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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As a result of the pandemic, we are witnessing increasing interest by organizations for utilizing natural language processing and speech recognition solutions targeted at customer engagement and support — particularly in the form of smartbots, intelligent assistants, conversational computing, and other applications designed to automate customer requests and assist human agents with contact/call center operations. In this Advisor, we examine some of the types of NLP and speech solutions available to organizations and consider some of the issues to keep in mind when it comes to employing such offerings.
Many organizations today struggle with a strong disconnect between their business model and their IT systems, data distributed over a large number of nonintegrated IT systems, manual interfaces between incompatible applications, or difficulties with EU GDPR compliance. We can trace most, if not all, of these issues back to an abundance of unspecific, inflexible, and nonaligned data models underlying the applications these organizations use to conduct their business. Often, these data models have been developed with insufficient business involvement and in isolation from each other — or have been purchased from vendors with little concern for the actual needs of the organization. In this Advisor, we briefly describe the origins of some of these issues.
In my short series of Data Architecture Advisors, “Data Architecture — Containing the Lakehouse,” and “Data Architecture — Out of the Lakehouse, Into the Lake,” I first introduced the newcomer on the block — the data lakehouse — and then discussed the life of one of its parents, the data lake. What about the other parent, you may ask. You may have heard that it’s dead. To paraphrase Mark Twain’s alleged riposte: “reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.”
In today’s digital environment, companies and their customers are generating increasing amounts of data. Correctly interpreted and used, this overload can be a means of competitive differentiation. It can improve understanding of customers and their behaviors, as well as control of internal processes. However, in many cases, the amount of data is so large, and the nature of it so complex, that it is difficult to analyze and act upon. As a result, many companies do not manage to harvest the potential value of existing data, despite significant investments and efforts. This Executive Update provides a brief description of how Agile ways of working can help companies effectively and efficiently leverage data in their day-to-day operations.
One of the primary issues impeding organizations from carrying out their customer experience (CX) management initiatives is a lack of CX professionals within the organization. So how are organizations meeting or planning to meet their CX implementation needs? This Advisor provides some answers.
Enterprises must manage their data systems to overcome challenges and leverage the opportunities and benefits of digital transformation. The “secret sauce” to achieving this lies in a practical approach that can help enterprises transition from their current state to the desired state in which they are ready for the digital era and beyond.
“MiPasa” is an important new blockchain project to assist healthcare providers, government health agencies, public health departments, universities, and other organizations manage and analyze COVID-19 data. MiPasa is a collaboration between many of the world's major health organizations, tech companies, and research institutions to build a blockchain-based, open, “global-scale control and communication system” to facilitate fast and early detection of COVID-19 carriers and infection hotspots via accelerated information sharing among individuals, authorities, and health institutions.
In this Executive Update, we provide a detailed introduction to the design thinking and Lean Startup paradigms. We also explore their interplay with Agile and how this trifecta can enhance product-market fit by focusing on customer delight.