information systems | Life, Project Management, and Everything

Both Sides Now — The Value of Data Exploration

Over the last several months I have authored a number of stillborn articles that just did not live up to the standards that I set for this blog site. After all, sometimes we just have nothing important to add to the conversation. In a world dominated by narcissism, it is not necessary to constantly have something to say. Some reflection and consideration are necessary, especially if one is to be as succinct as possible.

A quote ascribed to Woodrow Wilson, which may be apocryphal, though it does appear in two of his biographies, was in response to being lauded by someone for making a number of short, succinct, and informative speeches. When asked how he was able to do this, President Wilson is supposed to have replied:

“It depends. If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.”

An undisciplined mind has a lot to say about nothing in particular with varying degrees of fidelity to fact or truth. When in normal conversation we most often free ourselves from the discipline expected for more rigorous thinking. This is not necessarily a bad thing if we are saying nothing of consequence and there are gradations, of course. Even the most disciplined mind gets things wrong. We all need editors and fact checkers.

While I am pulling forth possibly apocryphal quotes, the one most applicable that comes to mind is the comment by Hemingway as told by his deckhand in Key West and Cuba, Arnold Samuelson. Hemingway was supposed to have given this advice to the aspiring writer:

“Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote the first part of A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit. When you first start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none, but after you learn to work it’s your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself.”

Though it deals with fiction, Hemingway’s advice applies to any sort of writing and rhetoric. Dr. Roger Spiller, who more than anyone mentored me as a writer and historian, once told me, “Writing is one of those skills that, with greater knowledge, becomes harder rather than easier.”

As a result of some reflection, over the last few months, I had to revisit the reason for the blog. Thus, this is still its purpose: it is a way to validate ideas and hypotheses with other professionals and interested amateurs in my areas of interest. I try to keep uninformed opinion in check, as all too many blogs turn out to be rants. Thus, a great deal of research goes into each of these posts, most from primary sources and from interactions with practitioners in the field. Opinions and conclusions are my own, and my reasoning for good or bad are exposed for all the world to see and I take responsibility for them.

This being said, part of my recent silence has also been due to my workload in–well–the effort involved in my day job of running a technology company, and in my recent role, since late last summer, as the Managing Editor of the College of Performance Management’s publication known as the Measurable News. Our emphasis in the latter case has been to find new contributions to the literature regarding business analytics and to define the concept of integrated project, program, and portfolio management. Stepping slightly over the line to make a pitch, I recommend anyone interested in contributing to the publication to submit an article. The submission guidelines can be found here.

Both Sides Now: New Perspectives

That out of the way, I recently saw, again on the small screen, the largely underrated movie about Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 moon landing, “First Man”, and was struck by this scene:

Unfortunately, the first part of the interview has been edited out of this clip and I cannot find a full scene. When asked “why space” he prefaces his comments by stating that the atmosphere of the earth seems to be so large from the perspective of looking at it from the ground but that, having touched the edge of space previously in his experience as a test pilot of the X15, he learned that it is actually very thin. He then goes on to posit that looking at the earth from space will give us a new perspective. His conclusion to this observation is then provided in the clip.

Armstrong’s words were prophetic in that the space program provided a new perspective and a new way of looking at things that were in front of us the whole time. Our spaceship Earth is a blue dot in a sea of space and, at least for a time, the people of our planet came to understand both our loneliness in space and our interdependence.

Earth from Apollo 8. Photo courtesy of NASA.

The impact of the Apollo program resulted in great strides being made in environmental and planetary sciences, geology, cosmology, biology, meteorology, and in day-to-day technology. The immediate effect was to inspire the environmental and human rights movements, among others. All of these advances taken together represent a new revolution in thought equal to that during the initial Enlightenment, one that is not yet finished despite the headwinds of reaction and recidivism.

It’s Life’s Illusions I Recall: Epistemology–Looking at and Engaging with the World

In his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett posited that what was “dangerous” about Darwinism is that it acts as a “universal acid” that, when touching other concepts and traditions, transforms them in ways that change our world-view. I have accepted this position by Dennett through the convincing argument he makes and the evidence in front of us, and it is true that Darwinism–the insight in the evolution of species over time through natural selection–has transformed our perspective of the world and left the old ways of looking at things both reconstructed and unrecognizable.

In his work, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, Stephen Jay Gould noted that Darwinism is part of one of the three great reconstructions of human thought that, in quoting Sigmund Freud, where “Humanity…has had to endure from the hand of science…outrages upon its naive self-love.” These outrages include the Copernican revolution that removed the Earth from the center of the universe, Darwinism and the origin of species, including the descent of humanity, and what John McPhee, coined as the concept of “deep time.”

But–and there is a “but”–I would propose that Darwinism and the other great reconstructions noted are but different ingredients of a larger and more broader, though compatible, type of innovation in the way the world is viewed and how it is approached–a more powerful universal acid. That innovation in thought is empiricism.

