Strategic advice to leverage new technologies
Technology is at the heart of nearly every enterprise, enabling new business models and strategies, and serving as the catalyst to industry convergence. Leveraging the right technology can improve business outcomes, providing intelligence and insights that help you make more informed and accurate decisions. From finding patterns in data through data science, to curating relevant insights with data analytics, to the predictive abilities and innumerable applications of AI, to solving challenging business problems with ML, NLP, and knowledge graphs, technology has brought decision-making to a more intelligent level. Keep pace with the technology trends, opportunities, applications, and real-world use cases that will move your organization closer to its transformation and business goals.
Recently Published
Shortfalls in the risk management approaches many companies currently take can leave them dangerously exposed. These companies either have no corporate-level mechanisms for monitoring and acting on risk exposure or gather potentially relevant data but fail to develop appropriate metrics to support effective monitoring, control, and timely remediation. These metrics can take the form of key risk indicators (KRIs), which all levels of management can use to provide evidence of the effectiveness of the implemented risk management strategies. In this Advisor, we share some features of effective KRI implementation.
In the future, and as the technology advances, corporate, government, and military leaders will increasingly turn to advanced AI advisory systems to assist them with business strategy development. Such advanced AI advisory systems will likely function in the form of some kind of assistant. In this Advisor, IBM’s Project Debater application offers some insight into how such an advanced AI advisory system might function.
Yiannis Kanellopoulos addresses a key issue that we need to satisfactorily tackle: the accountability of algorithmic systems. Automated decision making can go seriously wrong, and hence, evaluating an algorithmic system and the organization that utilizes it in terms of their accountability and transparency assumes ever greater importance.
Daniel Power and Ciara Heavin discuss the need for — and the benefits of — automating decisions and decision processes and explore major areas of decision automation. They examine emerging, innovative sensing technologies — such as ambient intelligence and the IoT — that support decision automation and identify five major challenges and opportunities associated with deploying decision automation and sensors.
Mohan Babu K presents a roadmap for rolling out RPA and examines RPA solutions from key vendors. He then presents a snapshot of real-world stories of RPA adoption across industry domains and, based on his personal experience, recommends five key design topics to consider in rolling out scalable RPA solutions.
Aravind Ajad Yarra emphasizes that automation is most effective when humans and machines work together to deliver business outcomes and recommends that automation be designed in harmony with human experiences and business processes. He outlines three types of automation — experience automation, process automation, and platform automation — on which smart automation manifests, considers some smart automation fallacies, and examines how a design thinking approach can successfully be applied to smart automation.
In her article, Prerna Lal discusses the use of ML techniques to address cyberthreats and explores the benefits of AI-based cybersecurity solutions.
Helen Pukszta outlines several potential enterprise applications of drones in different industry sectors with illustrative real-world examples. She briefly highlights how Part 107 of Chapter 14 of the US Code of Federal Regulations redefines commercial drone use and the risks drones pose. She also discusses the challenges and limitations of today’s drones and how those concerns are being addressed. The barriers to employing drones for business are quickly melting away, and it’s time to pursue the opportunities that drones present, she advises.