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
So what is the status of SCM at this juncture? I see two big-picture stories: one about how SCM activities are being targeted and another about the evolution of SCM automation products. The first story is more obviously relevant to our question, but the second -- a sort of subplot that has importance that transcends the SCM category of applications -- may turn out to be the bigger story.
Editor's Note: This report addresses component and application architectures in detail and builds on the discussion covered in the author's previously published report, "Making Components Work" (see Cutter Consortium Distributed Enterprise Architecture Executive Report, Vol. 4, No. 9).
The accompanying Executive Report details two of the key architectures necessary for efficient and productive application development: component architecture and application architecture.1
Executive Update
Do You Know Where Your Patterns Are?
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
-- Elphonse Karr
Les Guê Pes, 1849
Those who cannot learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
-- George Santayana
The Life of Reason, 1905
One of these things is not like the others.
-- Big Bird
Sesame Street
The Object Management Group (OMG) began developing CORBA in 1989. The idea was that organizations would be moving to object and component technologies and that everyone would be better off if they had a common, open standard to use when they wanted to link together objects or components on different platforms.
SPENDING TRENDS
It's no secret that insurance companies are big IT spenders. Larger insurers have been consistently spending hundreds of millions of dollars per year on software alone. For some time, insurers have been focusing the vast majority of their technology spending in two areas: computing infrastructure and business process automation.
Competitive intelligence (CI) is the purposeful and coordinated monitoring of your competitor(s), wherever and whomever they may be, within a specific marketplace. Your competitors are those firms that you consider rivals and with whom you compete for market share. CI also involves determining what your rivals are planning to do before they do it.
If asked, just about any manager today could define competitive intelligence (CI). You should expect to hear responses ranging from "stealing business secrets" and "industrial espionage" coming from the truly deluded to a more accurate "collection and analysis of competitor behavior and plans" from those better informed.