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
In my last Trends Advisor (see "Privacy, Confidentiality, and Security," 26 April 2007), I talked about privacy, confidentiality, and security and how easy it was for me to find an old friend with the help of Google. Since that column, Google has announced an agreement to access the public records of four large US states.
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives have been evolving rapidly in the industry over the past year or so. During this period, most practitioners and their organizations have agreed upon one thing: SOA has to be business driven. I strongly believe that an SOA architect plays a significant role in the success of the initiative his or her company is pursuing.
Last week, I wrote about Business Objects buying business performance management vendor Cartesis S.A. in response to Oracle's acquisition of Hyperion Solutions in February (see "Business Performance Management Full Speed Ahead -- Business Objects Buys Cartesis," 1 May 2007).
You've probably been aware for some time that Amazon.com has made its catalog available online via Web services. Typically, when a Web site references a book and provides details about it, the information is obtained using one of Amazon's Web services. This has worked well for both Amazon and the users of the services.
Last month, I wrote that Oracle Corporation sucked the air out of the other BI vendors' lungs when it announced it would buy business performance management/OLAP database vendor Hyperion Solutions (see "Upping the Ante, Oracle Buys Hyperion," 6 March 2007).
Warfare is often merely ontological.
Rightly or wrongly, Web 2.0 represents one of those paradigm shifts that is predictably precipitating a bit of warfare. People are arguing over how we ought to describe the world. And in every struggle, there are three main participants: protagonists who optimistically push forward, antagonists who skeptically critique the protagonists, and idle bystanders who either dismiss the significance of the entire scuffle or revel in the ensuing mud bath.
Web 2.0 represents one of those paradigm shifts that inevitably has people taking sides. Today, it appears most corporate enterprises are looking at Web 2.0 with a bit of bewilderment, if not some detachment. After all, the main participants in Web 2.0 are considerably younger than the executives who must make decisions regarding it. Many CIOs simply don't use technology in quite the same way as teenagers and young adults do and hence are not immersed in the Web 2.0 culture.