Artificial intelligence, adopting lean practices in your innovation efforts, the future of BI and Blockchain were just some of the topics we heard about at Pythian’s recent Love Your Data Conference. This event brings together CIOs and IT Business leaders, helping them better understand how they can tap into data to make better decisions for their businesses. As Pythian’s VP of Marketing, Lynda Partner said in her opening remarks, “figuring out data is a journey with a lot of twists and turns, and a whole a lot of learning.” One of Pythian’s goals for this conference was to help make that journey a little easier to navigate.
Pythian’s founder and CEO, Paul Vallée kicked off the speaking program giving his take on the state of IT today, with a particular focus on what’s driving IT leaders and innovation. He touched on some of the industries’ “mega trends;” as defined by Gartner. These are trends that impact businesses, the economy, and society and that define the future of how things will change. He also outlined concepts businesses should have in mind as they move forward.
Get comfortable with artificial intelligence
One of the mega trends business leaders need to keep their eyes on is artificial intelligence (AI). Vallée pointed out how AI is starting to show value, and how the progress in machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence indicates how things will dramatically accelerate from here on in.
“Artificial intelligence and machine learning are becoming increasingly valuable for businesses. The rate of success when applying these kinds of algorithms to solve difficult business problems is very fast and getting faster,” Vallée said.
This is something for all CIOs and business leaders to take note of because it’s not something that will be going away.
Adopting lean practices for future innovation
One of the points that was stressed is that going forward, in order to start thinking smaller, delivering value sooner, and closing the feedback loop faster, businesses must start to innovate in a way that is much like a lean start up with lean enterprise.
“We can no longer hope to tie up an enormous amount of capital in support of a deliverable and wait to take feedback at a big bang delivery of that product or that result. The modern approach needs to be iterative and deliver small amounts of results right away, and then iterate on that feedback from the result,” Vallée noted.
The power of DevOps
Earlier this year, CIO magazine pointed out that DevOps is “a much misunderstood methodology that many believe is simply a way to build software faster.” They went on to say that “executed well, DevOps certainly does that, but it’s also a cultural shift that has CIOs rethinking how they must deliver technology services that best serve employees and customers.”
Vallée explains DevOps by saying it’s actually the automation of automation.
“As computer scientists, what we’re doing with DevOps is we’re automating our engineering platforms, our operational delivery platforms, and we’re changing the way in which operations and engineering work together. The power of automating the act of automation is that we’re going to accelerate a lot from here on in,” Vallée remarked.
Read more on the key highlights of the 2017 Love Your Data Conference.
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