The months of December and January are usually full of reviews of significant events and achievements during the previous twelve months. Harvard Business Review makes the search for some of the best writing on the subject of data-driven transformation by occasionally publishing in one volume the best writing on a critical subject of interest to professional through the magazine OnPoint. It is worth making part of your permanent data management library.
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Money for Nothing — Project Performance Data and Efficiencies in Timeliness
I operate in a well regulated industry focused on project management. What this means practically is that there are data streams that flow from the R&D activities, recording planning and progress, via control and analytical systems to both management and customer. The contract type in most cases is Cost Plus, with cost and schedule risk often flowing to the customer in the form of cost overruns and schedule slippages.
(more…)Synergy — The Economics of Integrated Project Management
The hot topic lately in meetings and the odd conference on Integrated Project Management (IPM) often focuses on the mechanics of achieving that state, bound by the implied definition of current regulation, which has also become–not surprisingly–practice. I think this is a laudable goal, particularly given both the casual resistance to change (which always there by definition to some extent) and in the most extreme cases a kind of apathy.
(more…)Ground Control from Major Tom — Breaking Radio Silence: New Perspectives on Project Management
Since I began this blog I have used it as a means of testing out and sharing ideas about project management, information systems, as well to cover occasional thoughts about music, the arts, and the meaning of wisdom.
(more…)Like Tinker to Evers to Chance: BI to BA to KDD
It’s spring training time in sunny Florida, as well as other areas of the country with mild weather and baseball. For those of you new to the allusion, it comes from a poem by Franklin Pierce Adams and is also known as “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon”. Tinker, Evers, and Chance were the double play combination of the 1910 Chicago Cubs (shortstop, second base, and first base). Because of their effectiveness on the field these Cubs players were worthy opponents of the old New York Giants, for whom Adams was a fan, and who were the kings of baseball during most of the first fifth of a century of the modern era (1901-1922). That is, until they were suddenly overtaken by their crosstown rivals, the Yankees, who came to dominate baseball for the next 40 years, beginning with the arrival of Babe Ruth.
(more…)Back in the Saddle Again — Putting the SME into the UI Which Equals UX
“Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.” — Statement by Henry Ford in “My Life and Work”, by Henry Ford, in collaboration with Samuel Crowther, 1922, page 72
The Henry Ford quote, which he made half-jokingly to his sales staff in 1909, is relevant to this discussion because the information sector has developed along the lines of the auto and many other industries. The statement was only half-joking because Ford’s cars could be had in three colors. But in 1909 Henry Ford had found a massive market niche that would allow him to sell inexpensive cars to the masses. His competition wasn’t so much as other auto manufacturers, many of whom catered to the whims of the rich and more affluent members of society, but against the main means of individualized transportation at the time–the horse and buggy. The color was not so much important to this market as was the need for simplicity and utility.
(more…)Loose (Data) Sinks Ships — OpSec for the Information Age
More than a year ago I attended an on-line seminar for businesses that do business with federal agencies. The speaker, in a refrain now heard quite often said: “There are two types of businesses; those who have been hacked by the Chinese and those that don’t know they have been hacked by the Chinese.” While there is a bit of hyperbole in that statement, it does make a valid point, and it is that all data with which we work in this new interconnected age of the internet and social media is vulnerable to being exposed to those who do not have a need to know if we don’t institute the right countermeasures.
(more…)I Can’t Drive 55 — The New York Times and Moore’s Law
Yesterday the New York Times published an article about Moore’s Law. While interesting in that John Markoff, who is the Times science writer, speculates that in about 5 years the computing industry will be “manipulating material as small as atoms” and therefore may hit a wall in what has become a back of the envelope calculation of the multiplicative nature of computing complexity and power in the silicon age.
This article prompted a follow on from Brian Feldman at NY Mag, that the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has anticipated a broader definition of the phenomenon of the accelerating rate of computing power to take into account quantum computing. Note here that the definition used in this context is the literal one: the doubling of the number of transistors over time that can be placed on a microchip. That is a correct summation of what Gordon Moore said, but it not how Moore’s Law is viewed or applied within the tech industry.
(more…)River Deep, Mountain High — A Matrix of Project Data
Been attending conferences and meetings of late and came upon a discussion of the means of reducing data streams while leveraging Moore’s Law to provide more, better data. During a discussion with colleagues over lunch they asked if asking for more detailed data would provide greater insight. This led to a discussion of the qualitative differences in data depending on what information is being sought. My response to more detailed data was to respond: “well there has to be a pony in there somewhere.” This was greeted by laughter, but then I finished the point: more detailed data doesn’t necessarily yield greater insight (though it could and only actually looking at it will tell you that, particularly in applying the principle of KDD). But more detailed data that is based on a hierarchical structure will, at the least, provide greater reliability and pinpoint areas of intersection to detect areas of risk manifestation that is otherwise averaged out–and therefore hidden–at the summary levels.
(more…)Don’t Know Much…–Knowledge Discovery in Data
A short while ago I found myself in an odd venue where a question was posed about my being an educated individual, as if it were an accusation. Yes, I replied, but then, after giving it some thought, I made some qualifications to my response. Educated regarding what?
It seems that, despite a little more than a century of public education and widespread advanced education having been adopted in the United States, along with the resulting advent of widespread literacy, that we haven’t entirely come to grips with what it means. For the question of being an “educated person” has its roots in an outmoded concept–an artifact of the 18th and 19th century–where education was delineated, and availability determined, by class and profession. Perhaps this is the basis for the large strain of anti-intellectualism and science denial in the society at large.
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