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
There's no lower-hanging fruit than thin fruit. The adoption of Web-enabled smartphones is outpacing just about every technology in history.1 As form factors have improved, so has functionality. Lots of assumptions have been challenged along the way. For example, how many of us believed that no one would watch video on a one-inch-by-one-inch screen?
Back in October, I wrote that the question of whether the cloud model is reliable enough for corporate IT would not be answered soon, adding that no amount of reassurances from service providers or IT analysts would really settle the question (see "Viability of the Cloud Model Still Up in the Air," 20 October 2009).
Cloud computing continues to gain momentum as a description of service offerings based on a virtualized data center infrastructure and provided over the Internet on an as-needed basis. Public clouds, such as Amazon EC2, first brought attention to this model, followed by private clouds built within an organization, as exemplified by IBM's Blue Cloud initiative.
The beginning of a new year is a good time to make resolutions, and the beginning of a new decade is an even better time. The resolutions that I'm going to concentrate on in this Advisor (I reserve the right to add to it later) include a number of words and phrases that I believe confuse those of us in enterprise architecture and/or systems development as well as our clients.
There are analogies that make it possible for a new field like software engineering to make progress, and there are analogies that confuse the basic issues. One of the latter is comparing software elements (objects, components, services, etc.) with Lego blocks. Now, my criticism is not against Lego blocks; I love Legos, my kids love Legos, and my grandkids love Legos....