This IRM UK event will be taking place in central London from the 3rd to 5th November 2010. It is co-located with two other related IRM conferences: Data Management and Information Quality. Full details may be obtained from the IRM conference web-site here.
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business intelligence, data warehousing | Tagged: IRM UK | 
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Posted by Peter Thomas
Introduction
Last week Ovum and @SarahBurnett were kind enough to invite me to speak at their Business Intelligence Masterclass in London.
Unfortunately one of the Ovum presenters, Madan Sheina, was ill, but Sarah did a great job running the session. The set up of the room and the number of delegates both encouraged interaction and there was a great atmosphere with lots of questions from the attendees and some interesting exchanges of ideas. Work commitments meant that I had to leave after lunch, which was a shame as I am sure that – based on what I saw in the morning – the afternoon workshops sessions would have been both entertaining and productive.
I certainly enjoyed my presentation – on Initiating and Developing a BI Strategy – which focussed on both my framework for success in Business Intelligence and, in particular, addressing the important cultural transformation aspects of these. Thank you also to the delegates both for the questions and observations and for kindly awarding my talk an 83% rating via the now ubiquitous seminar questionnaire.
Bouldering and Cultural Transformation
My partner bouldering the classic Boysen's Groove in Snowdonia
As part of my section on change management, I covered some of the themes that I introduced in my article Perseverance. In this I spoke about one of the types of rock climbing that I enjoy; bouldering. Bouldering is regular rock climbing on steroids, it is about climbing ultra-hard, but short climbs; often on boulders – hence the name. I compared the level of commitment and persistence required for success in bouldering to the need for the same attributes in change management initiatives.
I spoke to a few different delegates about this analogy during a coffee break. One in particular came up with an interesting expansion on my rock climbing theme. He referred to how people engaged in mountaineering and multi-pitch rock climbing make progress in a series of stages, establishing a new base at a higher point before attempting the next challenge. He went on to link this to making incremental progress on IT projects. I thought this was an interesting observation and told the gentleman in question that he had provided the inspiration for a future blog article.
An introduction to lead climbing
The above video is excerpted from the introduction to Hard Grit a classic 1998 climbing film by Slackjaw productions. It features climbing on the Gritstone (a type of hard sandstone) edges of the UK’s Peak District. This famous sequence shows a pretty horrendous fall off of a Peak District test piece called Gaia at Black Rocks. Amazingly the climber received no worse injuries than a severely battered and lacerated leg. Despite its proximity to my home town of London, Gritstone climbing has never been my cup of tea – it is something of an acquired taste and one that I have never appreciated as much as its many devotees.
As an aside you can see a photo of a latter-day climber falling off the same route at the beginning of my article, Some reasons why IT projects fail. I’m glad to say in this photo, unlike the video above, the climber is wearing a helmet!
What the clip illustrates is the dangers inherent in the subject of this article; traditional lead climbing. OK the jargon probably needs some explanation. First of all climbing is a very broad church, in this piece I’ll be ignoring whole areas such as mountaineering, soloing and the various types of winter and ice climbing. I am going to focus on roped climbing on rock, something that generally requires dry weather (unless you are a masochist or the British weather changes on you).
In this activity, one person climbs (unsurprisingly the climber) and another holds the rope attached to them (the belayer). The belayer uses a mechanism called a belay device to do this, but we will elide these details. With my background in Business Intelligence, I’ll now introduce some dimensions with which you can “slice and dice” this activity:
As the climber ascends, the belayer (hopefully!) takes in the slack, but (again hopefully!) without hauling the climber up the route. This means that if the climber falls (and the belayer is both competent and attentive) they should be caught by the rope almost immediately. Obviously this arrangement only works on single-pitch climbs.
Assuming that the climber is able to make a good attachment to the rock (again see next point) the issue here is how far they fall. If they climb 2m above their last attachment point, then a slip at this point will see them swinging 2m below this point – a total fall of 4m, much longer than when top roping. Also if the last attachment point is say 10m above the ground and the climber falls off say 8m above this, then slack in the system and rope stretch will probably see them hit the ground; something that should never happen in top roping.
[As an aside true top roping is what happens when the belayer climbs up after the climber. Here they are now belayed by the original climber from above. However no one uses the term top roping for this, instead they talk about bringing up the second, or seconding. Top roping is reserved for the practice of bottom roping described above, no one said that climbing was a logical sport!]
In the last point I referred to a lead climber mysteriously attaching themselves to the rock as they ascend. The way that they do this determines whether they are engaged in sport or traditional climbing (though there is some blurriness around the edges).
The process of equiping a sport route in this way can take some time, particularly if it is overhanging and of course it needs to be done well if the bolts are to hold a climber’s fall. A single-pitch sport climb may have 10 or more of these bolts, plus generally a lower-off point at the top.
The climber will take with them at least the same number of quick draws as there are bolts. These are two spring-loaded carabiners joined by a section of strong tape. As the climber ascends, they clip one end of a quick-draw to the staple or hanger and the other end over the rope attaching them to their belayer.
So long as the person who drilled and inserted the bolts did a good job and so long as the climber is competent in clipping themselves into these; then sport climbing should be relatively safe. At this point I should stress that I know of good climbers who have died sport climbing, often by making a simple mistake, often after having completed a climb and looking to lower off. Sport climbing is a relatively safer form of climbing, but it is definitively not 100% safe; no form of climbing is.