It is this approach to understanding that eats through the many ills of human existence that lead to self-delusion and folly. Though you may not know it, if you are in the field of information technology or any of the sciences, you are part of this way of viewing and interacting with the world. Married with rational thinking, this epistemology–coming from the perspectives of the astronomical observations of planets and other heavenly bodies by Charles Sanders Peirce, with further refinements by William James and John Dewey, and others have come down to us in what is known as Pragmatism. (Note that the word pragmatism in this context is not the same as the more generally used colloquial form of the word. For this type of reason Peirce preferred the term “pragmaticism”). For an interesting and popular reading of the development of modern thought and the development of Pragmatism written for the general reader I highly recommend the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand.

At the core of this form of empiricism is that the collection of data, that is, recording, observing, and documenting the universe and nature as it is will lead us to an understanding of things that we otherwise would not see. In our more mundane systems, such as business systems and organized efforts applying disciplined project and program management techniques and methods, we also can learn more about these complex adaptive systems through the enhanced collection and translation of data.

I Really Don’t Know Clouds At All: Data, Information, Intelligence, and Knowledge

The term “knowledge discovery in data”, or KDD for short, is an aspirational goal and so, in terms of understanding that goal, is a point of departure from the practice information management and science. I’m taking this stance because the technology industry uses terminology that, as with most language, was originally designed to accurately describe a specific phenomenon or set of methods in order to advance knowledge, only to find that that terminology has been watered down to the point where it obfuscates the issues at hand.

As I traveled to locations across the U.S. over the last three months, I found general agreement among IT professionals who are dealing with the issues of “Big Data”, data integration, and the aforementioned KDD of this state of affairs. In almost every case there is hesitation to use this terminology because it has been absconded and abused by mainstream literature, much as physicists rail against the misuse of the concept of relativity by non-scientific domains.

The impact of this confusion in terminology has caused organizations to make decisions where this terminology is employed to describe a nebulous end-state, without the initiators having an idea of the effort or scope. The danger here, of course, is that for every small innovative company out there, there is also a potential Theranos (probably several). For an in-depth understanding of the psychology and double-speak that has infiltrated our industry I highly recommend the HBO documentary, “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.”

The reason why semantics are important (as they always have been despite the fact that you may have had an associate complain about “only semantics”) is that they describe the world in front of us. If we cloud the meanings of words and the use of language, it undermines the basis of common understanding and reveals the (poor) quality of our thinking. As Dr. Spiller noted, the paradox of writing and in gathering knowledge is that the more you know, the more you realize you do not know, and the harder writing and communicating knowledge becomes, though we must make the effort nonetheless.

Thus KDD is oftentimes not quite the discovery of knowledge in the sense that the term was intended to mean. It is, instead, a discovery of associations that may lead us to knowledge. Knowing this distinction is important because the corollary processes of data mining, machine learning, and the early application of AI in which we find ourselves is really the process of finding associations, correlations, trends, patterns, and probabilities in data that is approached in a manner as if all information is flat, thereby obliterating its context. This is not knowledge.

We can measure the information content of any set of data, but the real unlocked potential in that information content will come with the processing of it that leads to knowledge. To do that requires an underlying model of domain knowledge, an understanding of the different lexicons in any given set of domains, and a Rosetta Stone that provides a roadmap that identifies those elements of the lexicon that are describing the same things across them. It also requires capturing and preserving context.

For example, when I use the chat on my iPhone it attempts to anticipate what I want to write. I am given three choices of words to choose if I want to use this shortcut. In most cases, the iPhone guesses wrong, despite presenting three choices and having at its disposal (at least presumptively) a larger vocabulary than the writer. Oftentimes it seems to take control, assuming that I have misspelled or misidentified a word and chooses the wrong one for me, where my message becomes a nonsense message.

If one were to believe the hype surrounding AI, one would think that there is magic there but, as Arthur C. Clarke noted (known as Clarke’s Third Law): “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Familiar with the new technologies as we are, we know that there is no magic there, and also that it is consistently wrong a good deal of the time. But many individuals come to rely upon the technology nonetheless.

Despite the gloss of something new, the long-established methods of epistemology, code-breaking, statistics, and Calculus apply–as do standards of establishing fact and truth. Despite a large set of data, the iPhone is wrong because the iPhone does not understand–does not possess knowledge–to know why it is wrong. As an aside, its dictionary is also missing a good many words.

A Segue and a Conclusion–I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For: Why Data Integration?…and a Proposed Definition of the Bigness of Data

As with the question to Neil Armstrong, so the question on data. And so the answer is the same. When we look at any set of data under a particular structure of a domain, the information we derive provides us with a manner of looking at the world. In economic systems, businesses, and projects that data provides us with a basis for interpretation, but oftentimes falls short of allowing us to effectively describe and understand what is happening.

Capturing interrelated data across domains allows us to look at the phenomena of these human systems from a different perspective, providing us with the opportunity to derive new knowledge. But in order to do this, we have to be open to this possibility. It also calls for us to, as I have hammered home in this blog, reset our definitions of what is being described.

For example, there are guides in project and program management that refer to statistical measures as “predictive analytics.” This further waters down the intent of the phrase. Measures of earned value are not predictive. They note trends and a single-point outcome. Absent further analysis and processing, the statistical fallacy of extrapolation can be baked into our analysis. The same applies to any index of performance.

