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
The biggest trend to hit business intelligence (BI) since the days of executive information systems may not be an innovation in the technology itself but in the kinds of data the technology analyzes. The new BI foreshadows a time when, for example, a disease epidemic will be stopped because data can reveal to health officials the movements of infected people. Welcome to the world of "reality mining."
Advisor
Bold CIO -- It Is SOA Time!
A lot has been said lately about service-oriented architecture (SOA). Still, I would like to take a look at another angle of SOA adoption in the light of the current economic turmoil.
SOA adoption has many layers: the basic enterprise service bus (ESB) infrastructure, business process management (BPM) workflow tools, other SOA-related tools, such as BAM (business activity monitoring) or business rules engine (BRE), and SOA governance -- both runtime and design time.
In last week's Advisor, I discussed findings showing that the adoption of BI search (i.e., tools and applications combining BI reporting and analysis with Internet search enginelike functionality) remains limited (see "Adoption of BI Search Remains Limited," 17 March 2009).
Craig Barrett, retiring chairman of Intel, opened the CeBIT trade fair show in Hannover, Germany, on 3 March, by stressing that "it is important for companies to continue to spend on R&D and upgrade plants so that they are positioned to take advantage of the upturn when it does come." Although Barrett was talking about Intel's core business -- chip development -- his comment
(This is the first in a series of Trends Advisors that will deal with the complex landscape of content, unstructured and structured, that confront organizations and individuals as we move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 and beyond. Future Advisors will deal with the growing schism between developers and database experts.)
A key objective of enterprise architecture (EA) is to deliver to business strategies and imperatives. This is also the basis for measuring the success of EA investment. While architectural models, specifications, standards, and so on are, of course, important; they will not, in and of themselves, enable this on their own. A foundational set of organizational capabilities must be in place that enables businesses to realize architecture-based solutions on a sustained basis.