March 01, 2014

Information Governance Can No Longer Be Confined to the IT Department
Historically, responsibility for data management is left primarily with the IT department. However, the growing complexity of information governance and the ramifications if it goes wrong mean that this narrow approach is no longer appropriate. Instead, responsibility for information governance should now be a boardroom level issue, with input from the compliance team and significant input from the legal team, whether internal or external and from other specialists.


Why “Big Data” Is a Big Deal
“The data themselves, unless they are actionable, aren’t relevant or interesting,” is Nathan Eagle’s view. “What is interesting,” he says, “is what we can now do with them to make people’s lives better.” John Quackenbush says simply: “From Copernicus using Tycho Brahe’s data to build a heliocentric model of the solar system, to the birth of statistical quantum mechanics, to Darwin’s theory of evolution, to the modern theory of the gene, every major scientific revolution has been driven by one thing, and that is data.”


Intranet Information Architecture (IA) Trends
A common pitfall with task-based IAs is difficult-to-scan category names. Organizations think that category names need to start with verbs or follow an “I need to...” pattern in order to be task based. This isn’t necessary. Sometimes trying to fit link or menu labels to a specified format makes them long and more difficult to scan, because the most meaningful words don't appear until the end of the label. Task-based IA doesn't require any particular grammatical structure for labels; it just means grouping information according to how employees use it, rather than by who creates and maintains it.


One third of Fortune 100 organisations will face an information crisis by 2017
"There is an overall lack of maturity when it comes to governing information as an enterprise asset," said Andrew White, research vice president at Gartner. "It is likely that a number of organisations, unable to organise themselves effectively for 2020, unwilling to focus on capabilities rather than tools, and not ready to revise their information strategy, will suffer the consequences." Business leaders need to manage information, rather than just maintain it. "When we say 'manage', we mean 'manage information for business advantage', as opposed to just maintaining data and its physical or virtual storage needs," said White.


Usability between information design and information architecture
A complete usability test has to consider several key criteria of a website: page identifier, transition elements, downloading time, and testing the pages on different browsers. Even all of these are taken into account, an information designer should be careful with the users’ reaction. During a usability test they might be impressed by spectacular graphic elements and their feedback is not always very relevant. Hackos and Redish describe a case when users rejected a product after the usability test.


Building a RESTful Web Service with Spring Boot to Access Data in an Aerospike Cluster
Spring Boot is a powerful jump start into Spring. It allows you to build Spring based applications with little effort on your part. Aerospike is a distributed and replicated in-memory database optimized to use both DRAM and native flash/SSDs. Aerospike also has high reliability and is ACID compliant. Developers can quickly scale their database cluster from two nodes to twenty nodes without bringing down the database service.


Big data, big business, Big Brother?
Berkman's Larry Lessig nails it when he says that we need norms, laws, technology and markets to deal with this tremendous power the '6 Memes' are giving us. Yet right now, most users are like kids toying with handguns, and BigDataCo's are acting like kids in a candy-store. Can we really trust those new data-oil companies, those behemoths of smart-data-mining to not fall prey to the temptation of instrumentalizing us, to not use their armies of servers and their powerful algorithms for the most nefarious 'monetization' purposes, and to not use that very same information to tacitly or otherwise support the creation of perfect surveillance states?


Facebook’s Plan to Conquer the World — With Crappy Phones and Bad Networks
As Facebook looked out across the globe it wanted to conquer, it saw a mish-mash of unreliable networks, low resolution screens, and shitty processors. There were all manner of various flavor of Android, problems with local language support, confusion over pricing, and unreliable or non-existent power grids. There’s the question of how you make social connections between people with no address books, no email address, no university affiliation, and who are perhaps the very first person in their village to sign up for Facebook. The challenges weren’t just difficult, they were epic.


Biggest of all data, Internet of Things
Teradata, a global analytic data platform, applications and services company, revealed that customers will be able to add Java Script Object Notation data to their data warehouse. This is a significant advancement, because JSON is the primary language that powers the Internet of Things, a global collection of millions of sensors and embedded microprocessors. Current Online Transaction Processing technology allows for transactional processing of JSON data. However, the OLTP technology does not allow for scalable analytics on massive data volumes, which is provided by Teradata’s parallel processing analytic engine.


Are You Too Old to Land a New IT Job?
"You have to be current. That is key, especially in IT," Gillis says. "I find it disturbing when I speak to clients who are older and they aren't spending time studying, staying hip and up-to-date on new technology advances," he says. "If you've been looking for a job for six months, you have to realize how much has happened in that time -- learn about emerging technology. Know the terminology. Be able to show that you've added to your knowledge and your skills," Gillis says, and be able to demonstrate how that knowledge and your skills have positively impacted previous employers.



Quote for the day:

"Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones." -- Theodore Roosevelt

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