Because of its [relative] safety, sport climbing has something of the ethos of bouldering, with a focus on climbing at your limit as the systems involved should prevent serious injury in normal circumstances.
Nuts/wires (which you try to wedge into small cracks):
Hexes (which you try to wedge into large cracks):
Cams/Friends (spring-loaded mechanical devices that you place in parallel cracks – the latter name being a make of cams):
Slings (which you use to lasso spikes, or thread through any convenient holes in the rock):
Once you have secured any of the above into or around the rock, you clip in with a quick-draw as in Sport climbing and heave a sigh of relief.
In the video that started this section, Jean-minh Trin-thieu falls (a long way) on to a cam, which thankfully holds. The issue on this particular climb is that there are no more opportunities to place gear after the final cam at round about half-way up. Th nature of the rock means that a lot of Gritsone climbing is like this; one of the reasons that it is not a favourite of mine.
In any case, having established the above dimensions, I am going to drill down via two of them to concentrate on just trad leading. My comments apply equally to multi- and single-pitch, but the former offers greater scope for getting yourself into trouble.
The many perils of trad leading
Dave Birkett on 'Nowt Burra Fleein' thing' E8 6c, Cam Crag, Wasdale, The English Lake District - © Alastair Lee - Posingproductions.com
One of the major issues with trad climbing, particularly multi-pitch trad climbing in a mountain environment is that you are never quite sure what you need to take. The more gear you clip to your harness, the more likely you are to be able to deal with any eventuality, but the heavier you are going to be and the harder it will be to climb. Some one once compared trad leading to climbing wearing a metal skirt.
The issue here is that not only do you have to find somewhere to place this protective gear, you have to place it well so that is not dislodged as you climb past, or pulls out if you fall. What adds to this problem is that you may have to try to place say a wire in a situation where you are holding on to a small hold with one hand, with only one foot on a hold and the other dangling. You may also be on an overhang and thus with all gravity’s force coming to bear on your tendons. At such moments thoughts like “how far below was my last piece of gear?”, “how confident am I that I placed it well?” and “what happens if I can’t fiddle this piece of metal into this crack before my fingers un-peal?” tend to come to mind with alarming ease.
It is not unheard of for a trad leader to climb up many metres, placing an assortment of gear en route, only to fall off and have all of it rip out, a phenomenon call “unzipping”, thankfully not something I have experienced directly; though I have seen it happen to other people.
These additional uncertainties tend to lead to a more cautious approach to trad leading, with many people climbing within their abilities on trad climbs. Some people push themselves on trad and some get away with it for a while. However there is a saying about there being old climbers and bold climbers, but no old bold climbers.
The links with business projects
I have written quite a few times before about the benefits of an incremental approach, so long as this bears the eventual strategic direction in mind (see for example: Tactical Meandering and Holistic vs Incremental approaches to BI). In rock climbing, even within a single pitch, it is often recommended to break this into sections, particularly if there are obvious places (e.g. ledges) where you can take a bit of a rest and consider the next section. This also helps with not being too daunted; often the biggest deal is to start climbing and once you are committed then things become easier (though of course this advice can also get you in over your head on occasion).
Splitting a climb into sections is a good idea, but – in the same way as with business projects – you need to keep your eye on your eventual destination. If you don’t you may be so focussed on the current moves that you go off route and then have to face potentially difficult climbing to get back where you need to be. The equivalent in business would be projects that do not advance the overall programme.
However the analogy doesn’t stop there. If we break a single-pitch trad lead climb into smaller sections, those between each piece of gear that you place, then it is obvious that you need to pay particular attention to the piece of equipment that you are about to employ. If you do this well, then you have minimised the distance that you will fall and this will bolster your confidence for the next piece of climbing. If you rush placing your gear, or assume that it is sort of OK, then at the best you will give yourself unnecessary concerns about your climbing for the next few metres. At worst a fall could lead to this gear ripping and a longer fall, or even hitting the ground.
In business projects, if you take an incremental approach, then in the same way you must remember that you will be judged on the success or failure of the most recent project. Of course if you have a track record of earlier success then this can act as a safety net; the same as when your highest piece of gear fails, but the next one catches you. However, it is not the most comfortable of things to take a really long leader fall and similarly it is best to build on the success of one project with further successes instead of resting on your laurels.
Of course the consequences of rushing your interim steps in rock climbing can be a lot more terminal than in business. Nevertheless failure in either activity is not welcome and it is best to take every precaution to avoid it.
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Posted by Peter Thomas
I have been a member of the Business Intelligence Mecca that is BeyeNetwork.com for quite some time, but as of this week I am delighted to announce that they will be syndicating this blog at: http://www.beyeblogs.com/pthomas/.
Thank you to all at at BeyeNetwork for setting this up.
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Posted by Peter Thomas
Forming the second part of the trilogy that commenced with:
New Adventures in Wi-Fi – Track 1: Blogging
Introduction
First of all some caveats:
| I am not | a social media expert, nor any of its many variants. |
| I do not | work in marketing or PR. |
| I will not | be encouraging you to unleash the power of FaceTube/YouSpace/MyBook to make the world a better place (and your bank vault a fuller one), or to sell a million more of your product. |
| I can not | claim to have some secret formula for success in the world of on-line communication (indeed I tend to be allergic to such things as per Recipes for Success?). |
If you want all the answers, then please look elsewhere. Good luck with your search!
