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

A US healthcare company CIO and his core IT team have been using an agile development approach in their projects for just about a year now. When I came across this company last year, the CIO and most of his key team members were getting ready to support the rollout of 10 large-scale systems-integration projects across the enterprise.

Last September, I discussed the latest Web 2.0-related development to make its way into the corporate world: mashups, which (as defined by Wikipedia) are Web applications that can combine data from more than one source into an "integrated experience." The aim of using mashups is similar to other Web

Enterprise IT leaders who seek customer value from a master data management (MDM) project [1] can find themselves in a Catch 22. They can't put all development on hold while they wait for a full enterprise data model to be developed and approved, yet they know anything that is developed in the interim will be subject to a costly, lengthy, and, quite possibly, ugly remediation when the new standard is available.

A debate is going on as to what actually constitutes "business performance management" and how it differs from so-called "traditional" BI. Because a number of readers have contacted me regarding this subject, I've decided to make it the topic of this week's Advisor.

As more organizations face transitions to agile methods and those transitions involve larger segments of those organizations, the need for transition or transformation strategies increases.

It is clear that the EA landscape is changing. For many practitioners, EA has transformed over the past few years from a set of strategic principles (originated at the ivory towers) to become an essential set of business-driven blueprints (used at the ground level) for their enterprise solutions.

In the December 2007 Cutter IT Journal covering Enterprise 2.0, I took the contrarian view that adding collaboration computing capabilities to the business environment is not sufficient to define a next generation of the enterprise (see "Attributes of the Next-Generation Enterprise"). Unlike the other authors, I described a number of attributes of the enterprise that will need to change.

What if someone established a blog whose sole purpose was to engage disgruntled consumers in a running commentary about how lousy your company's customer service is and to tell people to "do themselves a favor" and avoid buying, banking, renting, etc., from your business? Or what about a video on YouTube that slams your company's product?