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
DATA WAREHOUSING AND BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STANDARDIZATION EFFORTS
Data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) are no longer just about building a central repository where a company's data, sourced from multiple databases, is maintained in a static manner and analyzed on a "need be" basis.
BIZWORKS: ENTERPRISE APPLICATION INTEGRATION MEETS ENTERPRISE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Implemented on an enterprise scale, e-business requires integrating Internet applications with not only your core operational systems -- enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain, customer relationship management (CRM), data warehouse, etc.
Traditionally, there has been a rather sharp distinction between conventional enterprise applications and real-time applications. Regular applications were sometimes expected to provide answers to queries rather quickly, but everyone distinguished between "quick responses" and the kind of responses that were required by process control systems.
Software theorists have been talking about developing new software applications with reusable components for a long time. The idea is obvious: why develop new code when you can simply snap together already available components that provide the needed functionality. An analogy is usually made, claiming that the amazing successes of computer hardware depend on the existence of standards and hardware components.
Advisor
No Mind Readers Here!
In the October issue of the Cutter IT Journal, I wrote about the fact that " You Don't Always Get What You Want: But You Do Usually Get What You Ask For." As an addendum to that, here's another thought: if you don't know what you want (or don't make it clear), you probably won't get it!
Ever since XML was introduced, people have been talking about the possibility that it could be used as a kind of Internet middleware. Skeptics have pointed out that XML is a document format. It isn't middleware -- it lacks any of the services traditionally associated with middleware, including the ability to locate distributed components, transactions, security, and so forth.
Advisor
Let Someone Else Test It
People who design or code something shouldn't test it. The classic reason is they may not see problems that others can. I've recently stumbled onto another reason, and that reason can save projects time and money.
Many years ago I remember someone explaining to me that the reason the Roman Colosseum was still (more or less) standing was due to the fact that the people who tried to tear it down and use it for a stone quarry in the Middle Ages were less skilled than the engineers who built it originally.