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.
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This article describes some trends about technologies, technologists, and technoligarchs. First, we’ll look at the technologies with the most momentum. Next, we’ll examine the technologists escaping from data centers. Finally, we’ll round out the discussion by addressing the technoligarchs who control much of the digital landscape.
Combining the fundamentally different paradigms of Agile architecture and architectural agility can prove to reinforce one another. In a real-world case study from the consumer sector, this Advisor describes one company’s experience combining Agile and EA.
Architectures that combine blockchain and AI offer some exciting possibilities, not only for DRM, but for other applications as well — like supply chain, financial, and trading systems. These include those systems that need to provide responses to events that require a higher form of reasoning than can be practically performed using blockchain’s smart contract functionality alone. Researchers are now working out the particulars of such applications, and we hope to see commercial platforms emerging over the next few years.
In this, the final Update of the series, we summarize the ideas we have discussed with the goal of leaving you, the business analyst, with a starting point for the application of Agile principles.
One of the keys to a solid architecture is considering how your organization will test it. This is true not only from an end-to-end perspective, but also when considering areas like usability, performance, security, reliability, and resilience. You must make these investments in quality and testing transparent to your stakeholders and help them realize their value proposition.
When people speak of capability assessments, they are referring to capturing and maintaining various metrics about the capabilities in their capability map, which can then be assessed to identify improvement opportunities and make such decisions as where to invest. Capturing these attributes provides a more complete view of each capability, beyond mere definitional information, making capabilities much more useful in practice. Organizations can use capability assessment information in a variety of proactive or reactive scenarios.
In Part X, we examine survey findings pertaining to current AI application design and development trends and plans by organizations to utilize outside AI experts and to train employees in AI development.
One of the key reasons organizations invoke for staying away from public clouds is security, and specifically the risk that unauthorized parties will access data. From a technology perspective, placing data in a public cloud may actually improve security rather than weaken it. We explore the four simple reasons for this in this Advisor.