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 think that many end-user organizations are going to have serious reservations about deploying their data warehouses permanently to the cloud, certainly at least initially. This is quite understandable, given that most companies tend to view their data -- especially customer data -- as a strategic asset.
BI and data warehousing appliances -- prepackaged offerings bundling software and hardware designed to support specific data warehousing and BI applications -- continue to garner strong usage. This trend is expected to continue through 2009 as end-user organizations look for ways to cost-effectively advance their data management and analytic needs.
Executive Update
SOA Enables Agile Methods
Agile application development methods have demonstrated improved quality and timeliness of results, but they have not been successful in scaling to large projects. In large projects, the collaboration and agility of small teams are eroded. Because the effort is large, the number of people involved becomes large, and considerable attention must be given to coordination, consensus, and resolution of issues. Changes ripple through the development organization resulting in consequential effects and requiring planning and change control on a broad scale.
Open source BI (e.g., query, reporting, OLAP, dashboards) and data warehousing tools (e.g., data integration, data cleansing) have generated considerable industry buzz over the past few years. But the $64 million question remains: to what extent are end-user organizations actually adopting these tools to build and deploy BI and data warehousing applications?
Despite the reality of service-oriented business -- as evidenced by partnering, collaboration, outsourcing, core competency focus, and the like -- many software solution projects aimed at solving business problems do not yet use service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a key enabler. I hear a variety of reasons from project managers for this, including the following: