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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Cloud computing is considered the great equalizer between small and large client firms by many senior executives and pundits. Is this true? And what are the emerging practices and lessons from cloud adoption by SMEs? To answer these questions, we describe three illustrative cases in depth: the Dana Foundation, Diesel Direct, and Art-World.
There are many purposes and potential opportunities based on an architectural view of the enterprise. One that may not be readily apparent is the use of a rigorous and holistic understanding of business to detect health issues for the enterprise itself.
There is a lot of confusion among practitioners about what "digital" really means. Does it refer to a set of technologies (i.e., social, mobile, big data/analytics, the cloud, the Internet of Things), or is there more to it? To give digital a more precise focus, we have coined the term "ExConomy." It defines what digital entails from a business-value point of view and pinpoints why it deserves consideration in executive committees.
Predictive maintenance is becoming one of the more killer applications to arise out of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Industrial Internet movements. We are now seeing companies ramp up their efforts to develop machine analytics with the intent of increasing equipment availability, lowering production costs, and enhancing their customer relationship and loyalty efforts.
In our recent workshop on the integrative framework, we emphasized that one cannot apply a single software method to all kinds of software efforts. For example, trying to develop a whole new software platform with the same process one uses to fix production bugs is a path to failure. Likewise, performance measures that are appropriate for staying on top of an input stream of production bugs differ greatly from those needed for the development of a brand new platform. Hence, to successfully manage your overall project portfolio you need to mix and match various practices and measures.
What is true with financial models is even truer with enterprise models that are even more abstract and expansive in their scope. The point is that it is all too easy to create poorly thought-out models that shine radiantly as PowerPoint slides, Visio diagrams, and financial spreadsheets, but which mislead. It takes time and a labor of love to design views that are less about emotional appeal and aesthetics than they are about representing truths that are sometimes ugly, but always revealing.
The Internet of Things (IoT) promises companies many benefits from connecting products and services. But once you start examining the requirements of the connected device ecosystem, it soon becomes apparent that implementing and managing IoT products and their supporting infrastructure is a complex undertaking.
This Executive Update reviews key legal issues that businesses face when reviewing and negotiating contracts for IaaS. It discusses key requirements related to the service itself, remedies if the service fails in one or more of these requirements, and ways to ensure that if a "provider divorce" is necessary, it can be conducted with minimal mess and expense.