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
There have been a lot of announcements pertaining to open source business intelligence (BI) tools (query, reporting, OLAP, dashboards, etc.) over the past 12 months or so. But the important question is: To what extent are companies actually adopting open source BI tools?
At the close of 1998, Time magazine chose the 100 most important people of the last 100 years. Neatly listed alphabetically between Walt Disney and Bill Gates, was titan Henry Ford. Lee Iacocca, a former Ford company president and something of a legend himself, was appropriately invited to write the Henry Ford item for Time.
In the first in this series of Advisors (see "LoTech -- HiFi: The Evolution of Story Cards and User Stories," 23 March 2006), I stated that capturing stories in a malleable form is paramount to building a strong product backlog. I also discussed the use of a story wall as a simple way to see the project, along with various tools that can be used for organizing and tracking/planning with stories.
"If you want higher quality, build less stuff." That, in essence, is what Cutter Business Technology Council Fellow Tom DeMarco once said about a daring strategy for quality improvement: reduce quantity. Tom went on to say, "Whatever it is that your organization makes, make less of it. Make less, and choose much more carefully what you make" [1].
The good news is, Tom's advice is something that can be done immediately to reduce defects. Talk about being agile! Quality is inversely proportional to quantity -- simple as that.
One of the reasons that it is so hard to find enterprise data architects (EDAs) these days is that most of the training on database (or data warehouse design) is focused far too much on technique and far too little on basic concepts. And since most EDAs are taken from the ranks of DBAs, database models, or data warehousing experts, that means that the folks with experience haven't learned the basics.
I'm hearing increasing talk (again) about how organizations need to extend BI capabilities to their rank-and-file employees. To date, however, most companies have found this "BI for the masses" movement difficult to carry out. True, the growing popularity of digital dashboards and scorecards have helped extend -- in somewhat limited fashion -- BI capabilities across the enterprise.
This Advisor is the fourth in a series on agile integration and the first on process (see Agile Integration -- Assembling a Team, 13 April 2006, Agile Integration -- Making Agile Work in Organizations, 2 March 2006, and Agile Integration -- Organization and Empowered Teams, 6 April 2006).
I've seen a lot of press lately about the relationship between business process management (BPM) and service-oriented architecture (SOA). Products are now claiming to support the "convergence of BPM and SOA technologies." There have been major announcements this year of BPM products being acquired by SOA vendors, such as the purchase of Collaxa by Oracle and the recent purchase of Fuego by BEA. There have also been announcements of new product sets following previous acquisitions.