Creating Smart Enterprises

Book excerpt: "Vivek Kale's Creating Smart Enterprises goes smack-dab at the heart of harnessing technology for competing in today's chaotic digital era. Actually, for him, it's SMACT-dab: SMACT (Social media, Mobile, Analytics and big data, Cloud computing, and internet of Things) technologies. This book is required reading for those that want to stay relevant and win, and optional for those that don't." —Peter Fingar, Author of Cognitive Computing and business technology consultant Creating Smart Enterprises unravels the mystery of social media, mobile, analytics and big data, cloud, and Internet of Things (SMACT) computing and explains how it can transform the operating context of business enterprises. It provides a clear understanding of what SMACT really means, what it can do for smart enterprises, and application areas where it is practical to use them. All IT professionals who are involved with any aspect of a SMACT computing project will profit by using this book as a roadmap to make a more meaningful contribution to the success of their computing initiatives. This pragmatic book: Introduces the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) business ecosystem confronted by the businesses today. Describes the challenges of defining business and IT strategies and of aligning them as well as their impact on enterprise governance. Provides a very wide treatment of the various components of SMACT computing, including the Internet of Things (IoT) and its constituting technologies like RFID, wireless networks, sensors, and wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This book addresses the key differentiator of SMACT computing environments and solutions that combine the power of an elastic infrastructure with analytics. The SMACT environment is cloud-based and inherently mobile. Information management processes can analyze and discern recurring patterns in colossal pools of operational and transactional data. Analytics, big data, and IoT computing leverage and transform these data patterns to help create successful, smart enterprises.