Process flow of Analytics projects.

A spiral approach seems to work wonders for a business who has been unable to reach the information off their operations - for many reasons. 

This approach enables them as part of the discovery - with knowledge gained in the intricacies of Analytics, data quality assessment, need for transformations, and its cost to best practices, understanding of how the different visual cues of Tableau help to articulate complicated business scenarios into lego bits of views/dashboards & stories. 

Pearls among grains of sand...

In the current state of affair, we are overrun with offerings of knowledge, of ways to do things better -or smarter. Education is getting to be more - on demand. A look at my daughter’s school website includes Khan academy as a resource! Looks like our demand of a la carte from cable channels and content has migtrated to how we express our demand for information in general or self paced learning with immense choice in specific.

But as I see it, that has brought in a new cost - too much is being offered a la carte - a bit  counter productive. A quest via your preferred search tools - will leave us with a handful set of resources available on web,  - some free and some not, some great and some not so great. Question is, with limited time - how do we decipher which is the most efficient one for our needs. Ranking in becoming critical - and that reminds me the state of ratings services in financial market and where that went.

In the days going forward, that will be the key. Sometimes the best ones might not come up on the google search - for lack of keywords or marketing perhaps. Since when did good content need to market themselves.. unfortunately for ever - in the days of shrinking margins, and ever demanding business landscape.

Camera & Action .. on Architecture

Shawn would say he gets a vision of a merging roads - of various kinds.

Looking forward into future - if we could just see the culture of Gen Y, of new visualization techniques flourishing ( Prezi, D3, .. etc), of sudden growth of infographics, of extremely limited attention span - whats impact to org architecture & business decision making a decade later? Would they continue to operate in same pace and lack of vibrancy now - or would it transform or merge with a more effective story telling /story boarding way of expressions? Am sure there are other impacts to the future - but I am toying with the change visible in one area.. specifically communications,.. and visual comm.

The tools & resources are here --and getting more economical as the time flies. It would be miraculous to bring in a fresh touch of art and ingenuity to such areas of architecture as mundane as Capability Modeling, Gap analysis, strategic planning etc.

On the other hand, the prospect of these new forms of expression and its toolsets, do offer us a great way to introduce tomorrow’s leadership the time tested ways of Planning & Design from the last 3 decades.

Financial markets

A starting point of my knowledge of capital and money markets, assets movement, valuation, and regulations surrounding it. My focus is to capture the works on a macro level. I acknowledge difficulty in visualizing the time factor on these conceptual models. I am hopeful I will find a way to showcase the effect of time on regulations entities and how they affected these entities and future ones in the same line of thoughts.

Look forward to adding Federal reserve bank and other agencies aligned with the securities & associated industries.

Conceptual Modeling - Why do it?

Why do we involve in conceptual modeling - to interface knowledge between all players involved AND to bring into view ideas - not tables and entities of the business - be that motivation,  process or information.

This gives us a view of overall picture and form a great way to accumulate business knowledge. As this is a collection and position of ideas, this can encapsulate all the components of enterprise - that are of business importance. Ideas might be as simple as Risk and market segmentation. How these play down into the multiple models downward - process & data in layer 3 of Zachman - is a different exercise - typically called logical modeling. This is more to do with knowledge accumulation.

Complexity & Conceptualization

Interesting to see that complexity in IT systems is getting focus - from Main Street! Peter Doolan of Oracle's keynote presentation at the Oracle Location Intelligence conference was an eye opener and hopeful - as it meant we have a focus from the top - on making things easier.

This will be challenging to IT industry - which doesn't reward fixing previous mess so much as  it responds to  the enhancement or additional functionality or offering.

http://www.locationintelligence.net/

Much Ado about Hadoop

Much ado about Hadoop - is in the air currently. This is a novel way to do analytics - spread the risk of trying to define everything at once, truly agile. At what cost is the question. Technology innovation makes it possible for mom & pop to afford critical analytics - kudos to innovation on the infrastructure layer - to make clustering of nodes to solve your problem efficiently - at the cost of tailored coding at the MR level.

For the ones in the weeds of it, its new. From a larger perspective, its data management in a new infrastructure layer offering. The concepts of models, knowledge management, change management still apply. Oh - I forgot - the roles still matter. Going forward, data management involving Hadoop MR codes, will evolve into managing the MR Code libraries - as those pose quite a bit of rules for Enterprise to manage. Whats our holistic view into the Map-Reduce Codes... and rules embedded inside?  Limiting the acknowledgement  to the infrastructural gains, with added access to tons of open source statistical excellence is the key.