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
Business process management (BPM) is a category of software application sweating from the heat generated by the spotlight of attention. No surprise when you consider the importance of managing, refining, and reengineering the very business processes that multimillion-dollar enterprise software automates. As BPM software evolves, the best of this class of application is likely to blossom into multiple points of functionality. Stay focused on the following functional modules as the bare minimum needed to constitute BPM software that offers any real value:
Back in 2002, when I wrote the Executive Report "Transitioning Business Application Components to Web Services" for Cutter Consortium's Enterprise Architecture advisory service, I described service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a next big thing.
The other morning, over coffee, I was talking with several folks about the predicament that the big US automotive manufacturers General Motors and Ford now find themselves in. Simply put, GM and Ford are in trouble because sales of their SUVs, pickups, and other large vehicles have declined considerably. Some defined it as a forecasting problem. Others said it was faulty data analysis, and asked me why Ford and GM's BI folks failed to predict the shift in consumer sentiment to smaller, more gas economical cars.
"We would like to do agile but we cannot go because we need documentation for the FDA/SOX/..." is one of the statements I frequently hear after talks, panels, or in client conversations. This is a popular misconception about agile, which I'd like to clarify in this Advisor.
A recent development that should help accelerate the adoption of service-oriented architectures (SOA) is the introduction of repositories and registries for cataloging and managing services and their associated artifacts. Over the past few months, several vendors have announced such offerings, including IBM, BEA Systems, and WebMethods.
Last week, Business Objects announced plans to acquire Armstrong Lang Limited Software (ALG), a vendor of profitability management and activity-based costing solutions, for approximately US $56 million. The acquisition is an all-cash transaction for all outstanding shares of ALG by Business Objects (UK) Limited, a Business Objects wholly owned UK subsidiary. Business Objects plans to use ALG's software and consulting expertise to boost its own line of business performance management offerings.
Five years have passed since service-oriented architecture (SOA) started to become the IT industry's favorite new topic, displacing older paradigms such as client-server, object orientation, and transaction processing. When making critical decisions about future architecture and procurement plans, it is especially desirable to obtain as many hard facts as possible; so Cutter Consortium recently conducted a survey to establish what IT user organizations are thinking and doing about SOA.
Executive Update
Podcasting and Defamation in the US
WHAT IS PODCASTING?
Podcasting is the distribution of audio and/or video content via the Internet on a subscription basis.