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
Advisor
Information Lifecycle Management
Amidst the tangle and bustle of ERP, CRM, NAS, SAN, CAS, and NSF, I have found a new acronym right down the block from where HSM used to live (I grew up with DFHSM; we don't talk about the DF part). ILM 's the name of the new acronym. Pronounced eye-el-em, not "ilm" (perish the thought): information lifecycle management.
I recently sat through a 32-slide PowerPoint presentation (about 14 slides too many) on a vendor's view of ILM. I'll save you the time by giving you the quick version.
In last week's Advisor, I said that outside of academia, the life sciences, and financial services, practical grid business applications are mostly rare, and that the biggest reason for this is a lack of standards and best practices for implementation. I added that although these are now under development, I did not see companies stampeding to implement grid-computing architectures in 2006 (see " My Thoughts on BI Trends for 2006," 3 January 2006).
Test-driven development was developed by Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Kent Beck, one of the founding fathers of Extreme Programming (XP). Beck is also the inventor of the xUnit family of automated unit testing utilities and author of Test-Driven Development: By Example [1], which highlights both TDD and JUnit.
Advisor
Data Analysis Quality
An information system (IS) manager's job can be more than delivering data. Moving up the management chain to chief information officer (CIO) requires a more critical understanding of how and why data is collected and used by decision makers.
I began my first EA Advisor in 2005 with some predictions of what the year would bring (see " Looking Ahead to 2005," 19 January 2005). To kick off 2006, I'm going to see how those predictions panned out. And not to be accused of learning my lesson, I'm going to make some more predictions for 2006. Here we go....
Happy New Year!
I wish all of my readers a terrific 2006.
Since this is the first Advisor of the New Year, I thought I'd give my thoughts on some of the more important business intelligence (BI) developments and trends I see taking place in 2006. Obviously, I can't cover everything here, so I welcome your feedback on developments you see affecting data warehousing, BI, and CRM this year.