Furthermore, these indices and indicators–for that is all they are–do not provide knowledge, which requires a means of not only distinguishing between correlation and causation but also applying contextualization. All systems operate in a vector space. When we measure an economic or social system we are really measuring its behavior in the vector space that it inhabits. This vector space includes the way it is manifested in space-time: the equivalent of length, width, depth (that is, its relative position, significance, and size within information space), and time.

This then provides us with a hint of a definition of what often goes by the definition of “big data.” Originally, as noted in previous blogs, big data was first used in NASA in 1997 by Cox and Ellsworth (not as credited to John Mashey on Wikipedia with the dishonest qualifier “popularized”) and was simply a statement meaning “datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage, and analyze.”

This is a relative term given Moore’s Law. But we can begin to peel back a real definition of the “bigness” of data. It is important to do this because too many approaches to big data assume it is flat and then apply probabilities and pattern recognition to data that undermines both contextualization and knowledge. Thus…

The Bigness of Data (B) is a function ( $f$ ) of the entropy expended (S) to transform data into information, or to extract its information content.

Information evolves. It evolves toward greater complexity just as life evolves toward greater complexity. The universe is built on coded bits of information that, taken together and combined in almost unimaginable ways, provides different forms of life and matter. Our limited ability to decode and understand this information–and our interactions in it– are important to us both individually and collectively.

Much entropy is already expended in the creation of the data that describes the activity being performed. Its context is part of its information content. Obliterating the context inherent in that information content causes all previous entropy to be of no value. Thus, in approaching any set of data, the inherent information content must be taken into account in order to avoid the unnecessary (and erroneous) application of data interpretation.

(Data) Transformation–Fear and Loathing over ETL in Project Management

ETL stands for data extract, transform, and load. This essential step is the basis for all of the new capabilities that we wish to acquire during the next wave of information technology: business analytics, big(ger) data, interdisciplinary insight into processes that provide insights into improving productivity and efficiency.

I’ve been dealing with a good deal of fear and loading regarding the introduction of this concept, even though in my day job my organization is a leading practitioner in the field in its vertical. Some of this is due to disinformation by competitors in playing upon the fears of the non-technically minded–the expected reaction of those who can’t do in the last throws of avoiding irrelevance. Better to baffle them with bullshit than with brilliance, I guess.

But, more importantly, part of this is due to the state of ETL and how it is communicated to the project management and business community at large. There is a great deal to be gained here by muddying the waters even by those who know better and have the technology. So let’s begin by clearing things up and making this entire field a bit more coherent.

Let’s start with the basics. Any organization that contains the interaction of people is a system. For purposes of a project management team, a business enterprise, or a governmental body we deal with a special class of systems known as Complex Adaptive Systems: CAS for short. A CAS is a non-linear learning system that reacts and evolves to its environment. It is complex because of the inter-relationships and interactions of more than two agents in any particular portion of the system.

I was first introduced to the concept of CAS through readings published out of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Most noteworthy is the work The Quark and the Jaguar by the physicist Murray Gell-Mann. Gell-Mann is received the Nobel in physics in 1969 for his work on elementary particles, such as the quark, and is co-founder of the Institute. He also was part of the team that first developed simulated Monte Carlo analysis during a period he spent at RAND Corporation. Anyone interested in the basic science of quanta and how the universe works that then leads to insights into subjects such as day-to-day probability and risk should read this book. It is a good popular scientific publication written by a brilliant mind, but very relevant to the subjects we deal with in project management and information science.

Understanding that our organizations are CAS allows us to apply all sorts of tools to better understand them and their relationship to the world at large. From a more practical perspective, what are the risks involved in the enterprise in which we are engaged and what are the probabilities associated with any of the range of outcomes that we can label as success. For my purposes, the science of information theory is at the forefront of these tools. In this world an engineer by the name of Claude Shannon working at Bell Labs essentially invented the mathematical basis for everything that followed in the world of telecommunications, generating, interpreting, receiving, and understanding intelligence in communication, and the methods of processing information. Needless to say, computing is the main recipient of this theory.

Thus, all CAS process and react to information. The challenge for any entity that needs to survive and adapt in a continually changing universe is to ensure that the information that is being received is of high and relevant quality so that the appropriate adaptation can occur. There will be noise in the signals that we receive. What we are looking for from a practical perspective in information science are the regularities in the data so that we can make the transformation of receiving the message in a mathematical manner (where the message transmitted is received) into the definition of information quality that we find in the humanities. I believe that we will find that mathematical link eventually, but there is still a void there. A good discussion of this difference can be found here in the on-line publication Double Dialogues.

Regardless of this gap, the challenge of those of us who engage in the business of ETL must bring to the table the ability not only to ensure that the regularities in the information are identified and transmitted to the intended (or necessary) users, but also to distinguish the quality of the message in the terms of the purpose of the organization. Shannon’s equation is where we start, not where we end. Given this background, there are really two basic types of data that we begin with when we look at a set of data: structured and unstructured data.

