Although artificial intelligence has been around for many decades, it has emerged as the next big thing only in recent years. Everyone is talking about it but in my view not everyone knows precisely what it is and what it is used for. I hear the term artificial intelligence used in many different contexts, anywhere…
Bitcoin and blockchain may be somewhat off-topic for this blog, but summertime is always a good time for me to pick up off-topic books to read during my vacation. With the current cryptocurrency craze it was unavoidable that I should pick up a book on the topic. Although I was previously vaguely familiar with Bitcoin…
The new general EU Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will become a binding law at end of May this year. The aim of the regulation is to establish greater control over the handling of personal data. As project managers, we must be aware that personal data may also be handled within projects, especially with respect to…
Alongside with DevOps, which ideally means deploying code into production with the click of a button through a well-defined process, data professionals are thinking about a similar concept for moving data into production. What if a business user wants new data in an analytical application, can we do it with the click of a button?…
The book Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz builds on the Lean Startup movement. The authors say that we live in a digital world, and we can build something on the cheap, measure its effect, and learn from it to build something better next time. Lean Analytics is used to measure the progress,…
As a practicing agile professional and a holder of both the PMI-ACP and Certified ScrumMaster certifications, I will share my insights on how such agile certifications compare in order to help you decide which one is better for you. The PMI Agile Certified Practitioner certification or PMI-ACP is issued by the Project Management Institute. I…
Whenever I hear that someone refers to PMP or PMI as a methodology, I want to tell them that neither of these is a project management methodology (PMP is a certification and PMI is the name of the organization that issues the certification). The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) is also not a methodology…
Chances are that when you started learning MapReduce, the first example that was covered was counting how many times a word appears in a given text or set of texts. This example is sometimes referred to as the “Hello, world!” of MapReduce. The example is straightforward enough and it explains how MapReduce works nicely. But…
Has this happened to you before? You spend months designing, building, testing, and delivering a data warehouse solution. You feel a sense of accomplishment, not just because you delivered on time and on budget, but because you delivered something that was needed and that is now being used and appreciated by the end users. And…
Recent references to business intelligence being on the way out (examples here and here) may be a result of misinterpreting what Gartner said about business intelligence competency centers being dead. Probably everyone agrees that business intelligence itself is not on the way out. It is evolving from the traditional data warehouse and single version of truth to…