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
It's almost become a cliché to say that employees have been harping for years about how easy it is to use a search engine to search the extreme reaches of the Web to find information. Yet searching for information within one's own organization is difficult -- if not downright intimidating.
Executive Update
Sustainable Software Development: Cultural Issues
INTRODUCTION
Suppose that you wanted to build a new kind of software development organization: one that could produce top-quality, feature-rich products year after year without burning out the engineers or their managers. What are the most important considerations in building an organization capable of sustainable development? In the first Executive Update of this series on the topic (Vol. 7, No.
A successful business intelligence (BI) outsourcing strategy requires a clear understanding of the value proposition. A benefits analysis to assess the gains of outsourcing should include the value of coming "online" more quickly with a new BI application; the cost saved by not having to build and maintain inhouse BI expertise; and the value inherent in the vendors' experience and ability to avoid perils and pitfalls.
Information architectures are increasingly misaligned with business architectures while becoming less adaptive to new products, services, markets, and customer requirements. A steady drumbeat of failed projects, some that are publicized and some that are not, has executives rethinking failed policies of the past. Wholesale replacement projects and package deployment initiatives have poor track records while integration tools have created a maze of redundancies wrapped around already convoluted architectures.
Last week, Microsoft acquired BI analysis and visualization vendor ProClarity Corporation. Financial terms were not revealed. However, this deal is important because it significantly bolsters Microsoft's already considerable BI technology stack with an intuitive and comprehensive analytic, visualization, and reporting platform already tailor-made for the Microsoft product line.
All around the world, corporations are turning to open source software (OSS) for a number of compelling reasons. In Europe, for instance, financial services companies have been moving to Linux because of its superior price/performance, hardware-neutrality, reliability, and vendor independence. Companies like AtosEuronext, Banco Popolare di Milano, LVM Insurance, and Reuters Group have migrated important server-side operations to Linux with remarkably successful results.
This third and final Advisor in a series of articles on post-project evaluations focuses on the second of the two main components of post-project evaluations: assessing the business impact of an IT investment (see "Post-Project Evaluations, Part 1: Overview," 22 February 2006 and "Post-Project Evaluations, Part 2: Assessing Project Performance," 15 March 2006).