However:
| I am | an IT person, with a reasonable degree of commercial awareness and a background in sales and sales support. |
| I have | been involved in running web-sites and various on-line communities since 1999. |
| I do | author a business, technology and change blog that has been relatively well-received (why else would you be reading this?) |
| I think | that Twitter.com can be an extremely useful way of interacting with people, expanding your network and coming into contact with interesting new people. |
This is the middle chapter of a series of articles about the experiences of a neophyte in the sometimes confusing world of social media. View this article as akin to Herodotus describing crocodiles and you won’t go far wrong. If you learn something useful, then that’s great. If not, I hope that my adventures prove a harmless diversion for the reader.
Origins
I covered some of my previous forays in what has now come to be called social media in my earlier article, so I won’t revisit them here. The main focus of this piece is Twitter, a service that I joined back in December 2008, a couple of months after establishing this blog. It took me some time to figure Twitter out and I am not sure that I entirely “get it” in full.
In a recent article – How I write – I referred to many of my blog posts flowing quickly and easily. I must admit that writing this piece is proving to be something more of a struggle. Perhaps this reflects the fact that making progress on Twitter was also anything but easy. Indeed I felt that for a long time I was blundering about without any real idea about how to use the medium, or what I wanted to use it for. It also probably reflects my admitted lack of expertise in social media.
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An aside for fellow pedants:
Twitter is positioned as a micro-blogging service. This terminology offends the scientific bent of my mind. Micro (μικρός) implies 10-6 or one millionth. I tend to write relatively long blog posts and the average size of one of my articles is about 1,200 words; this equates to just over 7,000 characters. Twitter’s 140 character limit (originally set as the length of an SMS) is one fiftieth of this figure, so a more accurate description of Twitter would be a centi-blogging service; for less verbose bloggers maybe deci-blogging would also work. |
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Many aficionados of Twitter claim that it is the ideal way to promote your product, your service and/or yourself (or all three at the same time). The same people also say that it is a great tool for listening to existing and potential customers, obtaining information about what they like and dislike and picking up on trends. All this may very well be true, but this is not how I have come to use Twitter and I will not be covering any of these aspects here.
For me the facility is not really about reaching a wide audience – however much I may be passionate about areas such as Business Intelligence, I realise that not everyone will feel then same. Instead it has been a great way to discover the members of a broader worldwide technology community focussed on areas such as databases and data warehousing, BI tools and approaches, numerical and text-based analysis and general technology industry issues.
So what is all the fuss about anway?
Twitter started as a way to post updates from your mobile ‘phone by texting a message to a number (07624 801 423 here in the UK). The messages would generally be about the sorts of things that you would be doing when you don’t have access to a PC, but do to a mobile ‘phone. For example:
These messages were then posted on-line and could be read by other people. If these people found your output interesting (and let’s face it who could not be captivated by the examples I quote above), then they could subscribe to your posts (or follow your tweets in the lingo). When some one follows you, you are notified and can return the complement if you wish. In this way the network of people with whom you can share your updates grows.
At some point people began to realise that you could skip the mobile bit and use your computer to post tweets directly on-line. This opened up the entire:
type post and the rest, as they say is history. I have tweeted via my mobile ‘phone recently, but only by first loading Opera Mini and going to twitter.com. I suspect that there are people out there who have never sent an SMS to their Twitter account.
A relic of this history is the aforementioned 140 character limit. Because there is not much room to type, there is a limit to the length of thought that you can share. In turn this means that a defining characteristic of Twitter is brevity. For someone such as me who is not known for having this quality as a core characteristic, this presents something of a challenge. However when you have something exceeding 140 characters to say, the Twitter limit forces the approach of writing it down somewhere else (e.g. on a blog) and then posting a link. A lot of my Twitter posts contain either links to this site or to interesting articles that I have found elsewhere. In this way, Twitter has some attributes akin to a more dynamic version of a social bookmarking site (such as reddit.com or del.icio.us).
The other key characteristic of twitter is interaction. Most of my other tweets are either passing on comments made by other people, or links posted by them – of course this type of behaviour tends to lead to reciprocation, which binds people together (in a positive sense) and also potentially widens the network available to both. The balance of my tweeting is made up of chatting with people (tweeps if you must) either about industry issues, or – probably more frequently – just shooting the breeze.
To me rather than [insert appropriate negative power of 10 here]-blogging Twitter is much more akin to it’s historical roots of public texting. Instead of SMSing one person, or a small group, you share your abbreviated pearls of wisdom with potentially thousands of people, these people also have a much easier way of following your train of thought. Of course there is no guarantee that they put the same care and attention into reading your tweets as you did in to writing them; more on this later.
Some suggestions for blissful tweeting
These are some things that have worked for me and seem to make sense. There are lots of alternative perspectives out there, just a google away:
Unless you want to stay anonymous, I would suggest using your real name and a user name that is close to this: I’m @peterjthomas for example.
There is nothing more off-putting than being followed by someone, clicking on their page and finding… nothing. Why would anyone want to listen to what you have to say if you don’t lay down some markers here? While you are at it, think about customising your page to make it a bit more distinctive. But don’t go to town, at least at present, it is not that easy to come up with a scheme that will work on multiple screen resolutions.
This can be a little easier said than done. What you are most likely looking for is people with similar interests to yourself. There are a number of approaches.
