Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
With any initiative that is offered for consideration, within a business, for inclusion within a program of work it is very easy to oversell the benefits that it can deliver and the ‘ease by which it may be accomplished. Often, … Continue reading →
Right Sourcing: Enabling Collaboration is now available for ordering from the publisher (US, UK). The book puts forward the proposal that the modern enterprise must fundamentally rethink its ‘sourcing equation’ to become or remain viable. By presenting perspectives on sourcing from 21 different contributors, the editors hope to enable and inspire readers to make better-informed decisions. […]
After half a decade, the challenges and problems arising from the financial collapse of 2007-8 are still dragging on and on. With the economies of entire countries seemingly brought to their knees, and no apparent end in sight to any…
How much does it cost to acquire a customer? To retain a customer? To lose a customer? And in what sense of ‘cost’? In part this one was triggered by reading through my relatively-new copy of Business Model You, and…
Obama orders agencies to make data open, machine-readable by default | Ars Technica
good, but note the “if implemented”…
“President Barack Obama issued an executive order today that aims to make “open and machine-readable” data formats a requirement for all new government IT systems. The order would also apply to existing systems that are being modernized or upgraded. If implemented, the mandate would bring new life to efforts started by the Obama administration with the launch of Data.gov four years ago. It would also expand an order issued in 2012 to open up government systems with public interfaces for commercial app developers.
“The default state of new and modernized Government information resources shall be open and machine readable,” the president’s order reads. “Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable.” The order, however, also requires that this new “default state” protect personally identifiable information and other sensitive data on individual citizens, as well as classified information.”
Will Your Golden Years Be Robot-Assisted?
I’m totally counting on an eldercare robot, tho I might choose a name other than HERB:
“Robots—in addition to other uses—are now being viewed as a way to meet the needs of a fast-growing aging population, with technologies that assist in daily care and provide companionship. Over the next 18 years, 78 million baby boomers will turn 65 at a rate of about 8,000 a day. And most will not be able to afford the daily help often required by age-related disability.
At the same time, health care costs are skyrocketing. Robots could help address both costs and manpower issues.”
tags: robotics healthcare demographics
“The same week that brought us a video of someone firing a gun built using parts manufactured on a 3D printer, on Wednesday offered us an inspiring story about using the same type of printer to manufacture a prosthetic hand for more than hundred times less than the cost of a traditional prosthetic set of fingers.
The story of the Robohand is as inspiring as an Oprah interview. One of the participants, however, noted that he didn’t intend to help those missing a limb. Instead, he sought out a 3D printed hand to save himself after a wood working accident shaved off four of his fingers. And yet, thanks to a collaboration between carpenter Richard Van As in Johannesburg, and a Seattle prop designer a five-year old born without fingers now has a more functional hand.”
tags: 3dprinting robohand makerbot
SAP Takes It All to the Cloud – NYTimes.com
The inevitable: “We will do cloud-based ERP on a massive scale,” said Vishal Sikka, a member of SAP’s executive board and one of the people who oversaw the project. Of SAP’s regular product, he said, “At some point in the future, complex implementations should go away. All of our products are moving to HANA.”
“Deep Learning is a first step in this new direction. Basically, it involves building neural networks — networks that mimic the behavior of the human brain. Much like the brain, these multi-layered computer networks can gather information and react to it. They can build up an understanding of what objects look or sound like.
In an effort to recreate human vision, for example, you might build a basic layer of artificial neurons that can detect simple things like the edges of a particular shape. The next layer could then piece together these edges to identify the larger shape, and then the shapes could be strung together to understand an object. The key here is that the software does all this on its own — a big advantage over older AI models, which required engineers to massage the visual or auditory data so that it could be digested by the machine-learning algorithm.
With Deep Learning, Ng says, you just give the system a lot of data “so it can discover by itself what some of the concepts in the world are.””
What if your organisation’s internal business processes had a publicly accessible api?
What if information about the internals of your products and services where available to mine, interact with and influence?
How would that change your customer’s perception of your organisation?
Would your customer’s self organise?
Would they help you improve your organisation?
Would your customer’s uncover insight you didn’t know you even wanted?
How would transparency of your organisations strengths and weakness change how you and your competitors operate
What would prevent such a leap? the thought of airing your dirty laundry? losing competitive advantage?
Wouldn’t it be great to not have dirty laundry?
Would radical openness and the necessary re-orientation of the organisation towards its customers bring a whole new competitive advantage?
Lots of questions, I don’t have the answers at the moment. If this post sparks any thoughts i’d love to continue the conversation either on twitter or in the comments on this post.
Enterprise Architecture FatigueInteresting discourse with a new client. They have been through numerous attempts to establish Governance using Enterprise Architecture and every time they find themselves swamped with extremely clever people who produce …
Enterprise Architecture FatigueInteresting discourse with a new client. They have been through numerous attempts to establish Governance using Enterprise Architecture and every time they find themselves swamped with extremely clever people who produce …
Our new book, Right Sourcing: Enabling Collaboration, is now available for ordering at the publishers websites: US: http://lnkd.in/AWVXt6 UK: http://lnkd.in/vFCWZB Read more about the book and the project at http://sourcing-it.org Rien Dijkstra, John Gøtze and Pieter van der Ploug are the editors. The foreword … Continue reading →
Guest Post by Hemant Ramachandra We’ve all heard the saying that information is power and that’s never been truer. Today’s consumers are now often armed with more information than the sales teams that serve them. As a result, the sales force is often at a disadvantage—needing to scramble to make sure they remain relevant to their customers. Take the car buying experience as an example. One of my most vivid early memories was accompanying my […]
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