Market Driven Data Quality (Data Darwinism)
A contrarian idea to improve data quality; let "market forces" like peer pressure, earn-in, and competitive prioritization encourage data owners to do their own quality monitoring.
Vintage Technology
Here's one of those videos making the rounds via eMail. I found this in my inbox at work, from an observant friend who apparently likes the same web sites I do (although I had originally this as a great example of minimalist site design). httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdSHeKfZG7c It's interesting to note how the magical becomes the mundane. I did find it interesting that certain "timeless" concepts (a deck of cards? a marbles game?) have more resonance than these artifacts of a bygone…
Chargebacks vs. Allocations – Defining IT’s Relationship with the Business
Some IT departments prefer chargebacks, while others do not. My own preference is to allocate IT costs to the business units, based on some reasonable balance of simplicity and accuracy. General services could be allocated by headcount, COGs, or revenues, with each business unit taking their proportional share. Some easily identifiable items might be allocated more directly - maintenance costs for specialized engineering, warehouse management, or financial systems, for example, could be allocated more directly to those departments. I've written…
Estimating Bird-Dogging Time for Project Tasks
New year, new projects, and new adventures in getting folks to think in project management terms. I've written before about Calendar time vs. Effort time, but this past week we came up with a new distinction that is worthwhile to call out. When working with the business and getting folks to estimate how much time it will take to complete a task, there are actually three different things that most people will talk about - and folks need to be…
Fun with Ngrams – Art, Science, Programming
A recent gift from Google Labs - the NGram viewer, a fascinating tool that searches the Google Books database for words and phrases, and charts their relative frequency. For example - let's take some of the themes of this blog ... Apparently, Art and Science have grown closer, and enjoy a somewhat parallel existence together. Design (Inspiration) started strong, had a bit of a lull, but is enjoying a bit of a renaissance (as it were). And unfortunately, "management" is…
External Radiance Projection 2010: A Christmas / Upgrade Story
No, I'm not a Christmas fanatic - but when you live in Chicago, you learn to look for nice weather in the weeks approaching Thanksgiving, to put up the lights before the wind and cold conspire to make it a painful experience. Basically, I gotta burn a vacation day - but why not? It's an opportunity to get away from the hassles of work in Corporate IT ... ... except this year, I finally had to deal with my outdated…
Design and Change Management
Over my career, I have developed a few strongly-held design beliefs, and one came up in conversation recently, during a spirited discussion on minimal quality requirements for a[ny] data mart. I hold that the data copied from source to destination must be provably correct and complete with little effort. When agile-ly rolling staged deliverables into production, I may not have all the attributes in place for full flexibility of drill down, but if you have [say] 1248 records in the…
Sorting with Sound
via Geek.com - yes, I subscribe to stuff like this in my RSS reader ... httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8g-iYGHpEA I thought this was interesting on two levels ... The Engineering student within appreciates the differences in sorting techniques (although I think I could speed up that bubble sort ...) I also think these videos provide a simple illustration of the power of multi-media information sharing; the audio helps the animated "description" of the sorting techniques httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXAjiDQbPSw I freely admit to be a bubble-sort…
A Little Too Literal (or, How to Teach Innovation)
Spoiler alert: It can't be taught ... One of the questions I get - and I'm getting this a lot lately - is how to get people to think more analytically, less literally. We need folks to stop focusing on the mechanical task of manipulating reports with Excel just to compute some answers. How about learning to use Excel, Access, and whatever native query / data download tools are available - to pull some data from the system, just to…
The Magic In the Middle – Practical Tactics for Digital Success
Most projects would be considered a failure if they only got 20% of their promised value. Then again, no one expects 100% success - some folks will never make the change. Is there a middle ground? Absolutely! Read on for practical pointers and targets to focus on - with examples of unexpected benefits.