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
Wiki Cool and Effective Technology
Some of the big technologies, the ones with the deepest impact on the everyday work lives of people, prove to be some of the least complex to learn and use. Think e-mail and the word processor. After having mastered these tools, you stand back and ask the question every meaningful innovation begs: why didn't someone invent these sooner? So too will users demand an answer to this question: couldn't someone have invented the corporate wiki years ago, when I could have first used it?
In February, I wrote about service component architecture (SCA) and service data objects (SDO) (see "Service Component Architecture," 1 February 2006, and "Service Data Objects," 15 February 2006), which are emerging specifications for how services can be written and assembled in an industry-standard way. At that time, eight companies had joined together to create and support these specifications. Let's see how this effort is progressing.
In February, I wrote about service component architecture (SCA) and service data objects (SDO) (see "Service Component Architecture," 1 February 2006, and "Service Data Objects," 15 February 2006), which are emerging specifications for how services can be written and assembled in an industry-standard way. At that time, eight companies had joined together to create and support these specifications. Let's see how this effort is progressing.
I've been hearing more and more about companies establishing "BI centers of excellence" (COEs; also sometimes referred to as "BI competency centers") in order to provide advice and experience with implementing BI techniques, applications, and products throughout their organizations. Several issues are fueling this trend, including corporate BI tools standardization initiatives as well as the move to distribute analytic capabilities across the organization to different classes of end users.
Each time IT explores a new domain or business area, it is inevitable that we have to develop a new set of tools to support that methodology. For example, relational database development spurred the development of entity-relational diagrams (ERDs) and object-oriented design spurred the development of object-class diagrams. Each of these environments required the development of new tools appropriate to the job at hand. But while new domains ultimately require new tools, our first instinct is to reuse existing tools and adapt them for the new domain.
In May, I wrote an Advisor titled "The Convergence of BPM and SOA Continues" (3 May 2006). Little did I know that it was only the beginning. The pace of consolidation has increased significantly in recent months in the SOA, BPM, and combined markets. Let's take a look at some of the highlights.
Back in 2003, I wrote about the use of intelligent video systems for adding automated, real-time threat detection, identification and alarming capabilities to closed circuit television cameras for security applications (See "Intelligent Video Surveillance for Security Applications," 30 September 2003). Since then, there have been a number of new developments regarding intelligent video systems.
This is the second of four Executive Updates in which I shall be analyzing the results of a recent Cutter Consortium survey on service-oriented architecture (SOA).