Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Businesses and governments collect a large amount of personal information, some of it quite sensitive, about their clients, employees, patients, and citizens. At the same time, a random scan of media reports on any given day will find multiple stories of personal data being lost by or stolen from corporations and governments.

The Semantic Web offers us a compelling architectural framework upon which to build next-generation, Internet-ready applications within the enterprise. Now is the time to embrace the possibilities.

Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The industrial model that promoted manufacturing and engineering is slowly being phased out to usher in a new digital economy powered by developments in networking and information management. The old model placed controls on everything, including information flow, and permitted sharing of knowledge only through hierarchies of roles within the organization.

Data integration is a key issue for any enterprise. If data from multiple sources can't be mixed and matched, it gets hard to gather the right information at the right time. As a result, it becomes a major hurdle to make informed decisions within or across an enterprise and for employees to reach set goals. How can one overcome this obstruction of the lifeblood of a company (i.e., enterprise data)? One promising set of technologies is based on the Semantic Web.

The Internet and Web have enabled easy and nearly instantaneous dissemination and exchange of different types of information almost free of cost. Most information currently on the Web is document (page) based and presented in textual natural language, because it is primarily meant for use by humans. It's hard for computers to understand and make use of this information content, as it may lack structure, precise meaning, or context, or because a given word or phrase could refer to more than one thing.

As a mature technology, enterprise resource planning (ERP) has a strong history of increasing productivity through organizational integration and the application of the packaged software concept. ERP provides the majority of computer applications associated with day-to-day business operations for medium-sized and large firms, including accounting, human resources management, and the coordination of manufacturing operations.

One of the major strengths of cloud computing is the freedom it gives companies to think strategically -- not tactically -- about how they want to leverage technology.