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
In his book Business Agility: Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World, Michael Hugos, who is also a columnist for CIO magazine, talks about two fundamental business strategies: responsiveness and efficiency.
I live in the state of New Hampshire, in the Northeast corner of the US. It's a major pumpkin-growing region of the country, and October is harvest season. Truckloads of pumpkins head south and west, and local farm stands are bursting with the orange globes. But what do you do with all the misshaped or leftover pumpkins? Chuck 'em, what else?
Back in June, I discussed how, after almost four years, BI software as a service (SaaS) provider LucidEra was considering calling it quits (see "As SaaS Provider Quits, What Happens to Its Data?" 30 June 2009).
In 2005, Cutter Fellow Ken Orr introduced Business Enterprise Architecture Modeling (BEAM), a state-of-the-art methodology that uses a business-driven strategy as the key to the long-term success of your enterprise architecture program.
Increasingly, we find business processes that are offered in alternative ways using different channels. For example, purchasing vehicle highway tax in the UK over the counter or online over the Internet. At the same time, as well as offering a process in its entirety over one channel, the same process can be supported by different channels at different points in the process.
In a recent interview, Mike Culver, the cloud computing evangelist for Amazon.com, clearly stated the cloud computing value statement for his company: "Amazon's goal is to take the fixed cost out of computing!" That's pretty simple. There has been a great deal of discussion of the TCO of one thing or another over the years, but rarely is the entirety of the operational overhead really factored in. We can learn what the TCO is for a desktop or a server or an Oracle product, for instance, but nobody goes to the trouble to include all of the factors involved.