Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

There is a common set of questions burning in peoples’ minds when they think about the business architect role, whether they are new to the discipline or experienced but seeking to compare approaches. In this Advisor, we address these important questions based on practical experience and best practices employed by a wide range of industries, organizations, and geographies.

Regulatory authorities are becoming increasingly focused on monitoring outsourcing arrangements in the financial services industry.

As companies strive to be more nimble and agile across their value chains, they are rapidly evolving their information management and analytics capabilities. Business intelligence and data warehouse (BI/DW) competency centers need to transform themselves to stay relevant and help their companies build a competitive advantage. This Executive Update provides a description of some key changes you can make to start transforming your BI/DW competency center in a cost-effective manner. Some of these changes include enabling advanced analytics, accelerating speed to market with Agile and DevOps, and empowering citizen developers and data scientists.

Human communication is based on natural language. Teaching computers to understand natural language is obviously a requirement, but our communication uses more than just voice (speech). An important part of human communication is our ability to see and understand what we see. Providing visual recognition capabilities to machines is the next big step in teaching them to understand a person when they speak.

Ask any developer and they’ll tell you that they waste most of their time debugging or adding features to code after it is initially written. Many systems have been hacked up so much that fixing one bug can sprout several more and what should take a few hours to fix ends up taking days, or even weeks. But with test-first development, developers find many errors before they can become bugs. Tests instantly catch errors and problems, not only in the current module but also against the whole system. This helps developers write software that is compatible across the whole system.

Knowledge must be discovered and utilized in context. Creating our own route in our own work will enable us to develop our personal theory of problem solving, thus making sense of our deliberations and dis­coveries. Educating learners engaged in professional practice in-the-unfamiliar requires us to abandon the safety of universal theory and instead embrace the principles of personal discovery, reflective practice, sensemaking, and the development of capability.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is currently emerging as an area where recent developments are likely to have a major impact on the way organizations do business, societies organize themselves, and even on how we address values and ethics.

The fact is that AGI already exists in our daily life. A common example is the GPS systems present in many new cars manufactured today; and let’s not forget the drones being used to deliver pizzas and cars that drive themselves. While automatic pilots have been used in commercial planes for quite some time, what AGI is about to offer to general business and human activity is well beyond what most of us have seen so far.

2017 is going to be a year of strange winners, and perhaps the strangest of all will be a giant leap away from technology and back to solutions that don’t rely on 24/7 connectivity. With the onslaught of major hacks and Facebook embarrassment, the antitech crowd may have its best year in decades.