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
There is a simple illusion shown in Figure 1. When asked which of the two lines is longer, many people choose line A, while some who have seen a similar example before will say that both lines are the same length. Actually, line B is longer. When I showed this figure to a class several years ago, one student remarked that surely I must have meant to say that line A is longer. I invited the student to measure the lines, to which he responded, "But that would be pointless when the result is so clear."
The ability to use and have command of metrics are essential skills for the agile IT executive. In this issue of CBR , Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Michael Mah provides a look at the emerging discipline of metrics and benchmarking and then frames the discussion in terms of using reliable information to make high-stakes decisions.
Jim Brosseau follows with a piece that highlights the dangers of using externally generated benchmark data and offers advice for balancing it with internally gathered data.
It's been almost five years since Web services were first introduced, and it's probably a good time to check in on how they're doing and where they're going.
Read the Executive Summary
We have to be very careful about making even small changes in IT today because they can impact the entire organization.
Recently, I talked with several senior IT executives who, in different ways, asked about the purpose of enterprise architecture (EA). Now, "What's EA's purpose?" is a good question because it asks what the value of EA is and how that value can be measured.
Executive Report