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.
Insight
This Executive Update, one in a series about software architecture, introduces product line architecture, which addresses problems that often hobble efforts to promote reuse in software systems.
The art of business transformation has a long history of mediocre success as companies have attempted to make great changes for quality and efficiency and to contend with significant movements in the market. As we'll explore in this Executive Update, the same forces pressing companies to react more swiftly fortunately are also providing new ways to support and energize enterprise redirection.
We've observed that architecture in the enterprise is still an evolving discipline. We saw how the reality and the words that purport to be tags for the reality might be two entirely different things. If the word-reality gap is true of architecture in general, is it not reasonable to expect this to be so with "solution architecture" and "solution architect," too?
Your organization has decided that it wants to build a mobile application. Congratulations! Here in Part I of this Executive Update series, we'll start with the very first stages of planning and discovery, while future Updates will address the rest of the project's lifecycle, including Agile development, Lean product design, user interface/user experience (UI/UX), resources and capabilities required, estimation, and major architectural concerns such as scalability and mobile security.
For teams tasked with developing an organization's enterprise systems, there are extra issues to consider in addition to those encountered in a business-to-consumer context. For starters, any such project will have political and cultural repercussions. In business, there is generally a tacit understanding that the feelings that make people say and do things -- really -- are undiscussable. As a pungent blog post on the subject of corporate culture recently observed: