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
Data integration vendor Informatica Corporation announced it is buying complex event processing (CEP) software vendor Agent Logic. Financial terms of the deal were not revealed. Still, this development is significant because it will combine the capabilities of Informatica's data integration tools with Agent Logic's rules-based CEP platform.
"Your strategic and corporate reporting will be as effective as your operational system's performance management is" -- every organization or enterprise understands this one-liner. The question is how many work toward making sure this happens.
As I pointed out in last week's Advisor (see "Complex Event Processing," 26 August 2009), complex event processing (CEP) remains an emerging technology that holds the promise of enabling companies to increase operational efficiency by providing a means to identify and interpret the effect of seemingly unrelated events
Data integration is a key issue for any enterprise. If data from multiple sources can't be mixed and matched, it gets hard to gather the right information at the right time. As a result, it becomes a major hurdle to make informed decisions within or across an enterprise and for employees to reach set goals. How can one overcome this obstruction of the lifeblood of a company (i.e., enterprise data)? One promising set of technologies is based on the Semantic Web.
ERP STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES
As a mature technology, enterprise resource planning (ERP) has a strong history of increasing productivity through organizational integration and the application of the packaged software concept. ERP provides the majority of computer applications associated with day-to-day business operations for medium-sized and large firms, including accounting, human resources management, and the coordination of manufacturing operations.
Businesses and governments collect a large amount of personal information, some of it quite sensitive, about their clients, employees, patients, and citizens. At the same time, a random scan of media reports on any given day will find multiple stories of personal data being lost by or stolen from corporations and governments.