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
When it comes to protecting my personal data, I feel both organizationally and technologically handicapped. Of course, there is the Data Protection Act (DPA), which applies mostly to countries of the western world, but how would that actually protect my personal data?
In a BI Advisor I wrote back in February 2004, I said that increased use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology would lead to new analytic applications for supply-chain analysis and operational business intelligence (BI). (See, " BI and Radio Frequency Identification," 3 February 2004.)
It's been part of programmers' training since the earliest days:
It's time we step back from benchmarking specific topics and industries to consider the process of performance measurement and benchmarking itself. How should you use benchmarking information? What information should you gather about your company's own internal operations? In general, how should you gather and use performance data? It's important to look inward at your processes, your own ways of thinking, to make sure they still make sense and that you haven't developed any bad habits.
The state of Missouri is often referred to as the "Show-Me state." Its epithet is traced back to Missouri Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver, who in an 1899 speech said, "Frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me." Vandiver may have unwittingly been the father of metrics.
In November 2004, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey that asked 110 end-user organizations about their adoption and use of business performance management (BPM) practices. The goal was to determine the degree to which companies are implementing BPM techniques and technologies. In particular, the survey was designed to identify BPM development issues and trends, discern how companies are progressing with BPM initiatives, and provide statistics useful for benchmarking and measuring your organization's BPM efforts.
"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