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
MDM: The Key Enabler in Search-Enabled BI
While master data management (MDM) will bring some order to the chaos in otherwise diverse source systems, it has an interesting role to play in new-generation business intelligence (BI) architectures (dubbed by some as BI 2.0). One of the key features desired by the entire BI user community and also the non-BI community (who hopes to benefit from the analytics technologies and capabilities of BI) is the realization of search-enabled BI.
Competitive intelligence is nothing new. Whether it's the owner of the shop down the street checking out his competitor's prices, a secret shopper analyzing a company's customer service, or a Fortune 500 company's high-level strategic analysis of the competition, businesses always want to know as much as possible about their competition.
Executive Update
The Pitfalls of Corporate Blogging
"How big are blogs?" asked BusinessWeek back in 2005. "Try Johannes Gutenberg out for size. His printing press, unveiled in 1440, sparked a publishing boom and an information revolution" [1]. To compare blogs with Gutenberg's invention of moveable type is, perhaps, mildly hyperbolic. A blog is more of a literary style than a new form of information technology, and the World Wide Web itself bears much more conceptual resemblance to the printing press than do blogs.
Back in January, I discussed Hewlett-Packard's (HP's) entry into the data warehousing and BI market with its new Neoview offering that combines data warehouse software, hardware, and services (see "Hewlett-Packard's Data Warehousing Gamble," 23 January 2007).
People never notice the most important things in an advanced society until those things stop working or they disappear. This is true of electricity or water or other forms of infrastructure, like roads and bridges. We count on these things for transportation and recreation and commerce, but it is only when they're gone that we begin to understand their value.
The increasing attention being garnered by the Web 2.0 phenomenon is reminiscent of the buzz and excitement of the dot-com days. In December 1999, Time Magazine named dot-com pioneer Jeff Bezos the Person of the Year. In December 2006, the magazine put "you" on the cover. The picture was the console of the YouTube player with a mirror instead of the screen.
I've had the opportunity to work with architects in a fair number of companies in diverse industries. Whether we were architecting individual applications or grappling with the complexities of an enterprise, the goal has always been to tease out the salient aspects of a problem and organize them in a way that speaks to a robust and flexible solution.