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
Most companies are exploring enterprise Web service possibilities. In essence, they are considering building large-scale business processes that cross organizational boundaries. A good example would be a supply chain process that treated supplier, manufacturer, carrier, distributor, and retailer processes as subprocesses within the larger supply chain system.
Software estimation has been a tough beast to control ever since the early days of programming. Some may say that we have succumbed to the dragon. During the 1980s and 1990s, there were many infamous stories about software projects running out of control and ultimately being abandoned, due to significant cost and time overruns [1]. Today, we find that software projects are still being abandoned and for many of the same reasons. This is one of the findings of a recent Cutter Consortium survey on the current state of software project estimation.
I was reminded of the tale of Saint George and the Dragon (see text box below) about three years ago in a conversation with the president of a Chicago-based company that seemed incapable of delivering any piece of software on time. He was looking for someone to come in and slay the dragon -- a sweep of the sword, a thrust of the spear, and the software overruns would disappear. But, unfortunately, there is no magical solution, which is one of the reasons why so many companies today are facing the same problem of overruns.
We have a huge history of software projects we've already done. We have data from these projects.