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
From time to time, the corpus of information technologies absorbs new classes of technology, often in one fell swoop. The collection of technologies discussed here -- social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (SMAC) -- represents such a bundle. A decade ago, social, mobile, and cloud technologies were more a gleam in the eye of innovators than part of the CIO repertoire. Back then, analytics were frozen in a period of glacial change that was moving far too slow to attract much attention except from analysts trying to divine which bigger vendor was going to buy which smaller vendor. Today, social, mobile, analytics, and cloud are the cornerstone technologies driving innovation inside many if not most enterprises. In this issue of Cutter IT Journal, we bring together five articles with some different looks at the opportunities and challenges SMAC poses.
While adoption of social technologies may lag behind the others due to their newness, IT leaders have had the concept drilled into their heads constantly over the past few years. In our first article, Cutter Senior Consultant Dave Higgins and coauthor Sam Clark rightfully point out the distinction between public social networks (e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook) and private social networks (those dedicated to a specific company or organization). After all, the way human beings network with each other is complex. Humans may maintain different sets of relationships for different purposes. For example, many of us have a Facebook presence for connecting with friends and family and a LinkedIn presence for more professional needs.
Nethaji Chapala asks an excellent question: Is SMAC really helping organizations compete, or is it merely adding more complexity and confusion? While the already large SMAC pie continues to grow, not all organizations have been able to extract value from their SMAC investments. Chapala argues for a more systematic approach to developing pragmatic SMAC strategies. He identifies two simple matrices that can help organizations clarify their thinking about how SMAC technology ought to be adopted.
The software development industry is continuously evolving, requiring organizations to maintain greater control over software development processes, methodologies, and practices in order to certify that projects and their management align with a company's strategic direction. The project management office (PMO) paradigm has arisen within organizations as a critical element in maintaining this control.1