Structured data are those where the qualitative information content is either predefined by its nature or by a tag of some sort. For example, schedule planning and performance data, regardless of the idiosyncratic/proprietary syntax used by a software publisher, describes the same phenomena regardless of the software application. There are only so many ways to identify snow–and, no, the Inuit people do not have 100 words to describe it. Qualifiers apply in the humanities, but usually our business processes more closely align with statistical and arithmetic measures. As a result, structured data is oftentimes defined by its position in a hierarchical, time-phased, or interrelated system that contains a series of markers, indexes, and tables that allow it to be interpreted easily through the identification of a Rosetta stone, even when the system, at first blush, appears to be opaque. When you go to a book, its title describes what it is. If its content has a table of contents and/or an index it is easy to find the information needed to perform the task at hand.

Unstructured data consists of the content of things like letters, e-mails, presentations, and other forms of data disconnected from its source systems and collected together in a flat repository. In this case the data must be mined to recreate what is not there: the title that describes the type of data, a table of contents, and an index.

All data requires initial scrubbing and pre-processing. The difference here is the means used to perform this operation. Let’s take the easy path first.

For project management–and most business systems–we most often encounter structured data. What this means is that by understanding and interpreting standard industry terminology, schemas, and APIs that the simple process of aligning data to be transformed and stored in a database for consumption can be reduced to a systemic and repeatable process without the redundancy of rediscovery applied in every instance. Our business intelligence and business analytics systems can be further developed to anticipate a probable question from a user so that the query is pre-structured to allow for near immediate response. Further, structuring the user interface in such as way as to make the response to the query meaningful, especially integrated with and juxtaposed other types of data requires subject matter expertise to be incorporated into the solution.

Structured ETL is the place that I most often inhabit as a provider of software solutions. These processes are both economical and relatively fast, particularly in those cases where they are applied to an otherwise inefficient system of best-of-breed applications that require data transfers and cross-validation prior to official reporting. Time, money, and effort are all saved by automating this process, improving not only processing time but also data accuracy and transparency.

In the case of unstructured data, however, the process can be a bit more complicated and there are many ways to skin this cat. The key here is that oftentimes what seems to be unstructured data is only so because of the lack of domain knowledge by the software publisher in its target vertical.

For example, I recently read a white paper published by a large BI/BA publisher regarding their approach to financial and accounting systems. My own experience as a business manager and Navy Supply Corps Officer provide me with the understanding that these systems are highly structured and regulated. Yet, business intelligence publishers treated this data–and blatantly advertised and apparently sold as state of the art–an unstructured approach to mining this data.

This approach, which was first developed back in the 1980s when we first encountered the challenge of data that exceeded our expertise at the time, requires a team of data scientists and coders to go through the labor- and time-consuming process of pre-processing and building specialized processes. The most basic form of this approach involves techniques such as frequency analysis, summarization, correlation, and data scrubbing. This last portion also involves labor-intensive techniques at the microeconomic level such as binning and other forms of manipulation.

This is where the fear and loathing comes into play. It is not as if all information systems do not perform these functions in some manner, it is that in structured data all of this work has been done and, oftentimes, is handled by the database system. But even here there is a better way.

My colleague, Dave Gordon, who has his own blog, will emphasize that the identification of probable questions and configuration of queries in advance combined with the application of standard APIs will garner good results in most cases. Yet, one must be prepared to receive a certain amount of irrelevant information. For example, the query on Google of “Fun Things To Do” that you may use if you are planning for a weekend will yield all sorts of results, such as “50 Fun Things to Do in an Elevator.” This result includes making farting sounds. The link provides some others, some of which are pretty funny. In writing this blog post, a simple search on Google for “Google query fails” yields what can only be described as a large number of query fails. Furthermore, this approach relies on the data originator to have marked the data with pointers and tags.

Given these different approaches to unstructured data and the complexity involved, there is a decision process to apply:

1. Determine if the data is truly unstructured. If the data is derived from a structured database from an existing application or set of applications, then it is structured and will require domain expertise to inherit the values and information content without expending unnecessary resources and time. A structured, systemic, and repeatable process can then be applied. Oftentimes an industry schema or standard can be leveraged to ensure consistency and fidelity.

2. Determine whether only a portion of the unstructured data is relative to your business processes and use it to append and enrich the existing structured data that has been used to integrate and expand your capabilities. In most cases the identification of a Rosetta Stone and standard APIs can be used to achieve this result.

3. For the remainder, determine the value of mining the targeted category of unstructured data and perform a business case analysis.

Given the rapidly expanding size of data that we can access using the advancing power of new technology, we must be able to distinguish between doing what is necessary from doing what is impressive. The definition of Big Data has evolved over time because our hardware, storage, and database systems allow us to access increasingly larger datasets that ten years ago would have been unimaginable. What this means is that–initially–as we work through this process of discovery, we will be bombarded with a plethora of irrelevant statistical measures and so-called predictive analytics that will eventually prove out to not pass the “so-what” test. This process places the users in a state of information overload, and we often see this condition today. It also means that what took an army of data scientists and developers to do ten years ago takes a technologist with a laptop and some domain knowledge to perform today. This last can be taught.

The next necessary step, aside from applying the decision process above, is to force our information systems to advance their processing to provide more relevant intelligence that is visualized and configured to the domain expertise required. In this way we will eventually discover the paradox that effectively accessing larger sets of data will yield fewer, more relevant intelligence that can be translated into action.

At the end of the day the manager and user must understand the data. There is no magic in data transformation or data processing. Even with AI and machine learning it is still incumbent upon the people within the organization to be able to apply expertise, perspective, knowledge, and wisdom in the use of information and intelligence.

