Successful Workplace

Day 2 of the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Conference in London and I can’t help but ask myself, “Does the combination of cloud, mobile, social and data usher in the eventual end of the stand alone application? There’s a frank reality that these four ‘movements’, called the Nexus of Forces by Gartner, intersect […]

Predictive analytics is big business now. Hand in hand with Big Data they represent one of the only ways to get to know your consumer market and understand how they’ll behave under conditions, respond to marketing and react to incentives. But the problem with all of this is that it’s a constant cat and mouse chase, consumers are […]

This week at Cloud Connect in Santa Clara, I had a chance to sit down with Alistair Croll, founder of Solve for Interesting. I had been vaguely aware of the site 23andMe that tests and individual’s spit to help customers, “learn valuable health & ancestry information.” Not only can they tell you which of 22 […]

David Bowie releases his new album, The Next Day, this week. I’ve not had a chance to listen to it yet but the title itself was provocative enough for this post. The disciplines of Big Data and real-time predictive analytics present organizations with the ability to understand behaviour at a relentless pace and also predict […]

Organizations are collecting more and more data every single minute of every day. It’s no secret that Facebook, for example, processes 2.5 billion pieces of content and over 500 terabytes of data each day, pulling in 2.7 billion Likes and 300 million photos per diem. Facebook also scans a whopping 105 terabytes of data each half […]

We hear all of the time about big data as a source of “key insights” but we hear less often about big data as something that truly changes how we live our lives. If you consider that big data involves high volumes, velocity and variety of data, you have to believe that information is coming […]

Pharmaceutical drug discovery can become highly problematic when a company has over a decade worth of test data that needs to be analyzed. How can you expect to visualize 10 years of pharmaceutical test data all at once? Allergan does it everyday. And it matters. All around the world, whenever people meet up for holidays, festivities, […]

I have been managing a few personal blogs for close to a decade now. I have traffic monitoring tools and Google Analytics configured, but I don’t monitor or analyze stuff there often enough. My excuse, though bad, is that I blog as a hobby, not for any business benefit. Plus, I haven’t found the idea […]

Selling data is nothing new. Marketers have engaged in a brisk trade in personal information for many years. The growing ubiquity of data, however, combined with new ways to analyze massive, diverse and fast-moving information increases the value of data significantly. Data is the the fuel for the modern analytics engine. Suddenly, the only thing […]

In our love affair with all things Big Data we easily forget the nuances that make it more about ubiquitous data than anything else. The oversimplification of the term is what frustrates many. Just last weekend Forrester’s John Rymer penned Big Data: The Worst Category Name Ever. Strong words? Not really. The term Big Data […]

Forrester’s John Rymer sums up his opinion succinctly when he says, “Big Data: The worst category name ever.” It certainly has challenges in name and how people conceive of it. Big Data as the hype would have it, I call, “The elephant riding the bicycle.” I’ll give you the seven things you need to consider, […]

Do a search for “data scientist” in a job search engine, and you’ll find the title is one of the hottest in IT today. With Indeed.com reporting 15000% growth for the role, is the sky the limit for these so-called data scientists? According to the Harvard Business Review–yes. Thomas Davenport and D.J. Patil deemed “data scientist” as […]

I was invited to speak at Forrester’s Digital Disruption Conference in Orlando this week and finished up my time on stage this morning. I was brought in by Forrester Senior Analyst Mike Gualtieri to speak alongside Terradata’s Chris Twogood about the meaning and impact of Big Data. Before taking the stage, the three of us […]

In a speech last week, U .S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta shocked many people with how real the threat is of a cyber attack on the U.S. and our infrastructure. In his talk to the Business Executives for National Security, Panetta painted a picture of an attack that would cause physical destruction and the loss […]

We’re heading into Columbus Day Weekend in the U.S., giving us a great chance to look at the fundamental changes that technology is bringing to retail. The new game is event-based marketing. Big Sale! A quick look at the LA Times shows who’s in the old game. The pages are full of merchants using discounting as […]

On Successful Workplace today there’s an interesting post about Big Data bringing down the house and it inspired me to continue the idea here. The idea of a distinct group that only handles procurement, another that does shipping and receiving and another that manages partner channels is fading. I’ve said in the past that traditional hierarchy must […]