The road to maturity for any technology in the enterprise is long and arduous. Take data and analytics platforms as an example. Data from 451 Research's Voice of the Enterprise series in March found a third of companies surveyed were still yet to fully embrace a data-driven approach to strategic decision making. If that is the case, whither artificial intelligence? Writing for Enterprise Talk earlier this month, Swapnil Mishra notes of businesses still being in the'AI adolescence' phase, citing research from Accenture which found 63% of 1,200 companies polled were still experimenting with projects.

The view from space has forever changed our vision on our home planet, revealing its beauty while pointing at the same time to its inherent fragility. This new perspective from above contributed to the emergence of the concept of Sustainable Development (SD), by convincing many of the need to (better) manage our (rapidly depleting) resources in a sustainable manner that would "meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". Over the last decades, the principles of SD were progressively adopted by world leaders on the occasion of a series of Earth Summits. One of the key challenges to implement SD however lies in one's ability to measure it. As stated by Lord Kelvin, "if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it". The challenge is further compounded by the inherent global nature of the problem, which calls for global data sets.