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
Two major elements behind the success of most enterprise-wide integration initiatives are: (1) establishing the right models to create and collect relevant data and maintain various parameters of enterprise architecture (EA) as a set of metrics; and (2) recognizing the significance of monitoring EA-related activities that emphasize the reality of those metrics.
This is the final installment in a series of three Executive Updates that examines enterprise architecture (EA) -- specifically, its organization and programs, how it provides governance, and the value it brings to companies. The series is based on data from a recent Cutter Consortium survey.
Technology only has value if you can do something with it.
-- Dr. Robert Phaal, Fellow, Cutter Consortium
Within the past decade, continued advances in mobile computing and wireless communications have had a profound impact on individuals, businesses, and society at large. Mobile and mobility have become buzzwords, and many mobile applications, both traditional and entirely new and novel, have been deployed [15, 16].
Driven by the continued advances in, and widespread adoption of, mobile computing and wireless communications, a paradigm shift in computer usage and information access is emerging. Mobile devices, such as Pocket PCs, PDAs, notebooks, and smart mobile phones, offer powerful platforms for the delivery of new applications and services. When deployed to their full potential, they are expected to radically change the way people work, the way that enterprises operate, and the way members of society interact and live.
Executive Update
An Object Lesson in Business Intelligence
When we think of business intelligence (BI), we are describing how technology extracts information from an IT system and manipulates and translates that data into realities that deepen our understanding of some phenomenon in a business; for instance, sales by rep, by product line, or by territory, or manufacturing defect and yield rates by product line, by shift, or by manufacturing location. Any operational activity is a candidate for BI technology.
While traveling on my vacation in Denmark, I found myself thinking about design. You might wonder why I'd be thinking about that while sitting in a cafe drinking a nice cold Carlsberg. The reason is that design is everywhere here. Scandinavia, and Denmark in particular, are known for their design and its simplicity and elegance. It's a mixture of form married to function based on efficiency, which is evident in everyday objects such as furniture, kitchen utensils, tools, and so on.
Last week, Oracle announced that it had acquired the intellectual property assets of Sigma Dynamics, a developer of real-time predictive analytics. Oracle plans to use Sigma Dynamics technology to enhance the analytic capabilities of its BI, CRM, and various enterprise applications offerings.
Two important events took place recently in the business process management (BPM) market. The first is when Oracle cut a technology licensing and marketing agreement with business process analysis (BPA) and modeling tools vendor IDS Scheer. The second is IBM's announcement that it intends to buy BPM/enterprise content management vendor FileNet Corporation.