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
Abstract
In this Executive Report by Robert K. Wysocki, we explore in detail the 12 basic tenets that characterize complex project management (CPM).
In this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review, we turn our attention to a topic that has been increasingly in the public eye: social media. What was originally only an interesting diversion for a small population of techies and college students has quickly and rather explosively become a major social phenomenon — one with cultural, practical, and business implications that become more far-reaching in scope every day. So what does this all mean for us in the IT shop? How do we manage in this environment where so many of the contributing factors are not within our control? And how do we use the information we can gather from social media monitoring (SMM) to set ourselves up for success? Whether or not you have already jumped onto the social media bandwagon, you will find this installment of CBR helpful as you attempt to get a broad overall view of the potential benefits and pitfalls social media represents for your organization.
If the maxim "what gets measured, gets managed" should be used to judge the use of social media in companies, then clearly the topic is moving beyond mere casual interest. Cutter Consortium's recent survey on the topic makes that abundantly clear. However, until I analyzed the results of the survey, I felt that many in industry were thinking somewhat schizophrenically. Most CIOs and business leaders I talk to are -- themselves singly or speaking for their organizations -- of two minds regarding social media.
This issue of CBR was quite interesting and a lot of fun to write about. It centers on a very timely and increasingly pervasive topic: social media, focusing our attention on the monitoring of the social media landscape by organizations. As the saying goes, and which Vince alluded to in his contribution, you can't manage what you don't measure. While the old saying may or may not be true, what is sure is that measuring is costly, in terms of time and the expense associated with the right tools.
This survey investigated the extent to which and how organizations are monitoring social media. The 54 respondents are primarily from North America (52%), with 22% from Europe, 15% from Asia/Australia/Pacific, 7% from South America, and 4% from Africa.
Technical debt is about doing the system right, not about doing the right system. It is essentially a quantifiable measure of how good the quality of your code is. It does not address functional completeness, nor can it predict success in the market. However, functional completeness might not amount to much if your technical debt is high. Likewise, market success is likely to elude you if you do not pay back your technical debt in a timely manner.