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.
Recently Published
Every software executive that faces the decision whether or not to ship code must answer the question, "Do the economic benefits of shipping outweigh the economic risks?" To decide, the executive must have a view of each. The hoped-for benefits are clear in that they are up front in the decision to build the software. They can include revenue, meeting contractual obligations, enterprise efficiency, or supporting some enterprise initiative such as a new service offering. The economic risks can involve exposures resulting from software failures, leading to the following:
Every software executive that faces the decision whether or not to ship code must answer the question, "Do the economic benefits of shipping outweigh the economic risks?" To decide, the executive must have a view of each. The hoped-for benefits are clear in that they are up front in the decision to build the software. They can include revenue, meeting contractual obligations, enterprise efficiency, or supporting some enterprise initiative such as a new service offering.
It would be hard to overlook the rise of social technologies, yet many enterprise architecture (EA) teams do not consider managing social technologies as part of their brief. This is partly because of the organic nature of social technologies and partly because they lie beyond the enterprise boundary. Social technologies change the boundaries, nature, and scope of EA. Organizations, senior executives, business managers, and IT leaders are all under pressure to find ways to deal with and take advantage of the attraction of social technologies.
Executive Update
The 3Ds: A Strategic Data Virtualization Methodology
Conventional data management approaches have always emphasized the physical movement of data across enterprise systems. Data virtualization (DV) introduced a paradigm shift to this approach by virtue of not physically moving data. This innovative approach has successfully addressed some of the shortcomings of the conservative approach. However, DV is not a silver bullet for all data management issues and presents its own set of challenges, as we will explore in this Executive Update.
It took home improvement retailing giant Home Depot about a week before it finally confirmed it had suffered a data breach. Home Depot first reported the possibility of a breach on 2 September 2014, but did not actually confirm the hacking until 8 September. During that time, the company made somewhat vague statements that it was still carrying out an investigation to determine whether or not its systems had actually been compromised.
Applying Lean practices to software and DevOps has multiple benefits. The disciplined application of Lean requires product flow measures. Unlike manufacturing, software and DevOps are artifact-centric processes. This Executive Report introduces artifact centricity and discusses how to specify, instrument, and apply product flows to artifact-centric processes.
Over the last decade there has been growing interest in applying Lean thinking to software. More recently, Lean methods have been extended to broader business processes that include both development and operations. DevOps practitioners set out to better integrate IT operations and software development to improve their joint responsiveness to change requests. These requests may include traditional IT problem tickets, new requirements for software for a specific market, fulfilling a contract, or for software embedded in a larger system. DevOps has the following goals: