Tag: change

Categories
Education Innovation Reading Technology Vietnam War

Latest read: No Sure Victory

In many ways my desire to understand the US failure in Vietnam has been a long difficult road. No Sure Victory: Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War by Gregory Daddis answers many long held questions.
no sure victoryAfter digesting so many resources in books, documentaries and listening to interviews with veterans, politicians and social leaders during the long duration of the war.

I believe No Sure Victory reveals strong indicators regarding our failure in Vietnam. The focus is the failure of MACV to gather and process data against an established set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) over the long duration of this war.

Daddis documents McNamara’s injection of data gathering (metrics) when LBJ increased America’s commitment to South Vietnam. McNamara’s experience as one of The Wiz Kids seemed to set the stage in his role as Secretary of Defense. Yet our enemy was determined and battle tested. America was fighting a larger, strategic cold war with an emerging China and the established Soviet Union in both Europe and Asia.

Daddis sheds light throughout No Sure Victory not only on the lack of White House direction but how MACV leadership could not adapt to fighting a war of counterinsurgency. The impact of this television war confused the government, media and our country. At the same time Daddis points to key failures in not understanding the full affect of the French Indo-China war regarding counterinsurgency. This lack of understanding established a crippling third leg the US consistently fought to balance against the cold war political spectrum.

Continue reading “Latest read: No Sure Victory”
Categories
Design Education Innovation Network Reading Technology

Latest read: The Data Science Handbook

The recent pre-release of The Data Science Handbook is a fast, easy read. There is nothing better in business today than the still exploding market of data science. While some marketing statements indicate many are trying data science, here are the voices of recognized data science leaders. I have read my share of data science and big data books as well but like the direction of this pre-release.

The Data Science Handbook Pre-ReleaseMaturing technologies like Hadoop and even MapReduce prove yesterday was the time for every organization, business unit and non-profit to understand how data science is fundamentally changing the game.

Data Science hits your data sweet spot due to the ability of large systems to process your data in real-time. Notice how Microsoft is acquiring data science companies?

Data Science was just in its early stages not more than 10 years ago. Yahoo and Google helped move this forward. Even “legacy” companies like Sears Holdings understands the impact of MapReduce and Hadoop, they are well outside Silicon Valley. Just wait until some great advancements for public health are established by non-profits as a result of implement data science to forecast their business.

There is a great deal of excitement as the full release publication date inches closer. Cannot wait to see this book ship.

Categories
Education Innovation Reading Technology

Latest read: Rework

Rework is a welcomed aggressive view of business today. Last year 37signals reorganized. Today the company is simply known as BaseCamp, their top selling product management cloud service. Rework is proven look at business in the Age of Attention.
ReworkThe best line in Rework that made me laugh out loud was Jason describing how you can get by with small things…he described how inmates carve shivs in prison. Perfect example but his follow up statement “I’m not telling you to carve a shiv” Hilarious.

Goodreads maintains a quote page for Rework. If your considering the book take a look for the little nudge to get you over the edge.And yes Jason nails it: Meetings are toxic, He suggests a few proven solutions.

This is an energizing read for millennials who need to understand that mature business models and the people who drive them come from a different time, have invested in ‘the system’ and are now using it to their advantage regardless of how the world works today. While the book is also clearly aimed at entrepreneurs, Jason addresses them as Starters instead.  He has a good idea about that term. This book is a quick read packed with lots of common sense that we forget in our busy lives.  Jason helps refocus your efforts.  Its worth the read.

Categories
Cloud Cyberinfrastructure Network Reading Technology

Latest read: Online Payments Risk Management

Online Payments Risk Management is certainly a hot topic. The 2013 holiday data breach at Target and more recently, a new large data breach at Home Depot the need for organizations to understand Online Payments Risk Management is more important today truly than ever before.
online payments risk managementI think there is no better way than for companies and payment card providers to step back and acknowledge many “security” measures are not effective today in combating cyber crime.

Ohad Samet’s book is a great introduction to payment risk management from multiple angles and can be a good base document to build upon in bringing PCI compliance efforts to online payment websites.

It may even be interesting to see how Samet positions of Loss over Fraud.  The implications can be rather surprising.

Samet has organized this book into logical sections regarding approaches and the use of analytics to optimize tracking losses while also addressing the role of the organization and the people implementing secure transactions.  Regardless of its 2013 publication, section 3 on Tools and Methods provides solid, industry tested solutions that should be reviewed annually.

That said its time to roll up your sleeves and begin protecting consumers.

Categories
Cloud Cyberinfrastructure Education Google Innovation Network OpenSource Technology

Latest read: The Art of Capacity Planning

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 PlanningMy 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.

Continue reading “Latest read: The Art of Capacity Planning”