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 spend a lot of time at research gatherings, where IT executives join with academics and experts to share information on running organizations better. It seems like I keep hearing the same complaints: "There's no predictability in my IT area." "Each year, more and more money goes into maintenance and operations, but there's still new work to be done." "We never know a project's on the rocks until it's too late to fix it."
Metrics is a people business. Having spent more than 15 years in the metrics field, this concept has reinforced itself with every engagement I've undertaken, first as a project leader within large companies and later as a managing partner in a private consulting and training firm. Measurement may initially seem to be about benchmarks, trends, and data, but what comes first is getting the data. And to do that, you have to be with and talk to people.
Article
Metrics and Other Priorities
Software metrics is one of those great ideas that just never seems to take hold. It certainly has vociferous advocates, and it is mandatory for Level 2 certification on the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model. Software metrics is available as dashboards, scorecards, and instrument panels. There are plenty of qualified consultants ready to help would-be users, but it just hasn't caught on.
It's time we at CBR 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? This issue of CBR considers these questions.
Integration remains one of the most important and difficult issues facing IT organizations today. Whether the integration is internal using enterprise application integration (EAI) or external using business-to-business integration (B2Bi), estimates are that at least 40% of IT budgets are directed to integration infrastructure. Multitiered computing, including Web-based applications, is quickly enhancing enterprise IT systems and provides the best hope for efficient and cost-effective integration.