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
I've recently read a series of articles on Linux desktop options, on Sun's Java Desktop, and on Apple as an alternative desktop. Most of the articles compared OS functionality and the cost per user. What most of the writers don't seem to understand is that, for most of us, a desktop OS is simply the platform on which we run the Microsoft Office suite.
Most IT organizations today are struggling with the same problem: how to be more agile, responsive, and competitive. When we look at the companies that excel in these areas, we notice some similarities. First, these companies have taken an overall enterprise-wide approach to defining their business processes and the IT infrastructure needed to support them. Underlying and unifying the IT infrastructure is a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Second, these companies have implemented changes in their business and development organizations to support this new approach.
EXPLORING SOA OPTIONS
In a recent Cutter Consortium Enterprise Architecture E-Mail Advisor, I discussed IBM's Workplace Client Technology.1 As a cosponsor of SOAP, UDDI, BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), and its growing server suite WebSphere (which includes a wide variety of utilities including business process modeling facilities derived from its acquisition of Holosofx), IBM is clearly working hard to lay the groundwork for and encourage investment in SOA.
SOA: HOW TO WORK IT AND HOW WELL IT WORKS
Strategies and Implementation
There is currently a lot of excitement over SOA, which many vendors and analysts are talking up as the next big thing in enterprise IT. Although consensus is lacking as to its exact nature, there is a strong feeling that an SOA is a good thing to have and that organizations should be making plans to implement one. In fact, depending on which definition you go by, quite a few organizations may already have an SOA up and running.