Technology

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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Technical Ecstacy — Technical Performance and Earned Value

As many of my colleagues in project management know, I wrote a series of articles on the application of technical performance risk in project management back in 1997, one of which made me an award recipient from the institution now known as Defense Acquisition University.  Over the years various researchers and project organizations have asked me if I have any additional thoughts on the subject and the response up until now has been: no.  From a practical standpoint, other responsibilities took me away from the domain of determining the best way of recording technical achievement in complex projects.  Furthermore, I felt that the field was not ripe for further development until there were mathematics and statistical methods that could better approach the behavior of complex adaptive systems.

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Big Time — Elements of Data Size in Scaling

I’ve run into additional questions about scalability.  It is significant to understand the concept in terms of assessing software against data size, since there are actually various aspect of approaching the issue.

Unlike situations where data is already sorted and structured as part of the core functionality of the software service being provided, this is in dealing in an environment where there are many third-party software “tools” that put data into proprietary silos.  These act as barriers to optimizing data use and gaining corporate intelligence.  The goal here is to apply in real terms the concept that the customers generating the data (or stakeholders who pay for the data) own the data and should have full use of it across domains.  In project management and corporate governance this is an essential capability.

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I Can See Clearly Now — Knowledge Discovery in Databases, Data Scalability, and Data Relevance

I recently returned from a travel and much of the discussion revolved around the issues of scalability and the use of data.  What is clear is that the conversation at the project manager level is shifting from a long-running focus on reports and metrics to one focused on data and what can be learned from it.  As with any technology, information technology exploits what is presented before it.  Most recently, accelerated improvements in hardware and communications technology has allowed us to begin to collect and use ever larger sets of data.

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The Monster Mash — Zombie Ideas in Project and Information Management

Just completed a number of meetings and discussions among thought leaders in the area of complex project management this week, and I was struck by a number of zombie ideas in project management, especially related to information, that just won’t die.  The use of the term zombie idea is usually attributed to the Nobel economist Paul Krugman from his excellent and highly engaging (as well as brutally honest) posts at the New York Times, but for those not familiar, a zombie idea is “a proposition that has been thoroughly refuted by analysis and evidence, and should be dead — but won’t stay dead because it serves a political purpose, appeals to prejudices, or both.”

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The Future — Data Focus vs. “Tools” Focus

The title in this case is from the Leonard Cohen song.

Over the last few months I’ve come across this issue quite a bit and it goes to the heart of where software technology is leading us.  The basic question that underlies this issue can be boiled down into the issue of whether software should be thought of as a set of “tools” or an overarching solution that can handle data in a way that the organization requires.  It is a fundamental question because what we call Big Data–despite all of the hoopla–is really a relative term that changes with hardware, storage, and software scalability.  What was Big Data in 1997 is not Big Data in 2016, and will not be Big Data in 2030.

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For What It’s Worth — More on the Materiality and Prescriptiveness Debate and How it Affects Technological Solutions

The underlying basis on the materiality vs. prescriptiveness debate that I previously wrote about lies in two areas:  contractual compliance, especially in the enforcement of public contracts, and the desired outcomes under the establishment of a regulatory regime within an industry.  Sometimes these purposes are in agreement and sometimes they are in conflict and work at cross-purposes to one another.

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Repeat after me — Excel is not a project management solution

Aside from dealing with organizations that oftentimes must use Excel as workarounds due to limitations of legacy software systems, I was reminded of the ubiquity of Excel in a recent article by my colleague Dave Gordon at AITS on the use and misuse of RAID (Risk Assumptions, Issues, and Decisions).  His overall assessment of the weakness of how RAID can be applied is quite valid.  But the literature on risk is quite extensive.  The article “Risk Management Is How Adults Manage Projects” at Glen Alleman’s Herding Cats blog is just one quick overview of a very mature process that has a large amount of academic, statistical, mathematical, and methodological grounding.

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Stay Open — Open and Proprietary Databases (and Why It Matters)

The last couple of weeks have been fairly intense workwise and so blogging has lagged a bit.  Along the way the matter of databases came up at a customer site and what constitutes open data and what comprises proprietary data.  The reason why this issue matters to customers rests of several foundations.

First, in any particular industry or niche there is a wide variety of specialized apps that have blossomed.  This is largely due to Moore’s Law.  Looking at the number of hosted and web apps alone can be quite overwhelming, particularly given the opaqueness of what one is buying at any particular time when it comes to software technology.

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Walk This Way — DoD IG Reviews DCMA Contracting Officer Business Systems Deficiencies

The sufficiency and effectiveness of business systems is an essential element in the project management ecosystem.  Far beyond performance measurement of the actual effort, the sufficiency of the business systems to support the effort are essential in its success.  If the systems in place do not properly track and record the transactions behind the work being performed, the credibility of the data is called into question.  Furthermore, support and logistical systems, such as procurement, supply, and material management, contribute in a very real way, to work accomplishment.  If that spare part isn’t in-house on time, the work stops.

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