Never Waste A Good Crisis
When something goes wrong, someone takes the fall. But for an influencer like an Enterprise Architect, a crisis can be a good thing. Why? Because we are change agents. And people won’t change unless they are forced to change. John Kotter, in his book “Leading Change” suggests that one of the greatest obstacles to change is complacency. Change just isn’t urgent enough. He’s completely right, and a crisis is often what is needed to break through complacency. To take advantage of a crisis, you have to be ready. Have your arrows sharpened and sitting in your quiver, ready to go. During a crisis, you may get exactly one shot to propose an idea, and it may not be the moment you expect. There won’t be a “right” time. Just the opportune time. So be prepared.
Using JavaScript to Create Geospatial and Advanced Maps
Until recently, developing geospatial apps beyond a 2D map required a comprehensive GIS service such as ArcGIS, Nokia Here, or Google Maps. While these APIs are powerful, they are also expensive, onerous to learn, and lock the map developer to a single solution. Fortunately, there are now a wealth of useful, open source JavaScript tools for handling advanced cartography and geospatial analysis. In this article, I’ll examine how to implement GIS techniques with JavaScript and HTML, focusing on lightweight tools for specific tasks. Many of the tools I’ll cover are based on services such as Mapbox, CloudMade, and MapZen, but these are all modular libraries that can be added as packages to Node.js or used for analysis in a web browser.
BioBeats founder warns of the dark side of wearables and biometrics
Plans worries some organisations are more interested in using wearables and the data they collect for "sinister purposes". In a twist he describes as "Orwellian", he claims that "some of the insurance providers we work with want to calculate insurance premiums in real-time," which he sees as problematic. Howver, Plans notes that "while some of the aspects of biometric data gathering from wearables may at first seem surveillance-like and therefore Orwellian in nature, they offer very clear and potentially life-saving advantages to human life and the provision of care. This means that whilst we have a lot of work to do to ensure privacy, security and choice for people and their data, we also have a tremendous amount of potential health benefit to deliver."
Hadoop demand falls as other big data tech rises
Hadoop vendors will almost surely languish -- unless they're willing to embrace adjacent big data technologies that complement Hadoop. As it happens, both leaders already have. For example, even as Apache Spark has eaten into MapReduce interest, both companies have climbed aboard the Spark train. But more is needed. Because big data is much more than Hadoop and its ecosystem. ... As Aerospike executive and former Wall Street analyst Peter Goldmacher told me, a major problem for Hortonworks and Cloudera is that both are spending too much money to court customers. While these companies currently have a lead in terms of distribution Goldmacher warns that Oracle or another incumbent could acquire one of them and thereby largely lobotomize the other because of its superior claim on CIO wallets and broad-based suite offerings.
IT Pro Panel: How the IoT will change your business
The IoT describes a phenomenon in which everyday devices can send and receive data over the internet, and potentially between one another, too. Everything from your kettle to aircraft parts could – and probably will – become connected, with the burgeoning industry set to grow as broadband quality and coverage improves. In fact, analyst firm Gartner predicts there will be 25 billion connected devices by 2020 – more than three for every person on the planet. In 2015 alone, it puts the number of connected machines at 4.9 billion come the end of the year. So what does this mean for your business?
Sourcing Security Superheroes: Part 1: Battling Retention and Recruitment
The mindset of cybersecurity practitioners is very different from most others in the corporate world. Think about what makes security professionals successful. They are smart, creative and don’t like to follow rules for the sake of compliance. It’s their ability to ignore constraints and to be disruptive that allows them to solve problems in new ways. Structured thinkers are important in all organizations. But the bottom line is that enterprises need creative hunters, not just responders, on the frontlines. If we apply that way of thinking and interacting to the traditional workforce, we can see where conflicts start to arise. Organizations like to hire from the highest pedigree of universities and pick the best and brightest graduates.
How to Be an Indispensable Force in the Workplace
In order to be the best, take advantage of any professional development opportunities available to you, and continuously build your knowledge using resources like trade journals and industry events. Actively seizing every possible opportunity to improve yourself as a professional makes you a better employee and gives you more opportunities to connect with hiring managers looking for top talent. ... Use your skills and the knowledge you've procured becoming the best at what you do, and diversifying your skills, to anticipate any issues that may arise. Whether it's a work or local trade organization meeting or just an issue brought up at a networking event, be prepared to provide intelligent, insightful solutions.
