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
The discussion recently came up about the role of an architect and whether or not they should write code as part of a project team. This became a somewhat heated discussion with a lot of strong opinions, but I think it ultimately comes down to the typical consultant's answer: "It depends." It depends on what you mean by an "architect" and what you expect the architect to accomplish.
A question I seem to be asked with increasing frequency by readers and other people I meet at meetings and conferences concerns whether I think that open source BI is catching on with companies. My answer is that open source BI is definitely catching on.
One of the basic assumptions of agile development is that design and -- to a certain extent -- architecture evolve over time. The key difference between a piece of completely entangled software that has been maintained to death and software that has grown in an agile manner is refactoring, the art of improving the design of an existing system without changing its functionality.
Last month, I discussed the concepts underlying Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 (see "Enterprise 2.0: Hip or Hype?" 25 October 2006). Basically, I said that Web 2.0 involves the use of second-generation Web technologies (e.g., blogs, wikis, social networks, instant messaging, RSS, video conferencing, pod casting) in an open manner to allow consumers to communicate with each other, to form groups or communities consisting of members with similar interests, and to share ideas and collaborate on content.
Last month, I provided an update on text mining and analysis technology (see "Text Mining Update," 24 October 2006). Basically, I said that over the past year or so, I've noticed increasing attention directed at the use of text mining for automating the analysis, categorization, indexing, summarization, and association of high volumes of text-based (i.e., unstructured and semi-structured) information for business applications.
Recently, my local state highway department put off a US $150-million project because, during a site mapping study, the state engineers discovered a layer of shale under a significant portion of the planned route. Now, building a stable roadway over a large segment of unstable shale is a very expensive and difficult process, so the highway department quietly postponed the project for a couple of years until a better route could be found or more extensive engineering studies could be completed. This was not a popular decision, but it was good engineering.
In my last Advisor (see "OASIS SOA Reference Model," 1 November 2006), I described the OASIS Reference Model for SOA as a set of fundamental concepts about services and service orientation. The Reference Model document talks about these concepts being the basis for a "reference architecture." To add fuel to the fire, Accenture recently announced the Accenture SOA Reference Architecture and other consulting organizations are expected to follow suit.
