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
This Advisor on alignment is the fifth in a series on agile integration (see "Agile Integration -- Organizational Processes," 4 May 2006; "Agile Integration -- Assembling a Team," 13 April 2006; "Agile Integration -- Making Agile Work in Organizations," 2 March 2006; and "Agil
Last November, I covered the merging of business process management (BPMS) and business rules management systems (BRMS) (see "The Merging of Business Process Management and Business Rules Management Systems," 16 November 2005). I also discussed differences between how the two technologies utilize business rules as well as how they are complementary.
In a recent Business Intelligence Executive Update (see "BI + Search = Discovery Reporting," Vol. 6, No. 8), I discussed the benefits and enhanced functionality that combining BI and search engine technology brings to BI. I also examined the initial products Information Builders Inc. (IBI) and Cognos introduced that integrate their BI platforms with the search capabilities of the Google Search Appliance and other search engines.
Experienced members of project teams are familiar with the concept of lessons learned, or project "post mortems." These are the discussions that occur near the end or after the end of the project when everyone is ready to move on to something else, but decide to get together to compile a list of things they wished they would have done differently or things they found out during the project. The theory is that these lessons would be recorded for future project teams to read, study, and integrate into their projects.
Last week I attended Cutter Consortium's 2006 Summit in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. As always, it was an interesting collection of people and presentations, which combined to create a thought- provoking atmosphere. The format of the Summit is unique, at least in my experience with IT conferences. Each topic is covered in a keynote presentation, which is followed by a panel of experts who discuss and debate the keynote and topic.
Successful projects have several common characteristics, including an active sponsor, engaged users, and an effective project manager. (Some projects might have these and still fail for other reasons, but I have never seen a successful IT project that didn't have these characteristics.) The most challenging criterion to fulfill is a sponsor -- and this is where many content management system (CMS) projects create the conditions for failure.
The recent revelation that the ultra-secret US National Security Administration (NSA) has amassed a gigantic database (some say it is the "biggest database in the world") covering "every call made in the USA" raises several privacy issues that are pertinent both to government and to industry.
Executive Update
Architecture-Oriented Requirements Traceability for ERP Solutions
How can you be satisfied that you've gotten what you've paid for? The issue is very familiar to anyone who has contracted for roofing repairs or had their car serviced.