situation of each organization. This is another reason to present the several sides to each issue: to enable clients to determine the course of action that best fits their unique situation.

The Cutter Difference

Cutter's research and inquiry response services are qualitatively different from that of other analyst firms in many vital ways:

• Research gives clients Access to the Experts - their latest writings and thinking. All of Cutter's content - right down to the last E-Mail Advisor - is provided exclusively by internationally recognized expert practitioners. Cutter has no "desk-bound" analysts. Cutter's research allows clients to tap into this brain trust and get the latest thinking on the business-IT issues challenging enterprises worldwide.
  
  
• Inquiry privileges give clients Access to the Experts - personalized guidance from the world's top practitioners. Every inquiry is fielded by a Cutter Senior Consultant, Fellow, or Faculty member. Clients can purchase bundles of hours and may allot some of the inquiry time to senior executives, such as the CIO, pairing him/her with a top business-IT strategist so they can brainstorm every month. This allows the two of them to build a rapport and gives the Cutter expert a growing understanding of the issues the enterprise is facing. The Cutter expert quickly becomes a valuable advisor. Similarly, inquiry time can be reserved for a client's Director of Enterprise Architecture to get guidance from one of Cutter's leading EA experts. The Cutter expert quickly gains an understanding of the issues and is able to be an excellent "sounding board."
  
  
• Clients call Cutter "the thinking person's research firm" because of Cutter's dedication to debate of the business-technology issues enterprises face and its success in attracting the thought leaders worldwide to conduct this debate. Clients get cutting-edge thinking plus multiple viewpoints so they can determine what's best for their individual enterprise/department/project. Reliance on current industry trends should not replace the hard work of figuring out what's best for your organization given its business strategy and drivers.
  
  
• Emphasis is on strategies and processes, not on vendor/product detail. This is based on Cutter's view that it is not the choice of product or vendor that determines success or failure, but sound strategies and business processes, agility, leadership and effective teams, hard-hitting financial analysis, and other complex factors.
  
  
• Written content is likened to "consultancy in print" since it provides hands-on, actionable solutions from expert practitioners who are successfully implementing these ideas, whether it be IT strategic planning, security strategies, or risk management. This relates back to the fact that the content is written by the people who are on the forefront of their fields and who are guiding companies daily.
  
  
• Content is written with both the IT and the business user in mind.
  
  
• Information and advice is truly objective. Cutter is unique in the research space in having no relationships with vendors. It is well known that other analyst firms derive significant portions of their revenues from vendors and that the choice of which vendors to evaluate, and the slant of the reports, can be influenced by this factor.
  
  
• An emphasis on agility. The leaders of the agile project management and software development movement are all part of Cutter. Agile methodologies are evolving in real time, as new projects push the previous limits, and Cutter reports are the place where the latest breakthroughs appear. To quote Cutter Fellow Jim Highsmith, "In a frenetic world of business and technology change, a traditional conformance-to-plan mentality doesn't work. Project teams, project managers, and executives must adopt a dynamic view of the world in which they embrace change as a competitive advantage, not shrink from it... In today's business world, the move to incorporate agile methodologies into your organization is ultimately a strategic one."
  
  
• Focus on project management, risk management, and change management so IT can accomplish the changes business demands. Software engineering's pioneers are key to the Cutter team and they know that delivering results depends on sound project, risk, and change management. These, rather than the vendor or product chosen, most typically are the critical success factors for projects. As Cutter Fellow, Tom DeMarco pointed out in a Business Technology Trends and Impacts Opinion, "IT is change. When an organization needs to change itself, the invariable impulse is to build an IT system to effect and support the change. That's why IT is so difficult; it consists of so much more than writing and testing code. The real and always difficult challenge of IT is to transform the organization. The new program or system is merely a vehicle for this. The hard part is not getting the software to work but rather getting agreement on it before the fact and effecting the necessary changes to the company and its procedures afterward."
  
  
• Licenses are much more affordable than those of other analyst firms and more flexible.
  
  
• Eloquence as well as insights. Clients routinely remark that Cutter's reports are a joy to read. Perhaps this is because our experts have collectively published hundreds of books, many of them the definitive work in the field.
  
  
• Licenses are designed to maximize value to senior management. From Cutter's focus on strategies and cutting edge practices to our inquiry program that pairs executives and Cutter experts to the actual design of each deliverable, Cutter's program is aimed at delivering far-reaching, immediate benefits to the highest level of the client organization. Deliverables assume executives are almost too busy to read, and that they are on the move. A quick abstract appears on the front of every in-depth Executive Report, and a one-page Executive Summary accompanies the report, to help executives determine what to read and what to route to other members of the team. Weekly E-Mail Advisors contain valuable take-home lessons in a fast-reading format. Print copies are provided to executives for reading on airplanes and trains.
  
  

Every step has been taken to ensure senior IT executives get the high-level information they need fast and to guarantee they connect to the best minds in the business!