From Information to Action: The Importance of the Data Story
An important part of this process is humanizing the data. Like any story, your data story should describe how events affect people. For example, it’s one thing to say that recalibrating a QA process will lead to reduced failure rates. It’s another to say that doing this will mean fewer angry customers returning products and demanding refunds. Of course, with all this talk of dragons and damsels (sorry, but the old stories were rather sexist!), it’s useful to remember another use of the word story – that is, the news story. The way that stories are presented in the news differs from some other forms of storytelling. Rather than structure the story as an entertaining journey and keeping the audience guessing what the outcome will be, a news report aims to grab your attention right away and give you the facts as concisely as possible.
Enterprise Architecture's Missing Models
An essential part of the enterprise architecture description is the set of organisational models – organisations, divisions, departments etc. and their relationships – for the organisations participating in the enterprise. By any rational methodology, this set must include the significant temporary organisations – the programmes and projects – not just the “BAU“- Business-As-Usual – operational organisations. Yet, how many Enterprise Architecture descriptions actually model the temporary organisations – the programme and projects – that will deliver the changes? This omission is even more glaring when you consider that Programme Management will, if it uses a proper systematic methodology, produce most of the models anyway! Every programme will have an explicit model of the target or transitional state of the enterprise at the end of the programme.
RaptorDB - the Document Store
The main driving force behind the development of RaptorDB is making the developer's and support jobs easier, developing software products is hard enough without complete requirements which becomes even harder when requirements and minds change as they only do in the real world. ... To aid the searching in such databases most Document store databases have a map function which extracts the data needed and saves that as a "view" for later browsing and searching. These databases do away with the notion of transactions and locking mechanism in the traditional sense and offer high data through-put and "eventually consistent" data views. This means that the save pipeline is not blocked for insert operations and reading data will eventually reflect the inserts done
Quote for the day:
"Nothing is so potent as the silent influence of a good example" -- James Kent
When something goes wrong, someone takes the fall. But for an influencer like an Enterprise Architect, a crisis can be a good thing. Why? Because we are change agents. And people won’t change unless they are forced to change. John Kotter, in his book “Leading Change” suggests that one of the greatest obstacles to change is complacency. Change just isn’t urgent enough. He’s completely right, and a crisis is often what is needed to break through complacency. To take advantage of a crisis, you have to be ready. Have your arrows sharpened and sitting in your quiver, ready to go. During a crisis, you may get exactly one shot to propose an idea, and it may not be the moment you expect. There won’t be a “right” time. Just the opportune time. So be prepared.
Using JavaScript to Create Geospatial and Advanced Maps
Until recently, developing geospatial apps beyond a 2D map required a comprehensive GIS service such as ArcGIS, Nokia Here, or Google Maps. While these APIs are powerful, they are also expensive, onerous to learn, and lock the map developer to a single solution. Fortunately, there are now a wealth of useful, open source JavaScript tools for handling advanced cartography and geospatial analysis. In this article, I’ll examine how to implement GIS techniques with JavaScript and HTML, focusing on lightweight tools for specific tasks. Many of the tools I’ll cover are based on services such as Mapbox, CloudMade, and MapZen, but these are all modular libraries that can be added as packages to Node.js or used for analysis in a web browser.
BioBeats founder warns of the dark side of wearables and biometrics
Plans worries some organisations are more interested in using wearables and the data they collect for "sinister purposes". In a twist he describes as "Orwellian", he claims that "some of the insurance providers we work with want to calculate insurance premiums in real-time," which he sees as problematic. Howver, Plans notes that "while some of the aspects of biometric data gathering from wearables may at first seem surveillance-like and therefore Orwellian in nature, they offer very clear and potentially life-saving advantages to human life and the provision of care. This means that whilst we have a lot of work to do to ensure privacy, security and choice for people and their data, we also have a tremendous amount of potential health benefit to deliver."
