CIOs, strategists and IT specialists all have their own ideas about what they can learn from previous projects and where they think the business should be heading in the future, but the only way to get the big picture is to stand back and take in an objective view of today’s state of play. Looking…
What is natural language processing? Natural language processing (NLP) is the branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that deals with communication: How can a computer be programmed to understand, process, and generate language just like a person? While the term originally referred to a system’s ability to read, it’s since become a colloquialism for all computational…
The past couple of months have been filled with new beginnings, especially for IT groups. Armed with new budgets and post-holiday enthusiasm, many IT organizations were preparing to launch major initiatives in 2018. Although most IT execs have learned what it takes to implement successful initiatives, we are all guilty of skipping key steps in…
This year, we’re going to plan to deliver more with less. We’re going to enhance infrastructure resilience. We’re going to manage our resources more effectively. We’re going to do a lot of things—or at least we plan to—this year. How, exactly, will that get accomplished without a business strategy? Enterprise architecture provides the operating principles…
Digital transformations are in vogue these days, with CIOs winning plaudits for efforts that fortify business operations, generate new revenues streams, or both. But before IT leaders can initiate a bet-the-house overhaul, many must author a far more foundational transition: IT culture change. Rather than broken technology implementations, such as spaghetti legacy code and ERP…
It’s been said that the only people who tell the truth are the children and the insane. Now, developers may seem insane at times and they are just as prone to childish tantrums as anyone, but that doesn’t mean they speak the truth. Indeed they often shade the truth just like the suits in the…
You could have heard a pin drop in the room. We were debating the target architecture of a large program. Someone in the room had said: “We created a target architecture four years ago, which we all believed in, and I guess we are half-way through implementing it. So, why is this not helping us…
A quick search for “IT maturity models” on Google produces over 4 million results. Finding the right maturity model is about as useful as searching through the millions of records looking for a single actionable process to achieve IT maturity. IT maturity models, maturity curves, and capability models all attempt to find your location on…
In “Why today’s IT organization doesn’t work anymore,” I wrote about why traditional IT organizations don’t meet today’s need. At the core of my argument was that with customers and 24/7 digital feedback loops at the heart of modern digital business models, classic, siloed IT organizations are ripe for disruption and transformation. Given the need…
Every IT leader seeks faster, more efficient department performance. After all, when IT underperforms, it hurts business operations and stifles innovation. A lackluster IT department also limits an enterprise’s ability to meet changing market demands, lengthens the time required to develop and release new products and services, and ultimately degrades customer satisfaction. Fortunately, improving performance…