A rant against 1:1

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Everey now and again, I get really annoyed with sites that assume you have only one of something. “Please enter your email address” is a common request – except that I have several, and would like to have the opportunity to use any of them as my login …

Big data fetishes: social and mobile – Active Information

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This week, I wrote about data fetishes on Active Information. Excerpt:

“On the Big Data front, I’m intrigued by the potential of fast, wide and deep data processing to solve hard problems, learn from outliers and make informed, data-driven decisions.

And, as my clients will attest, I advocate instrumenting everything as a means to discover true customer, business and systems behaviors.

However, I don’t believe that all data has equal value. Nor does all valuable data hold its value over time. Good data programs rely on context and include data weeding.

But, what about the data that should never, ever get in your attention? According to Wharton’s Peter Fader, the least valuable data is the noisiest in the Big Data space: social and mobile.”

Read the post: Big data fetishes: social and mobile – Input Output.
Related posts:

  1. Active Information: Big Data from left field; Big Data Rx
  2. Active Information: Data Scientists, Moneyball, Competitive Analytics & Big Data Definition
  3. Active Information: Reclaim the “I” in CIO, Big Data & Collective Intelligence

EA Heuristic #3: Talk to more blind men to know the elephant

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(this article is part of the series “12 Heuristics for Enterprise Architecting“)
Picture of an elephant in a gentleman outfit. Enterprises are like elephants, much bigger than this one, thus a lot harder for any person to get a correct whole picture of.
photo credit: Murilo Morais 
Enterprises are like often like elephants and the enterprises’ employees and stakeholders are like blind men in the classic story; they are each touching a different part of the enterprise and they will each describe the enterprise differently, sometimes in significantly different ways.  As such, though it might seem obvious, it is important to talk to multiple people, and if possible representatives of various stakeholder groups.  Moreover, what EA often reveals is the breakdown in information flow across the enterprise.

In our EA exercise, we got employees of the organization to suggest ideas.  In order to encourage more ideas to be contributed, we make it safe for idea contributors by not tagging names to ideas.  Later, when we evaluated the ideas, we observed that some ideas suggested by one employee was labeled as “we are already doing this” by another employee.  Clearly the initiative in question was seen as an area of improvement in the eyes of the first employee, but seen as completed in the eyes of the second.  This was a good example of different perspectives on the state of the enterprise.

EA Heuristic #3: Talk to more blind men to know the elephant

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(this article is part of the series “12 Heuristics for Enterprise Architecting“)
Picture of an elephant in a gentleman outfit. Enterprises are like elephants, much bigger than this one, thus a lot harder for any person to get a correct whole picture of.
photo credit: Murilo Morais 
Enterprises are like often like elephants and the enterprises’ employees and stakeholders are like blind men in the classic story; they are each touching a different part of the enterprise and they will each describe the enterprise differently, sometimes in significantly different ways.  As such, though it might seem obvious, it is important to talk to multiple people, and if possible representatives of various stakeholder groups.  Moreover, what EA often reveals is the breakdown in information flow across the enterprise.

In our EA exercise, we got employees of the organization to suggest ideas.  In order to encourage more ideas to be contributed, we make it safe for idea contributors by not tagging names to ideas.  Later, when we evaluated the ideas, we observed that some ideas suggested by one employee was labeled as “we are already doing this” by another employee.  Clearly the initiative in question was seen as an area of improvement in the eyes of the first employee, but seen as completed in the eyes of the second.  This was a good example of different perspectives on the state of the enterprise.

Just Enough Detail

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The real art of enterprise-architecture, and perhaps its hardest challenge, is in presenting the right level of detail. Not too little, not too much, but just enough. Just Enough Detail. To which people will, of course, immediately ask, “Okay, but how much detail is ‘Just Enough Detail’?”. And I’ll have to admit that there isn’t […]

Essential Enterprise Architecture governance

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A governance framework establishes who makes what decisions and based on what. The EA architects shall propose a governance framework that regulates the EA development itself and its employment in the enterprise. The development governance i…

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