What's New?
Big Data and Analytics

Daqing Zhao explains the difference between traditional BI and big data. He also explains how big data affected search engine marketing at Ask.com. Ian Thomas looks at the role of big data in decision making. Joseph Betser and David Belanger on how big data can redefine organizations.

Also in this Issue: Regular columnist Nancy Settle-Murphy cushions blunt honesty's crushing blow.

Blogs We're Reading

Lead and Lag Indicators

Investment in project leadership skills declines…from an already low point

Greenwishing? Greenwashing? Or Green?

About ITPI

IT Performance Improvement (ITPI) is where IT professionals share their expertise in making IT organizations and people perform better. ITPI covers such topics as:

Editorial Calendar 2013

June: Security
July: Green
August: Leadership
September: Programs
October: Projects
November: Virtual Teams
December: Trends for 2014


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The Software Process and Measurement Cast #237 includes an essay on a few of the issues that can plague stand-up meetings. It also marks the return of Philippe Back with an essay on Information Overload.

The Software Process and Measurement (SPaM) Cast 232 features an interview with Kim Pries. He is the coauthor of the book, Scrum Project Management.

SPaMCAST 146 features an interview with Michael West. Mr. West wrote the books Real Process Improvement Using the CMMI and Return On Process (ROP): Getting Real Performance Results from Process Improvement. He discusses this book and how and why the CMMI can be a tool for process improvement.

SPaMCAST 164 features an interview with Joe Raynus. He discusses his book Improving Business Process Performance: Gain Agility, Create Value and Achieve Success and explains a workable process to help an organization maintain clarity of purpose, bridge the gap between the strategic and tactical views, and apply structure to how it monitors its progress.

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Big Data and Analytics

Big Data and Decision Making

Ian Thomas

My own entrée into the world of big data began in 2000, when I joined a tiny software start-up in the UK that specialized in web analytics tools. The web analytics industry was very different from how it is today. Back then, dozens of technology vendors strove not just to convince potential customers to buy their solution, but to convince organizations that web analytics was worth investing in at all. Of course, in those days, big data meant megabytes or possibly gigabytes of data per day, rather than the terabytes and beyond of today's world. But in many ways, the web analytics industry at the turn of the millennium was not so different from the big data industry of today.
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Redefining the Organization with Big Data

Joseph Betser and David Belanger

Ready access to data, quickly and with rich analysis and visualization, has qualitatively, as well as quantitatively, changed the communication patterns and hence the decision processes in many companies. The first several generations of data processing were largely concentrated on record keeping and automation of existing processes. The expected, and common, result was a certain amount of disintermediation, so that the sources of data became connected to the consumers by machines, as opposed to armies of people with attendant hierarchies. While there was a considerable amount of data mining and analysis, it was largely based on direct analysis of single, sometimes large, data stores and was largely used for decision support and optimization within well-defined corporate silos.
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Traditional Business Intelligence and Big Data

Daqing Zhao

The BI pyramid defines a sequence of efforts from simple to increasingly complex, as in crawl, walk, and run. Most organizations are somewhere in the middle in "maturity" level; they never go beyond the stage of multidimensional reporting or simple analysis. These companies may just have built a data collection infrastructure, or may not have the required analytic talents, or may not be ready due to organizational and cultural reasons to achieve a higher level on the pyramid. They never had a detailed analysis of the data; no predictive modeling was ever done. Again and again in our years of experience, we found data issues that are subtle enough to look normal without a detailed analysis. For example, a data warehouse may take many data feeds from different departments or regions, and only one of them has problems. The numbers are not missing, but they are not accurate or not correct.
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Search Engine Marketing at Ask.com

Daqing Zhao

Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves) was founded 16 years ago, and now it is part of InterActiveCorp, the IAC. Ask.com attracts 100 million global users and is one of the largest questions and answers (Q&A) sites on the web. Over the last two years, Ask.com has revamped its approach to Q&A with a product that combines search technology with answers from real people. Instead of 10 blue links, Ask.com delivers real answers to people's questions—both from already published data sources and from our growing community of users—on the web and across mobile.
More...



