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
I was having coffee this morning with colleague Ken Collier and we were talking about Test-driven development (TDD) and the trials and tribulations of trying to implement TDD in a development environment. I left Ken and went out for a leisurely bike ride down from the Ponderosa pines in Flagstaff to the Scrub Oak and Juniper 1,500 feet lower and 15 miles out of town (then back up-ugh).
In ancient times, the Oracle (the person, not the database) was someone to whom you addressed important questions. The answers that the Oracle gave were always true, but were often given in an elaborate code. I imagined recently that I took some of my clients' questions to a modern version of the Oracle for enlightenment.
Search is having a major influence on BI and data retrieval and analysis in general. Although the technology is still developing, the combination of BI and search is important because it can provide nontechnical business users and BI consumers with easier access to -- and the ability to analyze -- both structured and unstructured information.
If agility is about delivering customer value by being flexible, then how can adherence to a traditional scope, schedule, and cost plan be the best way to measure performance? It can't be. With pervasive change the norm, we can no longer "follow the plan with minimal changes." Instead, our focus needs to be on successfully adapting to inevitable changes. We need to move beyond the classic Iron Triangle measures to an Agile Triangle that focuses on Value, Quality, and Constraints.
As a CIO or enterprise architecture (EA) manager, you will have experienced that some of your enterprise architects seem to get along just fine with the user community, but others seem to run into arguments with their customers time and time again. These are problems that you have to solve, committing time and prestige to fix things while you do not understand why things got out of control in the first place.
In my last Advisor, "SOA and the Cloud: Getting Past the Hype" (19 August 2009), I introduced the main categories of cloud computing. This week, I'll cover some of the product innovations taking place in those categories.
Judging from the wildly enthusiastic international crowd of 1,400 attending the Agile2009 conference in Chicago, Illinois, USA, last week, XP, Scrum, and agile software development methodologies are becoming more mainstream. After years of pilot projects, agile is finally gaining acceptance as a legitimate approach to software development in the business community.