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.

The analogy here is that the Cubs infielders, while individuals, didn’t think of their roles as completely separate. They had common goals and, in order to win on the field, needed to act as a unit. In the case of executing the double play, they were a very effective unit. So why do we have these dichotomies in information management when the goals are the same?

Much has been written both academically and commercially about Business Intelligence, Business Analytics, and Knowledge Discovery in Databases. I’ve surveyed the literature and for good and bad, and what I find is that these terms are thrown around, mostly by commercial firms in either information technology or consulting, all with the purpose of attempting to provide a discriminator for their technology or service. Many times the concepts are used interchangeably, or one is set up as a strawman to push an agenda or product. Thus, it seems some hard definitions are in order.

According to Technopedia:

Business Intelligence (BI) is the use of computing technologies for the identification, discovery and analysis of business data – like sales revenue, products, costs and incomes.

Business analytics (BA) refers to all the methods and techniques that are used by an organization to measure performance. Business analytics are made up of statistical methods that can be applied to a specific project, process or product. Business analytics can also be used to evaluate an entire company.

Knowledge Discover in Databases (KDD) is the process of discovering useful knowledge from a collection of data. This widely used data mining technique is a process that includes data preparation and selection, data cleansing, incorporating prior knowledge on data sets and interpreting accurate solutions from the observed results.

As with much of computing in its first phases, these functions were seen to be separate.

The perception of BI, based largely on the manner in which it has been implemented in its first incarnations, is viewed as a means of gathering data into relational data warehouses or data marts and then building out decision support systems. These methods have usually involved a great deal of overhead in both computing and personnel, since practical elements of gathering, sorting, and delivering data involved additional coding and highly structured user interfaces. The advantage of BI is its emphasis on integration. The disadvantage from the enterprise perspective, is that the method and mode of implementation is phlegmatic at best.

BA is BI’s younger cousin. Applications were developed and sold as “analytical tools” focused on a niche of data within the enterprise’s requirements. In this manner decision makers could avoid having to wait for the overarching and ponderous BI system to get to their needs, if ever. This led many companies to knit together specialized tools in so-called “best-of-breed” configurations to achieve some measure of integration across domains. Of course, given the plethora of innovative tools, much data import and reconciliation has had to be inserted into the process. Thus, the advantages of BA in the market have been to reward innovation and focus on the needs of the domain subject matter expert (SME). The disadvantages are the insertion of manual intervention in an automated process due to lack of integration, which is further exacerbated by so-called SMEs in data reconciliation–a form of rent seeking behavior that only rewards body shop consulting, unnecessarily driving up overhead. The panacea applied to this last disadvantage has been the adoption of non-proprietary XML schemas across entire industries that reduce both the overhead and data silos found in the BA market.

KDD is our both our oldster and youngster–grandpa and the grandson hanging out. It is a term that describes a necessary function of insight–allowing one to determine what the data tells us are needed for analytics rather than relying on a “canned” solution to determine how to approach a particular set of data. But it does so, oftentimes, using an older approach that predates BI, known as data mining. You will often find KDD linked to arguments in favor of flat file schemas, NoSQL (meaning flat non-relational databases), and free use of the term Big Data, which is becoming more meaningless each year that it is used, given Moore’s Law. The advantage of KDD is that it allows for surveying across datasets to pick up patterns and interrelationships within our systems that are otherwise unknown, particularly given the way in which the human mind can fool itself into reifying an invalid assumption. The disadvantage, of course, is that KDD will have us go backward in terms of identifying and categorizing data by employing Data Mining, which is an older concept from early in computing in which a team of data scientists and data managers develop solutions to identify, categorize, and use that data–manually doing what automation was designed to do. Understanding these limitations, companies focused on KDD have developed heuristics (cognitive computing) that identify patterns and possible linkages, removing a portion of the overhead associated with Data Mining.

Keep in mind that you never get anything for nothing–the Second Law of Thermodynamics ensures that energy must be borrowed from somewhere in order to produce something–and its corollaries place limits on expected efficiencies. While computing itself comes as close to providing us with Maxwell’s Demon as any technology, even in this case entropy is being realized elsewhere (in the software developer and the hardware manufacturing process), even though it is not fully apparent in the observed data processing.

Thus, manual effort must be expended somewhere along the way. In any sense, all of these methods are addressing the same problem–the conversion of data into information. It is information that people can consume, understand, place into context, and act upon.

As my colleague Dave Gordon has pointed out to me several times that there are also additional methods that have been developed across all of these methods to make our use of data more effective. These include more powerful APIs, the aforementioned cognitive computing, and searching based on the anticipated questions of the user as is used by search engines.

Technology, however, is moving very rapidly and so the lines between BI, BA and KDD are becoming blurred. Fourth generation technology that leverages API libraries to be agnostic to underlying data, and flexible and adaptive UI technology can provide a comprehensive systemic solution to bring together the goals of these approaches to data. With the ability to leverage internal relational database tools and flat schemas for non-relational databases, the application layer, which is oftentimes a barrier to delivery of information, becomes open as well, putting the SME back in the driver’s seat. Being able to integrate data across domain silos provide insight into systems behavior and performance not previously available with “canned” applications written to handle and display data a particular way, opening up knowledge discovery in the data.

