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
The management of knowledge is not new. Knowledge has been managed in organizations from time immemorial to ascertain that appropriate capabilities are available for people to perform requisite work competently and successfully. As a result, implicit knowledge management (KM) mechanisms were pursued by introducing practices such as master-apprentice traditions, educational programs, and so on.
Typical database development involves building the data structures, writing some code to access the database, running the code, then writing some queries to verify that the data got into the database. Even the most rigorous database testers generally verify a database by running several queries and visually inspecting the results for validity. The problem with this approach is that as changes are made to the database, we don't generally rerun all the old test queries to revalidate that everything is still fine.
I was talking recently with a reader who is in the process of selecting a business rules management (BRM) tool for a project at her company. She has checked out various products on the market, and is still unsure as to which one to choose. In particular, she is agonizing over the various user interface paradigms that the different products utilize.
A good friend of mine, who was quite active in the AI community in the late 1980s and early 1990s, asked me an interesting question the other day: "When did rule-based systems go from being 'expert systems' to 'business rules management systems'?"
Recently, my colleagues on the Cutter Business Technology Council got into a very heated exchange on the state-of-the-art in software development. A couple of members of the Council were particularly disturbed by the level of knowledge in fundamental principles that some of their recent computer science graduates were exhibiting.
Our December 2005 survey on outsourcing business intelligence (BI) showed that the pricing model is the third most important factor when selecting a provider (following experience and cost). All pricing models are essentially based on the number of units of service provided multiplied by a rate per unit. Outsourcing contracts layer service level and performance criteria over this units-times-rate basis.
I've been talking to a lot of clients that want to implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Many have been playing around with different implementations and they proudly show me the couple of services they have implemented and say, "What do you think of our SOA?" I usually answer with something along the lines of, "That's a good start," or "This looks like a useful service," or segue into some line of questioning about what they did and what they learned.
Business Objects has thrown its hat into the software-as-a-service space with the announcement of crystalreports.com. Crystalreports.com is an on-demand report sharing platform for organizations using Crystal Reports. Basically, it provides a common location for users to upload reports and then specify who can access them.