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've been thinking about the software-plus-service model, where a vendor offers online (hosted) software components that integrate with the vendor's software installed onsite at the end-user organization (i.e., the customer). Microsoft is pushing this approach in response to on-demand offerings from Google and other providers.
This Executive Update, the last in a three-part series, continues the discussion regarding approaches to implementing service-oriented architecture (SOA) standards and specifications used for enforcing WS-Security.
The question of where logic belongs in an application has been a topic of debate for years and has changed as technology, requirements, and our understanding has evolved over time. The change from client-server computing (two-tier) to the three-tier model represented a movement of logic out of the presentation and into a separate, middle tier.
When most people think of applications involving business rules management systems (BRMS), they tend to think of rules used as a means to represent and simplify complex business logic, with rules expressed as IF-THEN statements using English-like syntax (e.g., IF CUSTOMER_INCOME = $75,000 - $100,000 AND CUSTOMER_HOMEOWNER_CODE = 3 THEN CUSTOMER_LIFETIMEVALUE = 9).
Agile development has always included the practice of timeboxing -- setting a fixed time limit to overall development efforts and letting other characteristics, such as scope, vary. However, timeboxing can also be used in another interesting way: timeboxing capabilities and stories rather than projects or iterations.