Articles from Past Issues

IT Infrastructure

Licensing Cloud Resources and Services

Securing Storage

Data Protection: Setting the Right Objectives

Virtualization, Storage Tiers and Manual Data Movement

Spending Wisely on Performance

IT Data Center "Green" Myths and Realties

Common IT Resource Management Activities

Data Storage and Network Security

Metrics for Hard Disk Drives and Solid State Devices

Healthy and Beneficial Backup Paranoia

Ten Things Still Wrong with Data Protection Attitudes

IT Service Management, Business Service Management and Business-IT Integration

Service Management Implementation Overview

IT Release Management

Backup and Recovery Best Practices

Service Level Agreements and IT Bill-Back

Preventing Cloud Vendor Lock-in

Monitoring-as-a-Service

Evaluating Cloud Servers and Solutions

Enabling Efficient, Effective, and Productive Information Services Delivery

Preventing Cloud Vendor Lock-in

Monitoring-as-a-Service

Green Technology Can Improve Data Center Performance


Project Management

The Ethical Challenges in Managing Projects

Green, Quality, and Greenality

Cost of Greenality

Dealing with Change

Team Leader, Team Member

Healthcare: A Unique Environment for Project Management

Release Management and Project Management

Taking a PMO to the Next Level: Four Steps to Value Improvement

Complex Program Management with Scrum

Balanced Scorecard: Establishing Project Performance Measures

Delivering Strategic Benefits with Program Management

Three Perspectives on Project Management Business Value


IT Management

Benefits of Open Source Analytics

Social-Based Creativity Development

Understand the "Deal" First

Getting the Most of Networking on LinkedIn

Laws, Privacy, Security, and Social Networking

The BYOD Revolution

The Consumerization of IT

Strategy Management 2.0

Unlocking the Power of High-Performance Analytics

The Top Trends Shaping Analytics


Process and Productivity

Learn What to Improve and Why

IT's All about Processes

Defining Processes

Scrum and Social Networking

Lean Management

Achieving the Right Balance between Process Maturity and Performance

Why Scrum?


 

Improving IT Performance with
Books from Auerbach

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Have an idea for a book?

Contact ITPI editor John Wyzalek to discuss topics and book publishing.

 

May 16, 2013. Jon Quigley. IT Cost Reduction Strategies

May 21, 2013. Mark Price Perry. Business Driven PMO Success Stories

May 22, 2013. Dave Broderick. How to Effectively Lead a Global Team

May 23, 2013. Randall Englund. Negotiating with a Project Sponsor

June 4, 2013. Martha Heller. Breaking the CIO Paradox

 
 

Blogs by ITPI Authors

 

Improving Your Own IT Performance
Articles by Nancy Settle-Murphy

Speaking the Truth Is Not Always Easy in a Virtual World
Authentic communication, where we bravely seek and speak the truth, is hard enough when we sit across the table, looking into each other's eyes. In a world where we have no such visual cues to go by, it's far harder to decode what's really being said, what's not being said, and what's behind the words, or silence. More...

Nine Hidden Assumptions that Kill Virtual Collaboration
Why do companies like Best Buy and Yahoo invest so much in creating a flexible work environment in the first place, if they're so willing to discard it later? Bottom line: Many senior leaders just don't trust the concept enough to regard a virtual workplace as an essential component of running their business. And when the virtual workplace concept is seen as expendable, it becomes much easier to dismantle when times get tough. More...

A Line in the Sand Jumpstarts a Virtual Team
with David Kershaw
Virtual teams are hard to see. That's why the boundaries that define the scope, accountabilities, roles, reporting relationships, tasks and deliverables can be pretty tough to grasp. That is, if they exist at all. Why? Some teams simply assume that everyone has a shared understanding of the big picture. If that's true, the thinking goes, then no need to waste time discussing something that goes without saying. More...

