SuccessfulWorkplace

For centuries now, we’ve created goods through mass production, using machines, assembly lines and ever-larger ways to melt, mix, cut, stamp, rivet and paste. We’ve gotten used to using many materials to create something of higher value, with the waste being given off as liquid, gases and material headed for a landfill, or worse, put […]

Technology companies are talking big about encryption and new ways to shield their networks and online customer data. This has potential to start a cyber war with the NSA as government and private enterprise get locked in a battle to prevent and gain access to data. All of this is being done in an effort to distance […]

Forrester’s Nigel Fenwick posted Dawn of a New Digital Age this morning, a great summary of why we sit at the beginning of something very different from what humans have experienced to date. Fenwick calls it a revolution and ties his evidence to the rise of web-connected sensors: Consider a world in which every object […]

In Venture Beat yesterday, Meghan Kelly wrote up an article saying that data scientists, “…may soon become one of the most sought-after people in your industry.” with an accompanying infographic (see below). As evidence, Kelly said that data scientist job postings increased 15,000 percent between 2011 and 2012 alone. I think she has it wrong […]

Last week it emerged that retail giant Tesco is to implement screens in its forecourt petrol stations which can tell a customers’ age and gender in order target advertising more effectively. The system uses facial recognition technology to make this happen. Tesco will introduce the OptimEyes screen, developed by Lord Alan Sugar’s Amscreen, to all […]

Over the past several years there has been an enormous amount of press over NoSQL, which is a way to store and retrieve data found in a less structured and less consistent form than relational databases. NoSQL was claimed to be the heir apparent to the relational database, the kind that made Oracle an enormous […]

John Skovron has over twenty years of experience working with systems that run mega scale grid computing solutions. These are the systems used primarily at financial trading shops that are able to compute against loosely coupled, high variety and distributed data that most of the world wouldn’t ever consider as possible. When he slows down […]

Republished article on last year’s TUCON 2012 event. TUCON 2013 takes place October 14-17 at the Aria Resort in Las Vegas. Big Data is a great topic. Everyone recognizes the rise of the volumes of data being generated by individuals, systems and devices. There are some fabulous headline figures about data. It is the journalists’, […]

Customer engagement involves having access to the information that allows right-time marketing to happen, based on interaction channel, context, and customer’s preferences. For some, this is the definition of Big Data’s role in creating brand loyalty, but what if the Big Data conversation wasn’t enough? Going Beyond the Data Set In a recent Venture Beat […]

We hear the term “unstructured data” often. It’s brought up as the enormous challenge of big data and often cited as the reason why traditional relational databases don’t meet the needs of Big Data. But that conversation doesn’t adequately describe the challenge organization’s face with unstructured data. To get your head around unstructured data, you […]

Seth Godin wrote today that Cellphones repel UFO’s. He meant that people carrying digital cameras in their pockets every day take copious pictures of real things. Those pictures spread a rich reality rather than a fantastic story with little proof. When’s the last time you saw a photo of Nessie, Sasquatch or a Martian ship? […]

Retail is undergoing an enormous change that is just getting started. If you’ve been to Best Buy lately, you’ll notice that selection on the shelves is decreasing and that the chain is moving more toward a two-pronged selling approach. The first is to stock the store with popular items that attract consumers wanting or needing […]

This is a guest post by Lisa Arthur. I saw a statistic in Direct Marketing News recently that depressed me. According to a recent survey, fewer than one in five Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) think they are any good at Digital Marketing. A full 60 percent of them will be hiring or changing marketing agencies […]

I was recently asked, “Do you ‘fix’ processes before implementing a business process management system (BPMS)?” This is a very good question and something that sparks great debates whenever it comes up….how much time should be spend documenting processes that exist, especially if processes are seriously flawed? I’ve said many times that if you don’t start with the processes you have, good or bad, […]