Hadoop demand falls as other big data tech rises
Hadoop vendors will almost surely languish -- unless they're willing to embrace adjacent big data technologies that complement Hadoop. As it happens, both leaders already have. For example, even as Apache Spark has eaten into MapReduce interest, both companies have climbed aboard the Spark train. But more is needed. Because big data is much more than Hadoop and its ecosystem. ... As Aerospike executive and former Wall Street analyst Peter Goldmacher told me, a major problem for Hortonworks and Cloudera is that both are spending too much money to court customers. While these companies currently have a lead in terms of distribution Goldmacher warns that Oracle or another incumbent could acquire one of them and thereby largely lobotomize the other because of its superior claim on CIO wallets and broad-based suite offerings.
IT Pro Panel: How the IoT will change your business
The IoT describes a phenomenon in which everyday devices can send and receive data over the internet, and potentially between one another, too. Everything from your kettle to aircraft parts could – and probably will – become connected, with the burgeoning industry set to grow as broadband quality and coverage improves. In fact, analyst firm Gartner predicts there will be 25 billion connected devices by 2020 – more than three for every person on the planet. In 2015 alone, it puts the number of connected machines at 4.9 billion come the end of the year. So what does this mean for your business?
Sourcing Security Superheroes: Part 1: Battling Retention and Recruitment
The mindset of cybersecurity practitioners is very different from most others in the corporate world. Think about what makes security professionals successful. They are smart, creative and don’t like to follow rules for the sake of compliance. It’s their ability to ignore constraints and to be disruptive that allows them to solve problems in new ways. Structured thinkers are important in all organizations. But the bottom line is that enterprises need creative hunters, not just responders, on the frontlines. If we apply that way of thinking and interacting to the traditional workforce, we can see where conflicts start to arise. Organizations like to hire from the highest pedigree of universities and pick the best and brightest graduates.
How to Be an Indispensable Force in the Workplace
In order to be the best, take advantage of any professional development opportunities available to you, and continuously build your knowledge using resources like trade journals and industry events. Actively seizing every possible opportunity to improve yourself as a professional makes you a better employee and gives you more opportunities to connect with hiring managers looking for top talent. ... Use your skills and the knowledge you've procured becoming the best at what you do, and diversifying your skills, to anticipate any issues that may arise. Whether it's a work or local trade organization meeting or just an issue brought up at a networking event, be prepared to provide intelligent, insightful solutions.
From Information to Action: The Importance of the Data Story
An important part of this process is humanizing the data. Like any story, your data story should describe how events affect people. For example, it’s one thing to say that recalibrating a QA process will lead to reduced failure rates. It’s another to say that doing this will mean fewer angry customers returning products and demanding refunds. Of course, with all this talk of dragons and damsels (sorry, but the old stories were rather sexist!), it’s useful to remember another use of the word story – that is, the news story. The way that stories are presented in the news differs from some other forms of storytelling. Rather than structure the story as an entertaining journey and keeping the audience guessing what the outcome will be, a news report aims to grab your attention right away and give you the facts as concisely as possible.
Enterprise Architecture's Missing Models
An essential part of the enterprise architecture description is the set of organisational models – organisations, divisions, departments etc. and their relationships – for the organisations participating in the enterprise. By any rational methodology, this set must include the significant temporary organisations – the programmes and projects – not just the “BAU“- Business-As-Usual – operational organisations. Yet, how many Enterprise Architecture descriptions actually model the temporary organisations – the programme and projects – that will deliver the changes? This omission is even more glaring when you consider that Programme Management will, if it uses a proper systematic methodology, produce most of the models anyway! Every programme will have an explicit model of the target or transitional state of the enterprise at the end of the programme.
RaptorDB - the Document Store
The main driving force behind the development of RaptorDB is making the developer's and support jobs easier, developing software products is hard enough without complete requirements which becomes even harder when requirements and minds change as they only do in the real world. ... To aid the searching in such databases most Document store databases have a map function which extracts the data needed and saves that as a "view" for later browsing and searching. These databases do away with the notion of transactions and locking mechanism in the traditional sense and offer high data through-put and "eventually consistent" data views. This means that the save pipeline is not blocked for insert operations and reading data will eventually reflect the inserts done
Quote for the day:
"Nothing is so potent as the silent influence of a good example" -- James Kent
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