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
In my last Advisor ("EA Maturity Models," 15 March 2006), I introduced a variety of different models that are being used to evaluate enterprise architecture programs. Just like many EA programs that unfortunately go down the "EA for EA sake" path, we often take a "maturity for maturity sake" approach, forgetting that the maturity model is there for a purpose.
Last week, Oracle introduced Oracle BI Suite. This offering -- or rather, line of different offerings -- is significant because it blends Oracle's own BI technology (e.g., Oracle Discover, Oracle Reports, OLAP) with Siebel's BI and analytics technology, which Oracle gained when it acquired Siebel Systems last year.
Last month, I covered the "blending" of business rules management (BRM) and business process management (BPM) technologies (see "Business Rules and Business Process Management: Separate But Complementary," 22 February 2006). This month, I want to discuss the use of BRM applications for multichannel decision automation.
Over the past year, I've noticed increasing attention being directed at the use of text mining to enhance customer relationship management (CRM), knowledge management (KM), enterprise information portals (EIP), and other applications by automating the analysis, categorization, indexing, summarization, and association of high volumes of text-based information.
Senior managers -- the people who make strategic product decisions -- need to know when they can expect those products to release. The organization of current product releases against a timeline is a project portfolio. And, planning the project portfolio in an agile environment is different -- but not harder -- than planning the project portfolio in a non-agile environment.
The Windows Communication Framework (WCF) is one of the most interesting and exciting innovations in Microsoft's long-awaited Windows Vista (née Longhorn). Previously known by its internal codename Indigo, WCF is one of an array of developer frameworks that make up Vista's Windows .NET Framework Extension (WinFX).
Some people compare opinions to body parts; everybody has them. Perhaps the same could be said about capability maturity models (CMM), which seem to have sprung up like weeds. Maturity models were first pioneered by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI, a federally funded research organization associated with Carnegie Mellon University) in the early 1990s as a way to quantify software engineering practices and provide comparisons among organizations.