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 preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
-- General Dwight D. Eisenhower
I am fascinated by the continued conversations about EA's return on investment. They are especially exciting when we're actually able to conjure up tangible cost-saving projections to justify our investment in EA.
Executive Update
PIMs Get Serious
One of the many burdens of aging must include the ever-expanding accumulation of possessions that seem to defy easy classification for orderly storage and retrieval; you know you have too much stuff when you own something but can't find it, despite concerted efforts to organize items with easy access in mind. And so it has become with information. Today's desktop hard drive is a kind of family basement -- a repository of things ranging from the consistently useful to those which over time grow stale, esoteric, and useless.
In recent years, there have been a number of publications by industry luminaries regarding business transformation, execution, and innovation. In reality, each of these concepts plays a significant role in delivering tangible business values -- and must be connected with a common foundation that can link the associated business processes of the company.
A friend of mine was discussing a large custom system that his organization was in the process of acquiring. "The vendor is recommending that we use a code-generator that they have developed to handle the complex stuff in a Java environment. I wonder whether this is going to work out any differently than the CASE stuff that we did in the late 1980s and early 1990s?"
"Why do you think the vendor is going this way?" I asked.
In my last two Advisors in this series (please see the sidebar) "Doing SOA Right Today, Part 1: Making Sure We''re on the Right Track" 27 September 2006 and "Doing SOA Right Today, Part 2: Resolving the Initiative Planning Challenges," 18 October 2006)
BI leader Business Objects has bought software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform and on-demand CRM applications provider Nsite, Inc., for an undisclosed amount. Nsite offers a Web services platform and a set of on-demand CRM applications targeted at small and mid-size organizations seeking to add sales process automation to their CRM systems.
In this on-demand webinar, Ken Collier imagines what would happen if we raised our children like we build BI systems ... We would keep them in highly controlled and protected environments, away from others until they are mature and fully developed. Then we would release them into the world to see if they can function effectively.
In recent years, application developers have pioneered techniques that enable them to work in an evolutionary (iterative and incremental) manner, and now we're going one step further with agile methods that are also highly collaborative. Unfortunately, many data professionals are still mired in the traditional, serial approaches of the late 1970s and 1980s. As a result, they're discovering that they need to play catch-up if they're to remain relevant within the new environment.