Maybe a good way to think about this is to consider the exercise that you have just completed to look for people to follow. What would make your Twitter account come into focus in such a process? Whatever you are looking for in some one to follow, similar people will also be looking for, so try to fit the bill.
If you are looking for people who share cool articles, then share cool articles. If you are looking for people who express opinions about things that are important to you, then express opinions; either on Twitter, or via a blog and post links on Twitter. If you are looking for people who engage with others, then engage with others yourself. You can reference people who are not following you (and indeed who you are not following) just by putting an ‘@’ in front of their name.
For example even if you are not following me and you post:
“Wow! that @peterjthomas really knows his business intelligence”
then first of all I will notice (as you reference me) and second I’m as human as the next person and am likely to at least consider following you, or at the very least sharing your comment with my followers.
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An aside on sharing tweets:
Twitter etiquette is that you don’t share other people’s tweets without referencing them. So in the above example I might re-tweet your kind comment as: “RT @your-name Wow! that @peterjthomas really knows his business intelligence << Thanks" the RT stands for re-tweet and the << indicates my additional comments, in this case to say thank you – people do the latter in a number of way. An alternative to using RT is as follows: “Wow! that @peterjthomas really knows his business intelligence (via @your-name)” Not only is this polite, but now @your-name and @peterjthomas are linked – if I was worth following, then me mentioning you is a worthwhile objective. |
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Of course the other two keys to gaining followers are the same as for getting people to read your blog: first share links that are worthwhile sharing (particularly if they are your own work) and second try to engage with people and refrain from being a passive by-stander.
One thing that is probably dawning on any Twitter novices right now is that the above are not discrete activities that you do once and then are finished with. If you want to get the most out of Twitter, then you will have to keep doing them.
More advanced techniques
Unless you are looking to create a social media presence for a Fortune 500 company (assuming that there are any left who have not already created such a thing), then the above pointers are probably more than enough to get you started. Like me you may then just muddle through, hopefully learning from your mistakes. Alternatively, there are any number of guides out there which may or may not strike a chord with you and suit your personal style; just search for them.
Be yourself
On the subject of personal style, I’d suggest (as I also suggested in my article on blogging) that you be yourself on Twitter. Even within 140 characters, trying to be something that you are not comes across as fake; people aren’t impressed. On the same subject, treat people as you would face-to-face. If you are trying to sell something – even just your personal brand – then would you ram this down people’s throats in person? If not, then why would it be OK to do this on Twitter? A more low key approach is likely to lead to engagement and a better outcome than blowing your trumpet from the roof-tops (I know, I have tried the latter and it doesn’t work too well).
Use hash-tags
Above I mentioned tagging your posts. So if you write something about cloud computing, you might want to tag it with a key word, e.g. “cloud”. Though Twitter’s own search engine and the various other tools that you can employ on Twitter data will search for any occurence of specified text, it is still traditional to use hash tags, so in the above example a tweet might look like:
“I have just come across a great article sumarising new development in cloud computing – http://link.here #cloud“
As ever the incomparable xkcd.com has a view on this world that is both acerbic and insightful:
© xkcd.com
To see a slightly more positive use of Twitter search and hash-tags, try looking up coverage of a recent Teradata analyst event using #td3pi.
Shorten your URLs
On the subject of links, the 140 character limitation means that you don’t want to waste space with long URLs. Using a URL shortener is mandatory – I use http://bit.ly but there are many other such tools out there.
Check out the wide range of Twitter-related tools
Now that the subject of tools has come up, there is an entire hinterland of Twitter-related tools that can do a wide range of things to help you. These include:
These which help to manage your entire Twitter experience from reading other people’s posts, to making your own (sometimes doing link shortening for you automatically). If you are successful in finding people to follow and attracting people to follow you, then there will come a time when the noise level becomes unmanageable. This type of tool can help by providing filters and groups, which enable you to make sense of a tsunami of tweets, organise them and prioritise your time.
I use TweetDeck, but again there are many alternatives.
These are generally what you would employ on your blog or other internet site to allow people to easily tweet your content. There are several very slick and attractive looking options out there, just take a look at a handful of sites and take your pick. I’m staying old-school for present and hand-coding my Twitter links (as at the end of this article).
This is rather a grand name which covers everything from the trend of how many people are following you through to quite sophisticated analysis. Rather than provide a list, take a look at one that Pam Dyer has put together here.
There are a lot of fun Twitter-related applications out there. Just one example to whet your appetite is the following app, written by @petewarden which graphs your relations to other people on Twitter and gives a very visual perspective on the totality of your tweeting:
© http://twitter.mailana.com
In closing
I chose to close this article with the above image for a reason. To me it captures the essence of what Twitter is about; forming a network of associations with people who can enrich your understanding, provide you with fresh perspectives, or even simply make you smile. The diagram looks awfully like a community doesn’t it? If you enjoy reading this blog and are looking for people to follow who might share your world-view, then clicking on the above graphic and checking out some of the people I interact with most may be a good starting point.
If you chose to take the plunge with Twitter then good luck and I hope that you get as much out of it as I have. You can also then do me a favour and use the handy link just below to share this article with your followers!
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10 Comments | social media, twitter | Tagged: bit.ly, del.icio.us, follow friday, hash-tag, reddit.com, tweetdeck, twitter.com, xkcd.com | Permalink
Posted by Peter Thomas
During a conversation with an associate last week, she commented that a lot of effort must go into creating new content for this site and posed the question of where I find the time. Part of the answer is writing in the evenings and at weekends (tick both boxes for this piece), or grabbing moments when I am travelling on business. However, another piece of the jigsaw puzzle is quite different and relates to how I write.
