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
As business architecture initiatives continue to take hold, executives are seeking to clarify the role of the business architect. It is important to understand the diversity of roles within core and virtual business architecture teams. Defining these roles will help ensure the successful deployment of business architecture initiatives.
Any business intelligence strategy should be business goals-aligned in order to ensure that the BI roadmap meets the client's business requirements as closely as possible. A business goals-aligned BI strategy allows the BI infrastructure and other BI related resources to be optimally utilized toward achieving core business goals. This will ensure that the business users are able to quantitatively relate the BI initiatives to their business goals, thus achieving higher acceptance rates for both the IT and business groups.
As I head off to the annual Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, California, USA, this week, I can't seem to stop thinking about what Oracle's proposed acquisition of middleware maker BEA Systems, Inc. would mean for Oracle, end-user organizations, and the market in general. It appears that I'm not the only one, as the topic is definitely on other attendees' minds, too.
Not long ago, the Wall Street Journal announced that joining management by objective and total quality management as approaches that have marched in the management discipline hit parade is a new methodology called management by data (see "Now, It's Business By Data, but Numbers Still Can't Tell Future," by Scott Thurm).
At first glance, the title might not sound especially sexy: Architecture and Patterns for IT Service Management, Resource Planning, and Governance: Making Shoes for the Cobbler's Children, by Charles T. Betz.
There's a "new" data warehousing database vendor that deserves a closer look: ParAccel, Inc. ParAccel has developed a high-speed, columnar database -- utilizing a massively parallel (shared-nothing) grid architecture running on standard hardware -- that is optimized for data warehousing, BI reporting, and operational analytic processing.