What this means practically is that those organizations that are sensitive to these changes will understand the practical application of sunk cost when it comes to aging systems being provided by ponderous behemoths that lack agility in their ability to introduce more flexible, less costly, and lower overhead software technologies. It means that information management can be democratized within the organization among the essential consumers and decision makers.

Productivity and effectiveness are the goals.

Something New (Again)– Top Project Management Trends 2017

Atif Qureshi at Tasque, which I learned via Dave Gordon’s blog, went out to LinkedIn’s Project Management Community to ask for the latest tends in project management. You can find the raw responses to his inquiry at his blog here. What is interesting is that some of these latest trends are much like the old trends which, given continuity makes sense. But it is instructive to summarize the ones that came up most often. Note that while Mr. Qureshi was looking for ten trends, and taken together he definitely lists more than ten, there is a lot of overlap. In total the major issues seem to the five areas listed below.

a. Agile, its hybrids, and its practical application.

It should not surprise anyone that the latest buzzword is Agile. But what exactly is it in its present incarnation? There is a great deal of rising criticism, much of it valid, that it is a way for developers and software PMs to avoid accountability. Anyone ready Glen Alleman’s Herding Cat’s Blog is aware of the issues regarding #NoEstimates advocates. As a result, there are a number hybrid implementations of Agile that has Agile purists howling and non-purists adapting as they always do. From my observations, however, there is an Ur-Agile that is out there common to all good implementations and wrote about them previously in this blog back in 2015. Given the time, I think it useful to repeat it here.

The best articulation of Agile that I have read recently comes from Neil Killick, whom I have expressed some disagreement on the #NoEstimates debate and the more cultish aspects of Agile in past posts, but who published an excellent post back in July (2015) entitled “12 questions to find out: Are you doing Agile Software Development?”

Here are Neil’s questions:

Do you want to do Agile Software Development? Yes – go to 2. No – GOODBYE.
Is your team regularly reflecting on how to improve? Yes – go to 3. No – regularly meet with your team to reflect on how to improve, go to 2.
Can you deliver shippable software frequently, at least every 2 weeks? Yes – go to 4. No – remove impediments to delivering a shippable increment every 2 weeks, go to 3.
Do you work daily with your customer? Yes – go to 5. No – start working daily with your customer, go to 4.
Do you consistently satisfy your customer? Yes – go to 6. No – find out why your customer isn’t happy, fix it, go to 5.
Do you feel motivated? Yes – go to 7. No – work for someone who trusts and supports you, go to 2.
Do you talk with your team and stakeholders every day? Yes – go to 8. No – start talking with your team and stakeholders every day, go to 7.
Do you primarily measure progress with working software? Yes – go to 9. No – start measuring progress with working software, go to 8.
Can you maintain pace of development indefinitely? Yes – go to 10. No – take on fewer things in next iteration, go to 9.
Are you paying continuous attention to technical excellence and good design? Yes – go to 11. No – start paying continuous attention to technical excellent and good design, go to 10.
Are you keeping things simple and maximising the amount of work not done? Yes – go to 12. No – start keeping things simple and writing as little code as possible to satisfy the customer, go to 11.
Is your team self-organising? Yes – YOU’RE DOING AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT!! No – don’t assign tasks to people and let the team figure out together how best to satisfy the customer, go to 12.

Note that even in software development based on Agile you are still “provid(ing) value by independently developing IP based on customer requirements.” Only you are doing it faster and more effectively.

With the possible exception of the “self-organizing” meme, I find that items through 11 are valid ways of identifying Agile. Given that the list says nothing about establishing closed-loop analysis of progress says nothing about estimates or the need to monitor progress, especially on complex projects. As a matter of fact one of the biggest impediments noted elsewhere in industry is the inability of Agile to scale. This limitations exists in its most simplistic form because Agile is fine in the development of well-defined limited COTS applications and smartphone applications. It doesn’t work so well when one is pushing technology while developing software, especially for a complex project involving hundreds of stakeholders. One other note–the unmentioned emphasis in Agile is technical performance measurement, since progress is based on satisfying customer requirements. TPM, when placed in the context of a world of limited resources, is the best measure of all.

b. The integration of new technology into PM and how to upload the existing PM corporate knowledge into that technology.

This is two sides of the same coin. There is always debate about the introduction of new technologies within an organization and this debate places in stark contrast the differences between risk aversion and risk management.

Project managers, especially in the complex project management environment of aerospace & defense tend, in general, to be a hardy lot. Consisting mostly of engineers they love to push the envelope on technology development. But there is also a stripe of engineers among them that do not apply this same approach of measured risk to their project management and business analysis system. When it comes to tracking progress, resource management, programmatic risk, and accountability they frequently enter the risk aversion mode–believing that the less eyes on what they do the more leeway they have in achieving the technical milestones. No doubt this is true in a world of unlimited time and resources, but that is not the world in which we live.

Aside from sub-optimized self-interest, the seeds of risk aversion come from the fact that many of the disciplines developed around performance management originated in the financial management community, and many organizations still come at project management efforts from perspective of the CFO organization. Such rice bowl mentality, however, works against both the project and the organization.