A Simple Storyboard Commands Attention and Get Results (Virtually)
with Sheryl Lindsell-Roberts
You're in the process of designing your presentation and creating your meeting agenda. Since you will be leading the meeting from a conference room with several of the senior leaders, with others participating from various locations, you know that a critical success factor will be keeping everyone absorbed, engaged and enthusiastically participating in a productive dialogue. Following are practical approaches for presenting important recommendations that grab and keep peoples' attention, wherever they are. More...

Building Trust Calls for Different Approaches Across Different Cultures
with Caroline Beery and Manuel Heidegger
Celia, Ben's new team leader in Milan, seemed completely committed to delivering a crucial marketing plan on time when they spoke earlier this week. Trouble is, she hasn't. So far, Ben has sent two "friendly" emails, and just now he sent Celia an IM "just to see where we are." Celia's tone has become increasingly cool. Ben is at a loss. He knows that cultures regard punctuality differently and he's aware that Celia may regard him as a micromanager. Still, that marketing plan must be on his VP's desk tomorrow, or his team may lose all of the needed funding. More...

Great Year-Round (Free!) Gifts Everyone on Your Team is Guaranteed to Love
Give a gift every day for 29 days straight? Yeah, right—as if I have the time (and money), with everything I'm already juggling! But that's what a colleague just invited her friends to do. When she explained that such gifts can be as simple as starting a conversation with a downtrodden stranger, making an extra container of soup for a sick neighbor, or even just giving someone your undivided attention for more than five minutes, I was hooked. After all, I wouldn't have to buy anything, and didn't need to put aside much extra time. More...

Tapping the Quiet Power of Introverts in a Virtual World
Think about it: There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas. And yet, according to Susan Cain, author of the groundbreaking book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, our society is overwhelmingly biased toward extroverts. In a world that correlates the strength of an organization’s teamwork to its overall success, the real value of introverts often gets overlooked. More...

Far-flung Teams Deserve Fabulous Fanfare
How do you celebrate a major milestone? Maybe you call the troops together to share a pizza, or bring in a jug of coffee and a platter of decadent donuts. But, what if the team is geographically dispersed? When asked how they honor their team's achievements, many virtual team leaders come up empty. Sure, they may send a few congratulatory emails or team IMs. But when it comes to planning a true team-wide celebration, few virtual leaders do this well, if at all. More...

Untangle your Virtual Team with the 10 Most-Needed Norms
Precious few virtual teams have explicit team norms, even for aspects of teamwork where the absence of shared norms can really trip a team up. Excuses include: "When would we have time to talk this through?" "Everyone pretty much knows how we need to work." "We're too busy." And my favorite: "It's too late to go backwards." In this article, I provide 10 "best practices" norms that can do the most to save time, reduce frustration and boost productivity of virtual teams. These examples include specific actions that can support each one. For this piece, I touch on virtual meetings, decision-making, the use of email, shared documents and scheduling, areas for which a lack of explicit norms can cause especially thorny problems for virtual teams. More...

How Virtual Leaders Can Help Others Thrive in a World of Complexity
According to Yves Morieux of the Boston Consulting Group, author of a recent Harvard Business Review article, "Smart Rules: Six Ways to Get People to Solve Problems Without You," the number of procedures, layers, interface structures, and coordination bodies have ballooned to 50-350% over the past 15 years, in a recent study of 100 U.S. and European companies. So with all of this analysis, tracking, reporting and coordinating, how do leaders ever focus on the "real work" that needs to get done. More...

Balance Innovation and Expediency for a Supercharged Team
What's getting lost in our single-minded quest for uber-efficiency is the relative luxury of idle thought, where we take the time to line our gray matter with the seeds of half-formed ideas which, with a little bit of nurturing, can spawn big innovations. To sustain competitive advantage, organizations have to innovate constantly. Easier said than done. That's because thinking creatively takes time and focus, two commodities that are in short supply. More...





About the Author

Nancy Settle-Murphy, Guided Insights founder and principal consultant, draws on an eclectic and varied combination of skills and expertise. She wears many hats—meeting facilitator, virtual collaboration coach, change management leader, workshop designer, cross-cultural trainer, communications strategist and organizational development consultant.