Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

There is a price tag for innovating quickly and easily. One of the costly line items is technical debt, the increased drag on the ability to do software innovation that arises from a very specific source: failing to code with a proper level of care and diligence. Writing code is much like another procedural exercise -— writing laws and regulations. The less care one takes in the process of creating these instructions, the harder it will be to diagnose unintended problems and fix them, or even to build on the existing procedural foundations.

Gamification should not be done for the sake of gamification. It should be a business-led initiative that aligns to business strategy with a focus on improving specific key performance indicators (KPIs). The metrics to track and measure should be clearly laid down at the onset, and a business case should be created to justify the investments.

You can find variations on the definition of API all over the Internet. An API is a description of a software component in terms of its inputs, outputs, and operations. The inputs, outputs, and operations comprise the interface to the component (i.e., the application programming interface). In this sense, APIs have been part of system documentation for decades. However, there’s one key aspect to APIs that goes beyond good documentation housekeeping: APIs define interfaces and service usually without regard to implementation details.

One-off innovations are moderately easy to take advantage of, but to create a pipeline of innovative ideas that materially impacts the growth of an organization, it is critical to nurture an innovation management process that can be sustained and that can remain flexible and adjustable to accommodate changes in the competitive environment.

Developing and nurturing an innovation management process takes considerable effort, resources, and ingenuity to perfect. In advanced organizations motivated to reorchestrate the innovation management process, you’ll find a focus on the practices and principles of enterprise architecture (EA). This Executive Report explores the integration between the innovation management process and EA. It also highlights 10 key challenges that enterprises encounter and offers five pieces of advice on how to implement the concepts in your enterprise.

This Executive Update focuses on the opportunities for, and the challenges in, leveraging value in unstructured data — in particular, text. 

Architecture thrives as a discipline because it holds the promise of being able to sift out the essential structural elements from the complex tangle that is the enterprise. The theory is that architecture will help us realize business value by ferreting out the essentials so that we can grapple with the elements of the enterprise that are disproportionate in their influence, and make them deliver. The promised land of architecture-enabled business value beckons tantalizingly, but are we there yet? Do we even know how to measure architectural value, let alone in financial terms?

Cisco got serious about its IoT strategy with the completion of its acquisition of IoT platform and services provider Jasper Technologies. This development highlights just how dynamic the IoT market is. It’s also important because it essentially transforms Cisco into a major enterprise IoT provider with extensive IoT platform and packaged IoT solutions offerings.