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
Organizations deal with pressure on a daily basis. Executive and managerial pressure frequently comes in the form of on-time delivery, cost cuts, and scope coverage; customer pressure usually comes in the form of feature requests and better quality; employee pressure continually asks for more time to finish tasks, fewer work hours, and better guidance.
Executive Update
Seven Fundamental Checks Before Adopting a Middleware Adapter
Middleware software adapters used between dissimilar technologies play an important role in data integration. Dissimilar technologies in this context could be ETL, database, an enterprise package solution, such as SAP, or any technology that can consume or source data. These middleware adapters could be developed by participating technology vendors, through a strategic partnership, or by a third-party independent software vendor.
Back in December, when making predictions for the upcoming year regarding important BI trends, I wrote that we could expect to see use of text mining and analysis increase in 2011, just as it has almost every year since we've measured its adoption (see "What Lies Ahead: BI and D
Agile software development involves people working together, across disciplines, to deliver business value efficiently. While the Agile Manifesto states that agile development values "responding to change over following a plan" and "working software over documentation," that does not mean plans are not important. A plan allows you to measure your progress, focus your efforts, or, more important, present a target that stakeholders can invest in.
Software development has been full of fast-paced advancements, with a focus on increasing efficiency and reducing cost/efforts for stakeholders. Applying these changes forms a crucial part of the reusability concern that has been at the forefront of new business initiatives or development. Reuse has been central to many of the development models as have such tenets as "don't reinvent the wheel" and "don't repeat yourself."
In this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review, we consider the future of customer relationships, the management of those relationships, and the role that IT and the IT shop can play in the evolution of effective customer relationship management (CRM). Right off the bat it's important to ponder some questions that are fundamental to how we understand, on the most basic level, the dynamic and structure of the relationships we have with our customers. Think about the following for a moment: In today's world, is it really possible (or even desirable) to "own" a customer anymore? How is our present use of IT aiding our relationships with our customers? And in the current environment of data overload and incredible accessibility of information and services, is it possible (or even wise) to expect consumers to continue to relinquish control of what is truly theirs, namely, their own personal information?