July 27, 2014

A Roadmap to Agile Documentation
The adoption of agile methodologies in project management and software development has experienced a rapid growth in the last decade and is expected to keep growing. In transitioning to the agile way of working, many Johns and Janes throughout the world pose the same questions on what appears to be such a loose approach to development and is definitively a different, less traditional way of doing things. In the middle of all the differences in the way companies begin to work when transitioning to the agile mindset are issues relating to documenting.


How Ford plans to win the future like a software company
"When it comes to thinking like a software and technology company, [we need to make sure] the vehicle is updatable over time, and we want to plan on a certain number of software updates throughout the year," said Butler. "Device makers have been doing it for a long time. Automakers haven't been doing it for a long time... Enhancements on an ongoing basis need to be thought about and planned... There's some fundamental changes in terms of how we need to organize business." One of the biggest obstacles remains the product development lifecycle of a new automobile. In most cases, it's five years or more.


Analytics Handbook: Book 3 is Free
The team that brought you the Analytics Handbook, has freely published the third and final book, titled THE DATA ANALYTICS HANDBOOK RESEARCHERS + ACADEMICS. This book focuses on data science in research and academics communities. Like the previous 2 books in the series, it includes interviews with top experts in the field. Here are just a few of the people with interviews in this book.


3 Organizations That Can See the Future with Predictive Analytics
The ability to foresee the future would certainly be the ultimate competitive advantage. In reality though, no business has a crystal ball for making critical decisions. That’s why all critical business decisions have always carried a certain amount of risk. This risk has always and will always be part of the competitive game. While the elimination of risk is impossible, big data is forging a pathway for businesses to reduce it. Predictive analytics has been in use for a number of years and big data Hadoop is helping improve it’s usage and improve outcomes in the process. With big data, no longer is the size of the sample set a limiting factor, as a lot more data is available from a modeling perspective.


What SQL Server Clustering Can and Cannot Do
Microsoft Windows Failover Clustering is a high-availability option designed to increase the uptime of SQL Server instances. A cluster includes two or more physical servers, called nodes; identical configuration is recommended. One is identified as the active node, on which a SQL Server instance is running the production workload, and the other is a passive node, on which SQL Server is installed but not running. If the SQL Server instance on the active node fails, the passive node becomes the active node and begins to run the SQL Server production workload with some minimal failover downtime.


HaMIS: One 24/7 Product and Four Scrum Teams, Four Years Later
This paper grew from an initiative by two team members to share our experience with others. As we do for pretty much anything substantial in our team, we organised an open space to discuss this subject and, even more importantly, involved everyone. We asked team members from all teams to recommend subjects that the outside world might find interesting. In a second round, we asked everyone to write his or her most important message to the reader. The result is this compendium of topics that derive from our more than four years of agile and scrum practices at the Port of Rotterdam, one of the world's busiest ports.


The State of Enterprise Information Architecture
The good news is there’s no shortage of information to fuel those innovative trends. With this information explosion occurring all around us, the industry is seeing over a 50x growth in data from 2010 to 2020. That’s 80 exabytes to 40,000 EB that’s all coming from what was thought of in the past as the most unlikely sources: our wrists, our cars and even our refrigerators to name just a few. The question then becomes, what we do with that data? Well use it of course. This is where EIA comes in. This will be one of the many topics I will be addressing within the EA team here at Gartner.


Pageviews are Dead, Engagement is King
Unfortunately though, not all disruptors are popular, and for sites utilizing click-baiting as a key tactic in gaining unique pageviews, the feelings of animosity are growing. See, click-baiting, spurred on by social media sites, has a not-so-unknown dark side: "readers are being treated as stupid," Jake Beckman, the man behind @SavedYouAClick, told The Daily Beast. "It's social copy specifically intended to leave out information to create a curiosity gap. Some of it's disingenuous. It's not always, but the reader is always being manipulated."


Organizational culture has reached a tipping point, yet many culture change initiatives fail
Organizational culture has reached a tipping point. Most CEOs know that culture matters and can have a strong impact on business results. Studies now confirm it is considered as important to success as strategy, and in fact it should be a strategy in and of itself. That is the good news. The bad news is that despite this broad executive understanding of culture, and the many studies and books written over decades to demonstrate the link between culture and performance, the fact remains that too many culture change efforts still fail or fall short of their potential.


Adopting Information Governance in Small and Midsized Firms
One of the main drivers for effective IG initiatives that touch all law firms, regardless of size, is that regulations are starting to address how clients' vendors, including law firms, are managing their data. Outside counsel guidelines are now providing requirements on how clients expect their firms to handle and secure their data. Those requirements can range from "we don't want our data in a particular software application," to "we want our data destroyed X amount of years after the matter is completed." These types of requirements touch upon many different responsibilities within the firm, and part of the IG process is that there is an understanding that there needs to be a policy and procedure on how outside counsel guidelines are reviewed and agreed to.



Quote for the day:

“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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