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.

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Insight

Experience (and a quick Google search on "software implementation failures") tells us that implementing software packages can be just as treacherous, if not more so, than their custom software development brethren.

Last week, we celebrated the 40th anniversary of software engineering. Between 7 and 11 October 1968, the NATO Science Committee hosted 62 leading academics and professionals of the young computer industry in Garmisch, a beautiful place in Bavaria, Germany, at the foot of the north face of the highest German mountain.

I love it when the number of things I have to do is limited to five or fewer. Psychologists tell us that we're good for seven, but my limit is five. Fortunately, the number really is five; here they are:

  1. Business technology strategy

  2. Computing and communications architecture

  3. Technology delivery

I've been engaged with several clients recently to help them formulate a service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy for their respective enterprises. In my conversations with them, I've had two essential points to offer.

Last week, Microsoft shed some light on three BI and data warehousing projects it's working on: Gemini, Kilimanjaro, and Madison.

Software estimation is an area where more promises have been broken than in any other area of software development. But like addicts, we keep demanding promises because we need them to survive. As managers, there is a limit to what we can reasonably expect from software estimation, and when we cross that limit, we are, in effect, asking for short-term satisfaction in the form of promises that will not be kept.

Vendors are now offering on-demand versions of their analytic databases and other data warehousing and BI applications. These tools and applications are available to end-user organizations via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model or hosted on cloud computing platforms from Amazon.com and others providers.

Software estimation is an area where more promises have been broken than in any other area of software development. But like addicts, we keep demanding promises because we need them to survive.