WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

What Ron and Alex did might might seem like too much work, but really, it isn’t much more than you’d be expected to do in a real job. And that’s the whole point: when you don’t have work experience doing X, hiring managers will look for things you’ve done that simulate work experience doing X.
Fortunately you only need to do build a project at this level once or twice — Ron and Alex’s projects got reused over and over for all their interviews.
So if I had to summarize the secret to a great ML project in one sentence, it would be: Build a project with an interesting dataset that took obvious effort to collect, and make it as visually impactful as possible.

Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of the C++ programming language, defends his legacy and examines what’s wrong with most software code.

When comparing or evaluating Customer Data Platforms, people tend to default to feature comparisons. This seems logical, but can risk missing the business forest for the technical trees.

Application leaders engaged in digital transformation must include event-driven computing in their portfolio of skills and technology, including the key related responsibilities for event brokering and event stream analytics.

Continuous Delivery provides great benefits not only for the team developing the software, by increasing their confidence, but also for the product team, since the delivery of new features becomes a pure business decision.

Speed is critical, which means grocers must jettison their traditional—and slow—approach to implementing new initiatives. They should instead take an agile approach using “concept sprints.” Characterized by quick decision making, a focus on tangible outcomes, constant customer validation, colocated and multidisciplinary teams, rapid iteration, and careful attention to internal capability building, concept sprints can reduce time-to-market from four to six months to just four weeks.

Exhibit 5 shows how concept sprints can be used across the organization to accelerate the launch of high-priority initiatives. Leading retailers have used such an approach to introduce new in-store digital solutions, refine picking algorithms in warehouses, or develop new products.

What do an iPaaS, an event-driven architecture and an advanced event broker have in common?

They’re probably all critical to the success of your enterprises’ digital transformation.

Read this paper to learn how you can leverage these tools in unison, to integrate your new and old technologies with modern frameworks and design patterns, and enable real-time event-distribution across all your environments and geos.

Former Baidu Chief Scientist, Coursera co-founder, and Stanford Adjunct Professor — gave a talk at the Stanford MSx Future Forum. During the talk, Professor Ng shared his opinion on AI. He mainly discussed how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming industry and business.

Developing fully native applications is like buying a sports car: it’s a fun, full-featured option, but typically expensive and not always the most practical. It should be done after carefully weighing the product’s budget, the mobile app’s strategic importance, and capabilities of the current team.

Below are some guidelines to help you decide which tech stack would best fit your application. The best decision is rarely obvious and can usually only be made after a thorough cost-benefit analysis.

In our 26-criterion evaluation of web content management system (web CMS) providers, we identified the 15 most significant ones — Acquia, Adobe, Amplience, Automattic, BloomReach, Contentful, CoreMedia, Crownpeak, Episerver, Kentico Software, Magnolia, OpenText, Progress, SDL, and Sitecore — and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps digital experience (DX) and strategy professionals make the right choice.

When I speak to leadership teams or consult on agile transformation with corporates I’m always keen to stress that there is never one all-purpose solution to what a successful digital transformation looks like.

With such fast-paced change in the technology landscape it's impossible for us to keep everything in view on the latest Radar. Using this A-Z you can browse everything that has ever been featured on the Radar, as well as search for specific technologies that you're interested in.

The Technology Radar is our thoughts on emerging technology trends in the industry. Read the latest here.

As the API or "application programming interface" becomes the primary interface for business (in much the same way physical storefronts gave way to applications and websites), we're seeing a new chapter in the story of software emerge. While it's playing out against the backdrop of other trends (microservices, software-defined networking, developers as buyers, and connectivity as a utility), the big idea here is that traditional, large programs are being broken down into and being offered as -- or with data exposed to -- services. But more importantly, these pieces and services are being recombined by other companies to create something new... it’s combinatorial innovation in action. In this talk (originally delivered at our most recent annual a16z Summit in November 2017), general partner Martin Casado describes the evolution of "the API economy" in the context of the history of computing; shares examples of companies whose entire business is based on or around APIs; considers implications for future infrastructure, IT business leaders, and others; and shares how APIs are already fueling the expansion of software eating the world.

Teaching page of Shervine Amidi, Graduate Student at Stanford University.

The Customer Data Platform Institute is a vendor-neutral organization dedicated to helping marketers manage customer data.

Many brands going through a digital transformation struggle to structure their teams. This framework can act as a guideline.

The vendor's focus on core R&D and channel-based selling proved a winning business strategy, but I think Sitecore has hit a ceiling in recent years.

BlackLine automates complex, manual & repetitive accounting processes & enables companies to move beyond the legacy record-to-report process.

What’s Squad? It’s a small cross-functional self-organized team with usually less than 8 people. They have end-to-end responsibilities and they work together toward long-term missions. On Squads, the key drive is autonomy.

Each Squad has autonomy to decide what to build, how to build it, and how to work together while building it, although they need to be aligned with the Squad mission, product strategy, and short-term goals.

“Be autonomous, but don’t sub-optimize!”.

Page weight is an important metric to track, but we should always consider using appropriate statistical methods when tracking it on the web as a whole. Certainly track it for your sites – because as you’ve seen here, the size of content does matter. It’s not the only thing that matters – but the correlation is strong enough that a spike in page weight should merit some investigation.

The analysis of Internet of Things (IoT) data is quickly becoming a mainstream activity. I’ve written about the Analytics of Things (AoT) before (some examples here, here, and here). For this blog, I’m going to focus on a few unique challenges that you’ll most likely encounter as you move to take IoT data into the AoT realm.

What is fog computing, and why is it necessary? This 2-minute video provides a quick overview and introduction.

Last month’s story about organizations exposing passwords and other sensitive data via collaborative online spaces at Trello.com only scratched the surface of the problem. A deeper dive suggests a large number of government agencies, marketing firms, healthcare organizations and IT support companies are publishing credentials via public Trello boards that quickly get indexed by the major search engines.