Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

Hadoop is receiving a lot of attention from data mining and predictive analytics practitioners because it offers a scalable platform for building, training, and testing models that can be executed in parallel using massive volumes of data, as opposed to typical data mining practices involving the use of sample data sets for m

Organizations seeking to respond quickly in an ever-changing marketplace are asking more and more from their data warehousing (DW) and business intelligence (BI) teams. Fortunately, many BI teams are finding they can meet top-priority needs in short time frames when they adopt Agile practices. Within an Agile team, the product owner (PO) guides the team's priorities to meet the organization's goals.

The strategic goals, vision, and mission statements of today's organizations emphasize the importance of customer satisfaction, not only in terms of functionality but also in terms of quality of service (QoS). One of many QoS parameters for an application is performance. The performance of any system refers to how well the system is able to handle the user load in terms of application response and system resources.

If you visit an Agile conference these days, it's hard not to run into talks like "Scrum within a RUP project" or "Agile in a traditional organization." From a dogmatic Agile point of view, this reminds me a little bit of a veggie-stuffed beef recipe promoted as vegetarian food.

For a long time, the predominant business assumption was that specialization (around markets and business functions) was the right approach to complexity (divide and conquer), efficiency, and market responsiveness (closer knows best). In a divide-and-conquer paradigm, the "pipes and filters" pattern -- with islands (or silos) of information processing, decision making, and action, and "pipes" or information buffers between -- works well enough organizationally and for the technology firmament supporting that mode of business operation.

There is no escaping the talk (and rhetoric!) about Big Data. Vendors are peddling Big Data solutions; consulting firms employ Big Data specialists to help you with your Big Data projects; universities offer Big Data courses; Big Data conferences are aplenty; and tech journalists, magazines, and even blogs are buzzing about the Big Data revolution. This is great, especially after the Great Recession we just endured. We welcome any excitement about technology buzzwords!