Much has been made of the wall of honor for those CIA officers that have given their lives for their country, which lies to the right of the Langley headquarters entrance. What has not gotten as much publicity is the verse inscribed on the wall to the left:

“And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

John VIII-XXXII

In many ways those of us in the project management community apply this creed to the best of our ability to our day-to-day jobs, and it lies as the basis for all of the management improvement from Deming’s concept of continuous process improvement, through the application of Six Sigma and other management improvement methods. What is not part of this concept is that one will apply improvement only when a customer demands it, though they have asked politely for some time. The more information we have about what is happening in our systems, the better the project manager and the project team is armed with applying the expertise which qualified the individuals for their jobs to begin with.

When it comes to continual process improvement one does not need to wait to apply those technologies that will improve project management systems. As a senior management (and well-respected engineer) when I worked in Navy told me; “if my program managers are doing their job virtually every element should be in the yellow, for only then do I know that they are managing risk and pushing the technology.”

But there are some practical issues that all managers must consider when managing the risks in introducing new technology and determining how to bring that technology into existing business systems without completely disrupting the organization. This takes–good project management practices that, for information systems, includes good initial systems analysis, identification of those small portions of the organization ripe for initial entry in piloting, and a plan of data normalization and rationalization so that corporate knowledge is not lost. Adopting systems that support more open systems that militate against proprietary barriers also helps.

c. The intersection of project management and business analysis and its effects.

As data becomes more transparent through methods of normalization and rationalization–and the focus shifts from “tools” to the knowledge that can be derived from data–the clear separation that delineated project management from business analysis in line-and-staff organization becomes further blurred. Even within the project management discipline, the separation in categorization of schedule analysts from cost analysts from financial analyst are becoming impediments in fully exploiting the advantages in looking at all data that is captured and which affects project performance.

d. The manner of handling Big Data, business intelligence, and analytics that result.

Software technologies are rapidly developing that break the barriers of self-contained applications that perform one or two focused operations or a highly restricted group of operations that provide functionality focused on a single or limited set of business processes through high level languages that are hard-coded. These new technologies, as stated in the previous section, allow users to focus on access to data, making the interface between the user and the application highly adaptable and customizable. As these technologies are deployed against larger datasets that allow for integration of data across traditional line-and-staff organizations, they will provide insight that will garner businesses competitive advantages and productivity gains against their contemporaries. Because of these technologies, highly labor-intensive data mining and data engineering projects that were thought to be necessary to access Big Data will find themselves displaced as their cost and lack of agility is exposed. Internal or contracted out custom software development devoted along these same lines will also be displaced just as COTS has displaced the high overhead associated with these efforts in other areas. This is due to the fact that hardware and processes developments are constantly shifting the definition of “Big Data” to larger and larger datasets to the point where the term will soon have no practical meaning.

e. The role of the SME given all of the above.

The result of the trends regarding technology will be to put the subject matter expert back into the driver’s seat. Given adaptive technology and data–and a redefinition of the analyst’s role to a more expansive one–we will find that the ability to meet the needs of functionality and the user experience is almost immediate. Thus, when it comes to business and project management systems, the role of Agile, while these developments reinforce the characteristics that I outlined above are made real, the weakness of its applicability to more complex and technical projects is also revealed. It is technology that will reduce the risk associated with contract negotiation, processes, documentation, and planning. Walking away from these necessary components to project management obfuscates and avoids the hard facts that oftentimes must be addressed.

One final item that Mr. Qureshi mentions in a follow-up post–and which I have seen elsewhere in similar forums–concerns operational security. In deployment of new technologies a gatekeeper must be aware of whether that technology will not open the organization’s corporate knowledge to compromise. Given the greater and more integrated information and knowledge garnered by new technology, as good managers it is incumbent to ensure these improvements do not translate into undermining the organization.

Do You Know Where You’re Going To? — SecDef Ash Carter talks to Neil DeGrasse Tyson…and some thoughts on the international technology business

It’s time to kick off my 2017 blogging activity and my readers have asked about my absence on this blog. Well because of the depth and research required by some of the issues that I consider essential, most of my blogging energy has been going to contributions to AITS.org. I strongly recommend that you check out the site if you haven’t already. A great deal of useful PM information and content can be found there–and they have a strong editorial staff so that what does get to publication is pretty well sourced. My next post on the site is scheduled for 25 January. I will link to it once it becomes available.

For those of us just getting back into the swing of things after the holidays, there were a number of interesting events that occurred during that time that I didn’t get a chance to note. Among these is that SecDef Ash Carter appeared (unfortunately a subscription wall) on an episode of Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s excellent show “StarTalk“, which appears on the National Geographic Channel.

Secretary Carter had some interesting things to say, among them are:

a. His mentors in science, many of whom were veterans of the Second World War, instilled in him the concept of public service and giving back to the country.

b. His experience under former SecDef Perry, when he was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, taught him that the DoD needed to be the “petri dish” for R&D in new technologies.

c. That the approach of the DoD has been to leverage the R&D into new technologies that can be leveraged from the international technology industry, given that there are many good ideas and developments that occur outside of the United States.

d. He encouraged more scientists to serve in the federal government and the Department of Defense, if even for a short while to get a perspective on how things work at that level.

e. He doesn’t see the biggest source of instability will necessarily be from nation states, but that small groups of individuals, given that destructive power is becoming portable, will be the emerging threat that his successor will face.

f. There imperative that the U.S. maintain its technological edge is essential in guaranteeing international stability and peace.

