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
Executive Update
Usability and Aesthetics: The Importance of Being Pretty
In a recent Dilbert comic strip, you see our hero-turned-user-interface developer ask nonchalantly, "I designed the user interface myself. How do you like the colors?" Just behind him is someone more like your typical user representative looking on -- in horror. Funny or familiar, there's actually more going on here than you may at first think.
Many others and I have written about the necessity for enterprise architecture (EA) to be business-driven. When EA is not firmly grounded in the nature and shape of the business that it is to serve, it is common for a lot of time and resources to be spent on efforts that don't ultimately advance the goals of the business.
There seems to be an ongoing debate as to which data integration technique is best for BI: traditional data warehouse, "dynamic" (i.e., real-time) data warehouse, customer data store, enterprise information integration (EII), or real-time data broker. And the answer is: all of the above. In other words, this debate is pretty much irrelevant.
Organizations are applying a range of analytic techniques to support their business performance management initiatives, according to a January 2008 Cutter Consortium survey of 101 end-user organizations worldwide, which was designed to measure the extent that organizations are implementing business performance management technologies and techniques.
In this issue we look at forecasting and forecasting techniques in the business and organizational setting.
Organizations make enormous investments based upon forecasts they produce. Forecasted demand for new or existing product lines influences operational, logistical, marketing, retail, and many other decisions in an organization's value chain. While effective forecasting practices can inform a range of activities from daily operations to strategic initiatives, forecasting researchers and practitioners often lament about the gap between forecasting theory and practice.
Forecasting applies to a multitude of businesses; let's start off by looking at a couple of examples of how the practice is currently being used.