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'm sure most of you reacted as I did when you heard that two Microsoft vice presidents had launched an attack on open source software: What else is new? In effect, Microsoft has been doing this for a long time, and it's hardly news. Other companies like IBM and Sun, which have promoted proprietary software in the past, have come around and figured out how to live with open source software.
With the dot-com shakeout and the general malaise infecting the economy, you'd almost think that business intelligence (BI) analytics for business-to-consumer (B2C) personalization had become a dirty term. Last year at this time, vendors were tripping over themselves to enter the B2C analytics and "personalization" market.
In this issue of ITMS, I'm pleased to share the results of the latest Cutter Consortium research on computing platform trends, e-business, and outsourcing.
Cast of Characters
The Company
The company at center stage is a sizable manufacturing organization and is the largest employer in the area. It employs approximately 16,000 people worldwide and develops products for commercial, military, and government markets. Two of the company's product development business units have recently been assessed according to the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) for Software at Level 3.
Executive Update
Case Study: Using XML Schemas to Implement EAI Solutions
I am currently the application architect on a project whose purpose is to accept service orders from Web clients and implement those orders by triggering workflows in back-end legacy systems. The exact details of the client or the application are unimportant. What's important is that this is a typical enterprise application integration (EAI) scenario -- using a Web client to invoke end-to-end transactions via a workflow middle layer that ultimately uses back-end resources to perform its work.