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 attended a lot of interesting sessions at Sun's Java One conference last week. The two that impressed me the most were on reuse. Reuse has been one of those topics that has been strongly associated with objects and component-based development for well over a decade, so it's useful, once in a while, to do a reality check.
One of the biggest challenges that agile development methods face is developers claiming to be following the method -- when in reality they aren't -- who then run into trouble and proceed to blame the method they weren't following properly to begin with. We're seeing this in the case of extreme programming (XP), where hackers choose to follow a subset of XP's practices, yet claim to be following all of XP's tenets.
SUPPLIER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
I'll admit it: I'm one of those people who has made an occasional disparaging remark about COBOL. It's such an easy target, it could almost be the subject of a skit on Saturday Night Live if the actors knew anything about programming languages.
Many firms are having serious doubts about IT's ability to deliver business intelligence (BI) systems. After participating in many BI strategy and implementation efforts, it has become apparent that neither the IT function nor the business users have the mindset to deploy and utilize BI systems correctly. Corporations today are drowning in terabytes of transactional data.