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.
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This week I bring you another internationally inspired Advisor from my trip to Rome, where I'm teaching two seminars on enterprise architecture. For this trip, I decided to modernize and leave my trusty old paper Italian phrasebook at home in lieu of a modern, talking, iPhone app. Although there were quite a few to choose from, I started with the free app.
Does this sound familiar? The product manager for a software application is getting hounded by sales reps to add functionality that would let them call on their installed base with a new story to tell. At the same time, customer service has a list of usability problems that need to be fixed. Meanwhile, the product developers are realizing that they have pushed the current architecture to its limits, and they need to move to an approach based on services.
Over the past year or so, I've discussed some of the more important factors I see influencing the growing use of predictive analytics and data mining (see "The Slow, Steady Climb for Data Mining, Predictive Analytics," 1 February 2011).
Cloud computing has emerged as an attractive alternative to on-premise IT, offering organizations cost savings and greater flexibility in how they license, develop, and manage applications and how they store and manage data. But the big "however" with cloud computing remains a lack of open -- and generally accepted -- set of standards, benchmarks, methodologies, and best practices.
Last week, marketing giant Epsilon Interactive reported that hackers had gained unauthorized access to a gigantic trove of email addresses the company manages for its various clients. In fact, this might be the largest data breach ever (or at least ever reported), involving what some estimates report to be millions of customer email addresses and names. About 50 of Epsilon's clients are affected.
