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
Last month, I discussed cloud computing -- what it is and key issues that end-user organizations should carefully consider when evaluating its use, including reliability/availability, security, and data integration and integrity (see "Cloud Computing Cranks it Up, But Issues Remain," 23 July 2008).
The number of data warehousing appliances on the market -- prepackaged hardware/software offerings that combine database, data storage, compute servers, and operating systems preconfigured and pretuned to support data warehousing -- continues to grow. The latest vendor to introduce a data-warehousing appliance is Sybase, Inc.
This is a continuation of previous Advisors on quality, specifically ones on intrinsic quality (see "Investigating Agile: Inside and Out," 19 June 2008 and "Intrinsic Quality?" 3 July 2008).
I recently participated in a discussion about architecture frameworks and standards. While there are many frameworks -- such as Zachman, FEAF, and DoDAF -- only TOGAF qualifies as an official standard. By "official," I mean that it is created, published, and maintained by an accredited standards organization.
Last summer (see "Nurturing the Hidden Architect," 6 June 2007), I wrote about the importance of avoiding a common problem with the establishment of EA programs: namely, that it disempowers some of the very people who understand and have been looking after the "important stuff" that an EA program seeks to address.
Philosophers and scientists have been speculating about the operation of the human mind for at least 2,500 years. In recent years, the knowledge of how our minds actually process information has increased rapidly due to the research of neurologists, psychologists, linguists, and computer scientists.