6 IT management traps to avoid

IT leadership is challenging work. In addition to devising technology strategies that create maximum business value on a budget, you have to establish and motivate a highly productive team capable of tackling a wide range of technical issues while executing your vision for IT. At times the overwhelming nature of this work can lead even…

Mastercard pushes payments to the edge

A global payment network is Mastercard’s most prized asset, facilitating 300 million financial transactions worldwide each day in a complex system protected by machine learning (ML) and other cutting-edge security technologies. The financial services company is now upgrading that system, turning away from on-premises solutions to instead embrace a blend of cloud and edge computing…

6 best practices for good data governance

Why is good data governance so important? Consider what might result without it: data that’s poor in quality, difficult to use, lacking integrity, vulnerable to cybersecurity threats, inconsistent, and not always available to business users. In other words, from a business standpoint there is almost no point in having data without data governance. [ Learn…

The hard truth about IT process success

The key to running an effective organization, we’ve been told for decades, is delivering work products through well-designed and -managed processes. Process is hailed as the path to organizational nirvana, in the form of repeatable, predictable results. But CIOs who start process initiatives by designing processes and training staff in their use are akin to…

Discount Tire transforms CX on road to expansion

Enterprises across the country are rethinking how much office space they need post-pandemic, as knowledge workers and admin staff show no signs of wanting to let go of the conferencing and collaboration tools that enable them to log in from home. Gary Desai, CIO at Discount Tire, has another real-estate question on his mind, though:…

Inside USPTO's IT overhaul

Several years ago, a database corruption issue at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) brought parts of the agency’s electronic filing system down for days. The IT platform it depended on was nearly two decades old, which spurred the agency to bring in a new CIO with a mandate to overhaul its IT systems…

Predictive analytics: 4 success stories

For years, companies have been striving to develop analytics capabilities, not just to understand past performance, but to anticipate trends and future events to improve agility. Increasingly, companies are deploying predictive analytics to make their services more efficient, develop products, find potential threats, optimize maintenance, and even save lives. Predictive analytics apply techniques such as…

Discover transforms data pipeline for AI success

If there’s one key component for AI success, it’s data. But even organizations steeped in data and well-versed in the use of analytics can struggle to establish reliable, automated data pipelines to fuel machine learning strategies. Discover Financial Services found itself at this crossroads in 2019, when its developers and data engineers were coping with…