Secretary Carter’s comments, in particular, in realizing that the technology industry is an international one strikes a particular personal cord with me since my present vocation has caused me to introduce new capabilities in the U.S. market built from technologies that were developed by a close European ally. The synergy that this meeting of the minds has created has begun to have a positive impact on the small portion of the market that my firm inhabits, changing the way people do business and shifting the focus from “tools” as the source of information to data, and what the data suggests.

This is not to say that cooperation in the international technology market is not fraught with the same rocks and shoals found in any business area. But it is becoming increasingly apparent that new information technologies can be used as a means of evening the playing field because of the asymmetrical nature of information itself, which then lends itself to leverage given relatively small amounts of effort.

This also points to the importance of keeping an open mind and encouraging international trade, especially among our allies that are among the liberal democracies. Recently my firm was the target of a protest for a government contract where this connection to international trade was used as a means of questioning whether the firm was, indeed, a bonafide U.S. business. The answer under U.S. law is a resounding “yes”–and that first decision was upheld on appeal. For what we have done is–under U.S. management–leveraged technology first developed elsewhere, extended its capabilities, designed, developed, and localized it for the U.S. market, and in the process created U.S. jobs and improved U.S. processes. This is a good deal all around.

Back in the day when I wore a U.S. Navy uniform during the Cold War military, many of us in the technology and acquisition specialties looked to reform our systems and introduce innovative methods from wherever we could find them, whether they came from private industry or other government agencies. When coming upon resistance because something was “the way it always was done” our characterization of that attitude was “NIH”. That is, “Not Invented Here.” NIH was a term that, in shorthand, described an invalid counterargument against process improvement that did not rely on the merits or evidence.

And so it is today. The world is always changing, but given new technologies the rate of change is constantly accelerating. Adapting and adopting the best technologies available will continue to give us the advantage as a nation. It simply requires openness and the ability to identify innovation when we see it.

Over at AITS.org Dave Gordon takes me to task on data normalization — and I respond with Data Neutrality

Dave Gordon at AITS.org takes me to task on my post regarding recommending using common schemas for certain project management data. Dave’s alternative is to specify common APIs instead. I am not one to dismiss alternative methods of reconciling disparate and, in their natural state, non-normalized data to find the most elegant solution. My initial impression, though, is: been there, done that.

Regardless of the method used to derive significance from disparate sources of data that is of a common type, one still must obtain the cooperation of the players involved. The ANSI X12 standard has been in use in the transportation industry for quite some time and has worked quite well, leaving the preference of proprietary solution up to the individual shippers. The rule has been, however, that if you are going to write solutions for that industry that you need to allow the shipping info needed by any receiver to conform to a particular format so that it can be read regardless of the software involved.

Recently the U.S. Department of Defense, which had used certain ANSI X12 formats for particular data for quite some time has published and required a new set of schemas for a broader set of data under the rubric of the UN/CEFACT XML. Thus, it has established the same approach as the transportation industry: taking an agnostic stand regarding software preferences while specifying that submitted data must conform to a common schema so that a proprietary file type is not given preference over another.

A little background is useful. In developing major systems contractors are required to provide project performance data in order to ensure that public funds are being expended properly for the contracted effort. This is the oversight responsibility portion of the equation. The other side concerns project and program management. Given the usual cost-plus contract type most often used, the government program management office in cooperation with its commercial counterpart looks to identify the manifestation of cost, schedule, and/or technical risk early enough to allow that risk to be handled as necessary. Also, at the end of this process, which is only now being explored, is the usefulness of years of historical data across contract types, technologies, and suppliers that can be used to benefit the public interest by demonstrating which contractors perform better, to show the inherent risk associated with particular technologies through parametric methods, and a host of insights that can be derived through econometric project management trending and modeling.

So let’s assume that we can specify APIs in requesting the data in lieu of specifying that the customer can receive an application-agnostic file that can be read by any application that conforms with the data standard. What is the difference? My immediate observation is that is reverses the relationship in who owns the data. In the case of the API the proprietary application becomes the gatekeeper. In the case of an agnostic file structure it is open to everyone and the consumer owns the data.

In the API scenario large players can do what they want to limit competition and extensions to their functionality. Since they can block box the manner in which data is structured, it also becomes increasingly difficult to make qualitative selections from the data. The very example that Dave uses–the plethora of one-off mobile apps–usually must exist only in their own ecosystem.

So it seems to me that the real issue isn’t that Big Brother wants to control data structure. What it comes down to is that specifying an open data structure defeats the ability of one or a group of solution providers from controlling the market through restrictions on accessing data. This encourages maximum competition and innovation in the marketplace–Data Neutrality.

I look forward to additional information from Dave on this issue. Each of the methods of achieving the end of Data Neutrality isn’t an end in itself. Any method that is less structured and provides more flexibility is welcome. I’m just not sure that we’re there yet with APIs.