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
INTRODUCTION
No sooner have CIOs and IT departments come to terms with the demands of SOA and BPM than they find themselves confronted with a new challenge: Web 2.0. Enthusiasm for this new phenomenon is sweeping the world. It began in the ranks of bloggers, but quickly spread to the technorati, journalists, industry analysts, and would-be trendsetters. We have now reached the point where vendors are apt to feel naked if they appear in public without a convincing Web 2.0 story.
This issue of CBR focuses on a trend that is gathering strength: Web 2.0. 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.
This survey examined current views on Web 2.0 and its importance to the enterprise. The geographic distribution of the 133 respondents is worldwide, with 45% of responding organizations headquartered in North America, 25% in Europe, 23% in Australia/Pacific, and the rest in other parts of the world. Organization size varies, with 17% reporting more than 50,000 employees, 17% reporting between 5,000 and 50,000 employees, 25% reporting between 500 and 5,000 employees, 17% reporting between 100 and 500 employees, and the remainder reporting 100 or fewer employees.
Open source business intelligence (BI) is attractive for a number of reasons, especially a lower initial cost, perceived lower overall cost, simplicity of operation, and adherence to standards. The power and capability of business intelligence is growing, and the capacity to perform sophisticated data analysis with easy-access reporting -- hallmarks of BI -- is increasingly attractive to smaller businesses that do not have the budget to undertake full-scale commercial implementations.
Open source business intelligence software is beginning to come of age, not so much as competition to the major BI platforms but instead as market enhancement.
Businesses are required to comply with a significant number of laws and regulations governing everything from human resources to environmental matters. As if these laws and regulations were not enough, businesses also have to comply with a new industry standard affecting the security of credit card data -- the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI, for short). The goal of PCI is to create a security standard that businesses must follow in their handling of credit cardholder data.
