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
Mobile devices and cloud computing continue to redefine basic concepts of IT and challenge the concepts taken for granted over the preceding decades. One of the issues in ferment today is that of defining access and providing secure and differential availability of computing resources to users as needed.
As Agile practices move into mainstream development, the need to clarify product ownership has become increasingly acute. Where does the product owner fit in with respect to the project? Where does he or she fit in with respect to the organization? And what are the product owner's responsibilities in large projects, or projects that fall outside the normal territory of Agile development? This Executive Update looks to answer these questions.
The question is: do we need standards for performance measures? I've long opposed the request for canned measures and championed the use of personalized metrics. Your metrics should answer your root questions and fulfill your specific needs. However, I also teach that metrics are built from measures. It's these performance measures that would greatly benefit from a common language.
As with most new business disciplines, discussing business architecture with executives typically requires clarifying the value proposition. With business architecture in particular, clearly articulating and communicating its value is a prerequisite to launching a substantive and sustainable deployment effort.
Today, cloud services are the reincarnated, super-charged version of ASP. In the current decade, cloud has proliferated into many derivatives of XaaS, or "anything as a service" (e.g., SaaS -- software as a service, PaaS -- platform as a service, IaaS -- infrastructure as a service, and DRaaS -- disaster recovery as a service). The derivatives of XaaS are many and increasing daily. There are so many forecasts, it's impossible to determine the market size and growth trajectories.