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
Several important developments affecting the open source business intelligence (BI) market were announced last week at LINUXWORLD, in San Francisco, California, USA. The first was by Adaptive Planning, which introduced what is, to the best of my knowledge, the first open source business performance management offering. The second was by JasperSoft Corporation, which announced a new reporting product.
Perhaps there's still room on your reading list for one more title. Even if there's not, this is one you want to consider for your bookshelf. Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design, by Scott Ambler and Pramod Sadalage, published by Addison-Wesley, is an essential reference for anybody involved in database design.
The current trend whereby organizations are seeking to extend business intelligence (BI) capabilities to increasing numbers of end users (including those residing beyond the corporate firewall) has placed renewed emphasis on a frequently underestimated but hugely important aspect of the data warehouse lifecycle: managing the data warehouse/BI environment.
Data warehouse/BI administration and management involves a number of tasks, including the following:
Imagine for the moment that you are about to drive across the US from Los Angeles to Boston. 1 You have mapped out in detail the costs, the resources needed, the time, the roads, and even some of the places you want to visit along the way: Las Vegas, Mount Rushmore and the Badlands, Nashville, and Chicago. You expect the trip to take 10 days and cost US $1,500. You leave Los Angeles and head east, with a plan to be in South Dakota by day four.
In this business, if you put enough opinions on record, sooner or later you will wind up with egg all over your face. Just this past June, it was my turn: no sooner had my Executive Update "WinFS: Integrated Storage for Windows" (Vol. 9, No. 11) seen the light of day, than WinFS was no more. It had ceased to be. It was an ex-project. And just when everything had seemed to be going so well ...
DEFINING THE MARKET
Business rules management (BRM) products are software tools that enable organizations to capture business rules and model, deploy, and maintain business rules applications. Although there is no hard definition as to just what exactly constitutes a BRM product, there are some basic capabilities that a BRM product should provide.
Executive Update
Agile Code Priorities: Part I -- Using a Priority Hierarchy
MAKING CODE-RELATED CHOICES
At the beginning of any software project, development teams have a set of constraints to work with and choices to make. Many of these choices are code-related.
In making these choices, many questions arise. How do we choose how and when to test the code? How, and to what extent, can we keep it simple and clear? How do we choose major frameworks and tools? How do we choose a development language and development environment? Which choices are most important, and how do they affect each other?
Early in my career, I worked for one of the leading authorities in the field of linear programming (LP) [1]. This person had developed one of the earliest LP codes while he was working for an oil company. Oil companies figured out early on how to use LP to optimize their refinery operations, so LP was a big deal for them.