The same person was kind enough to say that she found my writing to be coherent and well-structured. In her mind, this implied an equally structured approach to composition. Sadly nothing could be further from the truth. In general I have an idea (sparked by a conversation on-line, something that happened in the work day, or reading an article) and create a WordPress.com draft as soon as I have time and access to the Internet. Often this is no more than a working title, maybe a line describing my idea and, if this is what inspired me to write, a link to the relevant web-page for future reference.
Sometimes I come back to these ideas as soon as I have time to write more fully. However, on occasion the gestation period is longer, either because other topics have consumed my attention, or because my thoughts have not matured enough to put fingertip to keyboard. At present for example, I have 17 drafts sitting in WordPress, the earliest of which dates back to December 2008 (maybe it will see the light of day at some point).
When I do get round to starting to write, the process is normally very fluid. Most frequently I will substantially finish a piece at a single sitting. The way that I write tends to be first via a stream of consciousness, which results in a large block of text. Next I restructure (I would be lost without cut and paste) and finally I trim (yes I do sometimes reduce the length of my articles), or expand as seems to make sense at the time.
If on re-reading I feel that I have not been clear enough in making my points, I might re-write a section, or add some clarifying comments. Sometimes I will change the order in which paragraphs appear in order to improve the flow. I may even feel that an initial draft is conflating two fairly distinct ideas and thus split the piece into separate articles; but this is very much an exception. If I ignore correcting typos, punctuation and grammar, then I would estimate that over 80% of any given article will be identical to how I first wrote it.
An idiosyncrasy is that I tend to write in the HTML pane of WordPress and often hand-craft things like tables (one reason I moved to WordPress from Blogger was that the latter didn’t – at least at the time – support HTML tables). I guess this is a hang-over from programming days (not that long ago as, alongside my other responsibilities, I was still programming professionally as recently as 2008). This means that I have greater control over how an article appears, but also leads to me using the “preview” feature quite extensively.
I also tend to spend quite a bit of time either finding suitable illustrations or creating them (I use a combination of Visio and Paint Shop Pro, both tools I have used in a work context for years). Sometimes the ideas for images come as I am in the midst of writing (and a brief search, or a quick bit of design work can give my unconscious time to think about the next bit of text), but equally often I get rather swept along by the prose, push on to completing this and then come back to add images as part of the editing process. Either way, nowadays I seem to spend almost as much time thinking about mouse-over text for images as I do coming up with images themselves.
Going back to the conversation that I mention at the beginning. We ended up talking more about how I write. I said that it was normally a relatively rapid process for me. The best analogy that I could come up with was the difference between speaking in your native tongue and translating into a language that you are not 100% fluent in. For me writing about topics in business intelligence, cultural transformation and technology feels very much a natural thing; like speaking English. It’s not something laboured and the words generally flow quickly easily.
Maybe I am just lucky in this respect. Or perhaps the secret of prolific blogging is to write about things that you both know something about and for which you have an ongoing passion.
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Posted by Peter Thomas
Measuring the effectiveness of business intelligence programmes is something that I both speak and blog about regularly. In fact Measuring the benefits of Business Intelligence remains the most frequently read article on this site (with over 4,000 hits at the time of writing).
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Ann All from IT Business Edge recently blogged on this topic and included some of my thoughts, starting at the foot of page 1. The article is entitled Will ‘Hair of the Dog’ Help Companies Measure BI Efforts?. I would recommend having a read.
You can follow Ann on Twitter at @all1ann
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Posted by Peter Thomas
Introduction
Earlier this week I attended the inaugural The Cloud Circle Forum in London. The Cloud Circle is the UK’s first independent Business and IT focused Cloud Computing Community. It is also the sister community of the Business Intelligence-focussed Obis Omni, an organisation with whom I have a longstanding (though I hasten to add, non-contractual) relationship (a list of Obis Omni seminars at which I have presented appears here, and you can also find some of my articles syndicated on their site).
There was a full programme with the morning being taken up by plenary presentations from Harrogate’s InTechnology (@InTechnology) and CloudOrigin (aka Cloud Computing evangelist Richard Hall – @CloudOrigin), followed by two Windows Azure case studies; one from EasyJet and one from Active Web Solutions (@AWSIpswich) for the Royal National Lifeboat Association – these were hosted by Microsoft themselves.
The afternoon programme saw delegates split into two work-streams, one focussed on strategy and management, the other on technology. Work-related pressures meant that I was unable to attend this part of the day, which was a shame as several bits of the morning speeches were helpful.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that virtually every organisiation and individual I have mentioned so far has a Twitter account and the additional fact that there were hundreds of delegates at the forum, there was virtually no Twitter coverage. Maybe we can get too carried away with the all pervasiveness of social media sometimes. There are clearly some avenues of professional life where its influence is yet to be fully felt; even IT conferences!
I tweeted some commentary on the InTechnology presentation and the stream may be viewed here while it persists. However by the time that Richard Hall stood up to speak, a combination of a lack of reception (the auditorium was in the basement) and issues with mobile Twitter on my hand-held brought this activity to a halt.
