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
Tools that allow users to apply advanced data visualization techniques have been around for years. For the most part, however, these tools have been used in scientific and engineering domains to build models for fluid flow analysis, aerodynamic simulation, interpreting atmospheric data, genetic mapping, and other complex applications involving extremely large data sets with many cause-and-effect variables.
It is way past the point when you would need to describe data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) applications in order to prove the technology works or to prove the value of enterprise data integration -- most organizations are convinced.
One of the many roles of a modern IT organization is finding and introducing new technology that enhances its parent organization's business objectives. When properly executed, this role enables IT to bring real bottom-line value to its parent by enabling breakthroughs in products, services, operational effectiveness, and/or competitive differentiation.
A couple of months ago, I wrote an Advisor on IBM's new patterns for e-business. In essence, IBM has examined the work it has done for clients and identified and formalized the major, recurring ways in which companies have solved e-business problems. At the moment, IBM has documented eight high-level e-business patterns:
During the past six months, I have been training and mentoring managers, users, and developers from the armed forces, major defense contractors, medical insurance companies, state governments, electrical and telephone utilities, and world-class research organizations. In every case, I was taken by surprise in learning that people from these organizations were still trying to understand the basics of object orientation.
Advisor
Recognizing the Dangers of Data
E-commerce is powered by an insatiable need for demographic, socioeconomic, and personal information to focus in on customers. Such information is beginning to acquire enormous financial value -- a new form of currency in the new e-economy. However, its use and storage is vulnerable to abuse, the potential for which grows daily.