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
Over the years, I've had the pleasure of working in a range of IT organizations around the world, and I've often worked with, or at least reviewed, many of the enterprise architecture (EA) teams within those organizations. In all cases, the EA team is staffed with some of the best and brightest within IT, all of whom have the organization's best interests at heart.
When data warehousing and BI appliances (i.e., prepackaged offerings that include software and sometimes hardware designed for data warehousing and BI applications) first appeared on the scene, many initially thought they'd prove most popular as a way for small and mid-sized organizations that lacked a data warehouse to get one up and running quickly.
The accompanying Executive Report focuses on five broad business technologies that deserve our attention: software development and delivery; Web 2.0; master data management (MDM) for business intelligence (BI); convergence customer relationship management (CRM); and access d
Agile architecture teaches us that while effective enterprise architecture (EA) needs to have a broad perspective, it also must have a focused contribution. There is no more powerful contribution than providing the data that is ultimately used to make specific decisions in support of the goal of "aligning IT and business." This report focuses on alignment of the EA program as a whole, in a partnership with business.
BI is an area of great interest, one that deserves our attention and analysis. Therefore, for this issue, we tapped the expertise of two individuals with a few decades of combined expertise in the field. Our objective is to benchmark the state of BI and allow our authors to comment on the emergent lessons.
The importance of business intelligence is well recognized by practicing managers and in academic literature. However, there are a lot of inconsistencies about what BI really is. I define it as providing decision makers with valuable insights by leveraging diverse sources of external and internal information. These information sources could be structured or unstructured, could reside within or outside the organization, and the information could be quantitative or qualitative. I distinguish between BI tools developed by BI vendors and BI solutions deployed within organizations.