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
At the beginning of each year, Cutter asks us consultants to forecast what the next big thing will be in our respective fields. (Read the 2014 predictions.) This year's request got me thinking what the next big thing in enterprise architecture was likely to be. At first I was stumped. For the last four or five years, "business capability" has been the most talked about addition to the EA repertoire.
Tools and technologies are an essential part of any distributed Agile development. Companies invest thousands of dollars in procuring high-fidelity video conferencing equipment at their onshore locations. However, one thing they nearly always ignore is the integration capability with their offshore locations.
Two countries that come to mind when discussing offshore development are India and China. Although both countries have good infrastructure for software development, there are two technology aspects that need careful attention.
The use of Hadoop in support of data warehousing and BI analytics efforts is still a relatively new development for many mainstream businesses. Some organizations, however, are implementing Hadoop in order to supplement their data warehousing and BI environments with its extreme processing capabilities.
The advent of cloud-based Watson-powered systems and services is significant. Outfitted with content and knowledge bases tailored to specific domains and industries, such systems can deliver expert reasoning and decision support that organizations can license. Thus, it increases the practicality of organizations to use such systems by reducing, if not eliminating, the need to deploy such high-end applications on-premises.
In this Update, we explore how analytics engineering will emerge as a focal point for handling the integrations and infrastructure requirements of this new discipline. And fundamental changes will be necessary in how business processes are understood and in how decisions are made and evaluated at every level.