Category: Technology

Latest read: Numbers Rule Your World

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date September 7, 2014

I have enjoyed Kaiser Fung‘s blog JunkCharts for some time. He provides insight regarding data visualizations. His book Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probabilities and Statistics on Everything You Do reveals how statistics and data mining find insights too good to pass up. Numbers make good stories even more compelling.

Numbers Rule Your World Kaiser Fung takes an excellent approach to confirming that data analysis is now key to improving outcomes and discovering insights.

Fung outlines the use of big data analysis to solve five problems:

1. Fast Passes/Slow Merges: managing traffic patterns by the Minnesota DOT. This chapter reveals how frustrating statisticians can become when confronting politicians who ignore data.

2. Bagged Spinach/Bad Score tracked a deadly E. coli outbreak that caused three deaths across 23 states.

3. Item Bank/Risk Pool is a fascinating chapter about Florida insurance policies. Hurricane seasons come and go and yet an established city mayor and established businessman could not maintain an ongoing insurance business even with years of experience in state government. I found this chapter interesting to discover how the state games the insurance system say for say….Hurricane Wilma. For Higher Education this chapter also reveals Admissions related stories that are most interesting when compared to hospital billing. Fung also brings into focus the Golden Rule lawsuit that successfully charged discrimination against minority applicants in the insurance industry.

Tags analytics, big data, business, Education, Innovation, knowledge, statistician, tipping point, trends

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Latest read: The Art of Capacity Planning

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date September 3, 2014

The impact of cloud computing on O’Reilly’s 2008 Art of Capacity Planning has shifted quite a bit to say the least. Its still a great resource and well worth the read for any web administrator, manager or director.

The Art of Capacity Planning My interest in revisiting is remembering Chapter 4: Predicting Trends. This touches two important factors today: cloud and procurement.

While in 2008 it was possible to ramp up a cloud, today a very high capacity cloud can be deployed in less than 10 minutes.

At the time of the book’s publication (2008) AWS pricing looked competitive. Yet today those prices are considered somewhat excessively high.

The Art of Capacity Planning now is all looking at cloud solutions by Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure has kept Amazon’s EC2 busy in releasing new services and even more aggressive pricing models. Under AWS users get free access to CentOS, LAMP stack, Git and WordPress.

But the Art of Capacity Planning touches on the very important component of Procurement. Procurement and Cloud contract solutions taught by UCLA has been very beneficial to my cloud projects.

Tags amazon ec2, amazon web services, business, capacity planning, centos, change, flickr, git, Globalization, Google cloud, Innovation, knowledge, lamp stack, Network, tipping point, wordpress

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Latest read: The Changing Role of the CIO

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date August 29, 2014

We live in a world of constant change in IT. O’Reilly’s The Changing Role of the CIO provides a foundation regarding Big Data for any IT team and every manager, executive or board member. Today if your not embracing change your getting run over by it whether you know it or not.

From the corporate boardroom to the campus research lab we indeed are undergoing a fundamental paradigm shift in our digital lives.

Without a doubt it is also an educational shift. Questions of Excel cubesets in a world of unstructured big data analytics will be a much needed training opportunity not for your IT team but actually or your entire workforce.

The Changing Role of the CIO is about the opportunities to engage your IT team over data. Today data is fueling actionable analytics not just vanity metrics. The IT team needs to embrace the idea that data is the new oil.

After leading your organization to a cloud solution that eliminates in-house, legacy enterprise systems you never can look back. Helping my organization migrate to a CMS public cloud that reduced just one enterprise service $400,000 annually resulted in our senior leadership never looking at me the same way. You gain a seat at the table.

And due to the nature of the mobile beast, The Changing Role of the CIO shows its now easier than ever to measure quality engagements in real time with your customers. The future of data, how it can be measured, immediately reported within your office or from the other side of world is a game changer.

Tags analytics, big data, cio, cloud, cloud computing, Innovation, knowledge, research, tipping point, trends

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Latest read: Big Data at Work

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date August 28, 2014

Big Data at Work is a good book for reviewing tested analytics case studies by Tom Davenport. As I began reading this I found myself reading an update to Tom Davenport‘s great analytics book Competing on Analytics that I read in 2008 which IMHO really set the standard. Big Data at Work is the follow up with tested business cases.

It seemed like an eternity that analytics are now realized as a critical business strategy for universities. Peter Drucker said it best: if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.

While much shorter than his Competing on Analytics, Big Data at Work is a must read. In Higher Education alone the Big Data at Work case studies by Davenport can serve as near perfect blueprints in the dynamic world of campus networks and services migrating to cloud.

Davenport needs to convince nobody that Big Data is a growing field, yet even in 2014 the number of colleges offering degrees in Big data science is not yet up to speed. More importantly he shares how traditional Business Intelligence is struggling to adjust to the analytics and big data era.

For as much as Big Data at Work contributes to the requirements in both technology and IT professionals, his suggestions that management stands in the way of more game changers outside of Silicon Valley. Yes Hadoop and MapReduce have forever empowered LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo and other startups. Healthcare, banking and insurance are markets who have already embraced and are excited about the abilities of big data for their customers.

Davenport is pretty upfront about what is needed: colleges have not fully embraced Big Data. Their mistake is assuming Big Data is a Computer Science degree. A good chapter of this book reflects on the inability of management to adopt Big Data for today’s competitive market. Is it surprising to see only a hand full of college programs sending grads to the likes of Google? More and more companies are looking to regional campus partnerships for Hadoop big data efforts. Yet many of those colleges still have no existing undergraduate or masters-level degrees in Big Data.

Tags big data at work, competing on analytics, Google, Hadoop, Hive, Innovation, knowledge, LinkedIn, MapReduce, Pig, tom davenport, yahoo

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Tableau 8.2 for OS X

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date May 29, 2014

Tableau will ship their 8.2 update supporting OS X on June 19 with a big release party in San Francisco. The emerging BI tool is getting a great UI on a great computer.

Tableau for OS X

Tags business intelligence, change, Design, Innovation, Interactive, knowledge, os x, tableau, Technology, tipping point, trends