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.

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Researchers at hospitals, universities, and technical institutes are teaming up to apply artificial intelligence, machine learning, and analytics to help determine and predict COVID-19 patients’ hospitalization paths and medical needs.
Established risk management methodologies and approaches tend to be static in nature and lead to models that are backward-looking. During the COVID-19 crisis, many companies have found their decision-making tools and dashboards for crisis management and business continuity to be inadequate given the geographic scale of the disruption. New risk models look ahead by utilizing AI and ML and can be continually updated as more data becomes available. In the first in a series of webinars, Tom Teixeira, Carl Bate, and Craig Wylie answered some questions about what risk management looks like in this changing business landscape.
This month's issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal (CBTJ) examines the new face of automation and explores novel ways to address the various issues and challenges encountered.
In my coaching, it is incredible how much pushback I receive on the idea of demoing your architecture. It seems Agile teams are comfortable demoing end-user functionality, but incredibly uncomfortable when you ask them to demo architectural elements.
Daniel J. Power, Ciara Heavin, and Shashidhar Kaparthi argue that a better governance mechanism is necessary to minimize the dangers of rushing to adopt AI and automation without due consideration of the risks. They present a governance framework for intelligent automation that includes all key stakeholders and offer policy prescriptions and guidelines for successful intelligent automation.
Tad Gonsalves and Bhuvan Unhelkar argue that while machine intelligence facilitates smart automation and autonomous operations, yielding benefits, it cannot handle decisions that need to account for subjective factors, such as satisfaction, perceived quality, or joy, which cannot be parameterized in an ML algorithm. The authors recommend judicious superimposition of human natural intelligence (NI) on machine intelligence as a better way to facilitate business decisions that factor in customer value. In their discussion of how to achieve this goal, they also present a few use cases that embrace this hybrid intelligence.
In most enterprises, business processes are automated in isolation, creating “automation silos” — a major barrier to realizing the fuller potential of enterprise-wide integrated automation. In their article, Aravind Ajad Yarra and Danesh Zaki address this issue. They differentiate between first- and second-generation smart automation and identify key imperatives to ensure desired integration across an entire business process. Furthermore, they present a detailed architecture for, and a pathway toward, smart automation 2.0, which enterprises can adopt to enable their automation bots to cooperate across the value chain
Namratha Rao and Jagdish Bhandarkar outline the concept of intelligent auto­mation using AI, ML, and RPA. A case study from the financial sector highlights the benefits gained through RPA. The authors explain how an intelligent bot can be trained and deployed over a period of a few months, and they emphasize establishing a roadmap, applying the right security measures, and setting up robust governance as three key tenets for scaling automation.