The morning presentations
| Note: | I don’t want to steal the thunder from any of the speakers and so this article does not cover the content of their presentations in any detail. Instead my aim is to highlight a few points and provide a flavour of their talks. |
The InTechnology talk was interesting in parts, in particular their focus on the savings to be achieved in cloud-based telephony alone. One of their speakers also suggested that the benefits of Cloud Computing were potentially reduced if an organisation worked with more than one vendor, which is clearly an aspect to consider.
Their presentations were topped and tailed by two segments of a Cloud Computing-related spoof of The Apprentice. Clearly some money had gone into this and the results were either hilarious or somewhat ill-advised depending on your personal taste. I have to admit to falling closer to the latter camp. While some delegates seemed to enjoy the fun of the fair, I felt the video distracted somewhat from InTechnology’s core message.
I billed Richard Hall as a Cloud Computing evangelist and certainly his tub-thumping upped the tempo. He made some interesting points, which included his assertion that the proprietors of cloud server farms were employing cutting edge technology that was not currently commercially available and might never be. The point here was that cloud providers were becoming true experts in the area with capabilities far beyond normal organisations. This segued with his prediction that there would be only four, or at most five, mega cloud vendors in the future.
Richard did have one slide focusing on the potential drawbacks (or current short-comings) of Cloud Computing, but you could tell his heart wasn’t really in it. One sensed that Richard never met a cloud he didn’t like, even referring to his only personal Road to Damascus during his talk. However one very valid point he made was that the legal agreements and licensing arrangements for Cloud Computing were significantly lagging the flexibility of the technology itself. This chimes with my own experience of the area.
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The real-life case studies of cloud-based success were perhaps more telling than the earlier sessions. Bert Craven, Enterprise Architect at EasyJet, spoke about how his company had been moving selected elements of their IT assets to the cloud. Interestingly, while the original plan had been to keep some critical applications (the sort for which 99.9% availability is not good enough) in-house, one of these was now in the process of becoming cloud-based.
Richard Prodger, Technical Director of AWS, spoke about the work that his company had been doing with the RNLI – a charity that runs volunteer lifeboats around the coasts of Britain. The specific project was to provide fishermen with devices that would automatically alert the RNLI control centre if they fell overboard and then provide accurate positioning information enabling a faster rescue and thus one that would be more likely to result in success. Richard shared stories of several fishermen who were alive today thanks to the system. Here the cloud was not the original vehicle, but something that was subsequently employed to scale up the service.
Both case studies used Windows Azure as a component. I have not used this toolset, nor have I been briefed on it and so will refrain from any comment beyond stating that both Bert and Richard seemed happy with its capabilities; particularly in securely exposing internal systems to external web-users.
Some thoughts on what I heard and saw
When multiple presenters state that there is no agreed definition of the central subject matter of a seminar and then proceed to provide slightly different takes on this, you know that you are dealing with an emerging technology. That is not to deny the obvious potential of the area, but a degree of maturation is still necessary in this part of the industry before – in Richard Hall’s words – Cloud Computing becomes the future of IT.
There was more than one elephant in the room. First of which is bandwidth, which is relatively plentiful and relatively cheap in many parts of the world, but equally has neither trait in many others. This will be of concern to a lot of global organisations. Of course this is a problem that will undoubtedly go away in time, but it may dog true enterprise implementations of misison-critical Cloud Computing for some years yet.
Security remains a concern, it may well be true that the experts in Cloud Computing will be an order of magnitude more careful and competent about handling their customers’ data than many internal IT departments. However the point is that they are already handling the data of many customers and one error, or one act of malfeasance by an employee, could have a major impact. You may well be safer flying than driving your own car, but when a plane crashes, people tend to notice.
Future consolidation in Cloud Computing was mentioned by a number of speakers. Although this issue is not solely the preserve of cloud technology, it does raise some concerns about betting on the right horse. As has been seen in many areas of industry, the titans of today may be the minnows of tomorrow. When you are trusting an external organisation with your transactions, it helps to know for certain (or as close as you can get to it) that they will be around in five years’ time.
One of the central pitches of Cloud Computing is “let us look after the heavy lifting and your people can focus on more value-added activities”. While there are certainly economies to be seized in this area, the Cloud Computing industry may be doing itself a disservice by stating that customers can effectively stop worrying about functions moved to the cloud. In my mind a lot of care and attention will need to be put into managing relationships with cloud vendors and into integrating cloud-based systems with the rest of the internal IT landscape (or with other cloud-based systems). It may be that this type of work costs a lot less than the internal alternative, but it is nevertheless invidious to suggest that no work at all is required. This line of attack is reminiscent of some of the turn of the millennium sales pitches of ERP vendors, not all of which turned out to be well-founded.
In finishing this slightly downbeat section (and before a more optimistic coda), I’ll return to the commercial issues that Richard Hall referenced. He claimed – correctly in my opinion – that a major benefit of cloud-based solutions was not only that they scaled-up, but that they scaled-down. The “knob” could be adjusted in either direction according to an organisation’s needs. The problem here is that many parts of the Cloud Computing industry still seem wedded to multi-year fixed licensing deals with little commercial scope to scale either up or down without renegotiating the contract. What is technologically feasible may not be contractually pain-free. In the same vein more flexible termination clauses and guaranteed portability of data from one vendor to another need to be sorted out before Cloud Computing is fully embraced by many organisations.
