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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The distinction between businesses that focus on a relatively small range of products with a high volume of sales and businesses that embrace either a wide range of products or highly specialized niche products with relatively smaller sales volumes is highly relevant to enterprise architecture.
Traditionally, farmers have applied new techniques — such as new seeds, pesticides, herbicides, and so forth — to a small plot to observe optimal yields. Instead of such empirical analysis, which takes time, farmers are also embracing results from analysis of large, real-world data sets from public sources. Analysis of such big data can produce reliable recommendations much more quickly.
A truly effective enterprise architecture should be something that senior executives in an enterprise use to manage their business on a day-to-day basis, that guides the implementation of strategy, and that helps them in communicating and implementing change.
A number of trends and developments — stemming both from advances in information technology and rising consumer/social expectations — are driving the commercialization of cognitive computing for consumer and enterprise use.
Predefined source or reference frameworks such as TOGAF, Zachman Framework, IFW, or DoDAF are all very different. We need a simple way to first identify the factors that we need from each framework, and then combine them to create several relevant checklists or frameworks. This tool is the EA metaframework. This Executive Update provides an explanation of the different types of architecture frameworks, describes the role of the metaframework, and shows how architects can use it to create multiple integrated practical frameworks.
Organizations seeking to incorporate effective analytics programs will likely encounter several challenges along the way. Whereas many of these can be dealt with in the short term, others will require solutions that we do not know to exist at the present time.
Big data has already demonstrated many successes, and experts assert that cognitive computing systems can actually make the context behind decision making “computable,” acting as a proxy for human intuition. It is that convergence — human creativity supported by relevant information — that offers the greatest potential.
Successful digital transformation enables the organization to embrace innovation, to develop new products and models, and to rapidly realize those to create value. Although there are no blueprints for success, we will examine three best practices that can allow businesses to increase speed and reduce cost, reach customers with an excellent user experience, and experiment with new products, features, and models.