On a more positive note, the above issues are maybe the typical growth pains of a nascent industry. No doubt solutions to them will be knocked into shape in the coming years. It is always tempting fate to predict the future with too much accuracy, but at this point it seems certain that Cloud Computing will play an increasingly important role in the IT landscapes of tomorrow. If nothing else this is attested to by the number of delegates attending Tuesday’s meeting.
The Cloud Circle are to be commended for getting out in front of this important issue and I hope that their work will better disseminate understanding of what is likely to become and important area and enable a wider range of organisations to begin to take advantage of it.
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4 Comments | cloud computing, microsoft, social media, twitter | Tagged: cloudcircle, intechnology, cloudorigin, microsoft, easyjet.com, active web solutions, rnli | Permalink
Posted by Peter Thomas
Introduction
A lot of human scientific and technological progress over the span of recorded history has been related to discerning patterns. People noticed that the Sun and Moon both had regular periodicity to their movements, leading to models that ultimately changed our view of our place in the Universe. The apparently wandering trails swept out by the planets were later regularised by the work of Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe; an outstanding example of a simple idea explaining more complex observations.
In general Mathematics has provided a framework for understanding the world around us; perhaps most elegantly (at least in work that is generally accessible to the non-professional) in Newton’s Laws of Motion (which explained why Kepler and Brahe’s models for planetary movement worked). The simple formulae employed by Newton seemed to offer a precise set of rules governing everything from the trajectory of an arrow to the orbits of the planets and indeed galaxies; a triumph for the application of Mathematics to the natural world and surely one of humankind’s greatest achievements.
For centuries it appeared that natural phenomena seemed to have simple principles underlying them, which were susceptible to description in the language of Mathematics. Sometimes (actually much more often than you might think) the Mathematics became complicated and precision was dropped in favour of – generally more than good enough – estimation; but philosophically Mathematics and the nature of things appeared to be inextricably interlinked. The Physicist and Nobel Laureate E.P. Wigner put this rather more eloquently:
The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.
In my youth I studied Group Theory, a branch of mathematics concerned with patterns and symmetry. The historical roots (no pun intended[1]) of Group Theory are in the solvability of polynomial equations, but the relation with symmetry emerged over time; revealing an important linkage between geometry and algebra. While Group Theory is a part of Pure Mathematics (supposedly studied for its own intrinsic worth, rather than any real-world applications), its applications are actually manifold. Just one example is that groups lie (again no pun intended[2]) at the heart of the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
However, two major challenges to this happy symbiosis between Mathematics and the Natural Sciences arose. One was an abrupt earthquake caused by Kurt Gödel in 1931. The other was more of a slowly rising flood, beginning in the 1880s with Henri Poincaré and (arguably) culminating with Ruelle, May and Yorke in 1977 (though with many other notables contributing both before and after 1977). The linkage between Mathematics and Science persists, but maybe some of the chains that form it have been weakened.
Potentially fallacious patterns
However, rather than this article becoming a dissertation on incompleteness theorems or (the rather misleadingly named) chaos theory, I wanted to return to something more visceral that probably underpins at least the beginnings of the long association of Mathematics and Science. Here I refer to people’s general view that things tend to behave the same way as they have in the past. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the sun comes up each morning, the moon waxes and wanes each month, summer becomes autumn (fall) becomes winter becomes spring and so on. When you knock your coffee cup over it reliably falls to the ground and the contents spill everywhere. These observations about genuine patterns have served us well over the centuries.
It seems a very common human trait to look for patterns. Given the ubiquity of this, it is likely to have had some evolutionary benefit. Indeed patterns are often there and are often useful – there is indeed normally more traffic on the roads at 5pm on Fridays than on other days of the week. Government spending does (with the possible exception of current circumstances) generally go up in advance of an election. However such patterns may be less useful in other areas. While winter is generally colder than summer (in the Northern hemisphere), the average temperature and average rainfall in any given month varies a lot year-on-year. Nevertheless, even within this variability, we try to discern patterns to changes that occur in the weather.
We may come to the conclusion that winters are less severe than when we were younger and thus impute a trend in gradually moderating winters; perhaps punctuated by some years that don’t fit what we assume is an underlying curve. We may take rolling averages to try to iron out local “noise” in various phenomena such as stock prices. This technique relies on the assumption that things change gradually. If the average July temperature has increased by 2°C in the last 100 years, then it maybe makes sense to assume that it will increase by the same 2°C ±0.2°C in the next 100 years. Some of the work I described earlier has rigorously proved that a lot of these human precepts are untrue in many important fields, not least weather prediction. The phrase long-term forecast has been 100% shown to be an oxymoron. Many systems – even the simplest, even those which are apparently stable[3] – can change rapidly and unpredictably and weather is one of them.
For the avoidance of doubt I am not leaping into the general Climate Change debate here – except in the most general sense. Instead I am highlighting the often erroneous human tendency to believe that when things change they do so smoothly and predictably. That when a pattern shifts, it does so to something quite like the previous pattern. While this assumed smoothness is at the foundation of many of our most powerful models and techniques (for example the grand edifice of The Calculus), in many circumstances it is not a good fit for the choppiness seen in nature.
Obligatory topical section on volcanoes
![First published in September 1843 to take part in 'a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress' [nice use of the Oxford / Harvard comma BTW]](http://peterthomas.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/the-economist.jpg?w=250&h=122 "First published in September 1843 to take part in 'a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress' [nice use of the Oxford / Harvard comma BTW]")
The above observations about the occasionally illusory nature of patterns lead us to more current matters. I was recently reading an article about the Eyjafjallajokull eruption in The Economist. This is suffused with a search for patterns in the history of volcanic eruptions. Here are just a few examples:
To be fair, The Economist did lace their piece with various caveats, for example the above-quoted “it would seem fair to expect”, but not all publications are so scrupulous. There is perhaps something comforting in all this numerology, maybe it gives us the illusion that we can make meaningful predictions about what a volcano will do next. Modern geologists have used a number of techniques to warn of imminent eruptions and these approaches have been successful and saved lives. However this is not the same thing as predicting that an eruption is likely in the next ten years solely because they normally occur every century and it is 90 years since the last one. Long-term forecasts of volcanic activity are as chimerical as long-term weather forecasts.
A little light analysis
Looking at another famous volcano, Vesuvius, I have put together the following simple chart.
The average period between eruptions is just shy of 14 years, but the pattern is anything but regular. If we expand our range a bit, we might ask how many eruptions occurred between 10 and 20 years after the previous one. The answer is just 9 of the 26[4], or about 35%. Even if we expand our range to periods of calm lasting between 5 and 25 years (so 10 years of leeway on either side), we only capture 77% of eruptions. The standard deviation of the periods between recorded eruptions is a whopping 12.5; eruptions of Vesuvius are not regular events.
One aspect of truly random distributions at first seems counterfactual, this is their lumpiness. It might seem reasonable to assume that a random set of events would lead to a nicely spaced out distribution; maybe not a set of evenly-spaced points, but a close approximation to one. In fact the opposite is generally true; random distributions will have clusters of events close to each other and large gaps between them.
The above exhibit (a non-wrapped version of which may be viewed by clicking on it) illustrates this point. It compares a set of pseudo-random numbers (the upper points) with a set of truly random numbers (the lower points)[5]. There are some gaps in the upper distribution, but none are large and the spread is pretty even. By contrast in the lower set there are many large gaps (some of the more major ones being tagged a, … ,h) and significant clumping[6]. Which of these two distributions more closely matches the eruptions of Vesuvius? What does this tell us about the predictability of its eruptions?
The predictive analytics angle
As always in closing I will bring these discussions back to a business focus. The above observations should give people involved in applying statistical techniques to make predictions about the future some pause for thought. Here I am not targeting the professional statistician; I assume such people will be more than aware of potential pitfalls and possess much greater depth of knowledge than myself about how to avoid them. However many users of numbers will not have this background and we are all genetically programmed to seek patterns, even where none may exist. Predictive analytics is a very useful tool when applied correctly and when its findings are presented as a potential range of outcomes, complete with associated probabilities. Unfortunately this is not always the case.
It is worth noting that many business events can be just as unpredictable as volcanic eruptions. Trying to foresee the future with too much precision is going to lead to disappointment; to say nothing of being engulfed by lava flows.
| [1] | The solvability of polynomials is of course equivalent to whether or not roots of them exist. |
| [2] | Lie groups lie at the heart of quantum field theory – a interesting lexicographical symmetry in itself |
| [3] | Indeed it has been argued that non-linear systems are more robust in response to external stimuli than classical ones. The latter tend to respond to “jolts” in a smooth manner leading to a change in state. The former often will revert to their previous strange attractor. It has been postulated that evolution has taken advantage of this fact in demonstrably chaotic systems such as the human heart. |
| [4] | Here I include the – to date – 66 years since Vesuvius’ last eruption in 1944 and exclude the eruption in 1631 as there is no record of the preceding one. |
| [5] | For anyone interested, the upper set of numbers were generated using Excel’s RAND() function and the lower are successive triplets of the decimal expansion of pi, e.g. 141, 592, 653 etc. |
| [6] | Again for those interested the average gap in the upper set is 10.1 with a standard deviation of 4.3; the figures for the lower set are 9.7 and 9.6 respectively. |
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10 Comments | business intelligence | Tagged: chaos theory, eyjafjallajokull, mathematics, non-linear systems, predictive analytcis, statistics, vesuvius, volcano, weather prediction | Permalink
Posted by Peter Thomas
While spring cleaning at home at the weekend, I came across a DVD of an interview I did for Informatica back in March 2005. This is still accessible on the Informatica web-site and appears in my video library, but I thought that I had lost my copy of the original.
Having made this discovery, I added it to my selection of videos on YouTube.com.
In the interview I stress the need for consistency in management information; the dynamics of the Insurance industry and the business value added by Business Intelligence in a pan-European insurance organisation.
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1 Comment | business intelligence, data warehousing, informatica | Tagged: data integration, video | Permalink
Posted by Peter Thomas
One of the benefits of the WordPress.com platform is that you can get some indication as to which other parts the the web are directing traffic your way. It was via this facility that I came across an article on Microsoft‘s site linking back to my piece Measuring the benefits of Business Intelligence. The title, sub-title and authorship of the Microsoft post is as follows:
How to Measure BI Value
A thorough assessment will help you demonstrate the effectiveness of your BI investments. We offer 8 factors to consider.
By Paula Klein, TechWeb
You can read the article here.
As always, my aim in writing this column is to remain vendor-neutral, however the Microsoft piece is not specifically pushing their BI products (though clearly further information about them is only a click away), but rather offering some general commentary.
Again it is interesting to note the penetration of social media (such as this blog) into mainstream technology business.
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Posted by Peter Thomas
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