From Data Collection and Analysis to Business Action

[My guest post on the GreenPages blog, April 24, 2015]

Here is a progression that most businesses experience in the data arena.

  • You go from no data or bad data to “better” data.
  • You start having reports regularly show up in your mailbox.
  • The reports go from being just tables to showing trend lines.
  • You evolve to dashboards that bring together data from many sources.
  • You fork into sets of operational and strategic reports and dashboards, KPIs driven, with drill down.

By this point, you have Operational Data Stores (ODSs), data warehouses….   Read more…

The Internet of Things & IP Address Needs

[My post in Information Week, Network Computing, April 16, 2015 ]

With IPv6, there’s no need to fear that there won’t be enough IP addresses for IoT. The real question is whether every ‘thing’ needs its own IP address.  Read more…

7 Habits of Highly Effective IT Departments

[My guest post on the GreenPages blog, March 11, 2015]

How many business books do you know that 26 years later can claim to be fully relevant? Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” remains just such a potent landmark. Re-reading it, I was struck by how useful the 7 habits can be for IT Departments.  Here is how to fit the habits into behaviors that lead to success for IT and the business.  Read more…

Big Data Insights from Practitioners

HMG’s 2015 CIO Executive Leadership Summit in Boston, Feb 12, 2015 was stellar. Congratulating Hunter Muller, President and CEO of HMG Strategy, I remarked that what stood out to me was the quality of the panel discussions: cogent, thought provoking and with just the right mix of well-picked experts. Nowhere was this truer than in the discussion on “Big Data: The Next Frontier – Insights and Strategies from Massachusetts Big Data Pioneers”. The panelists were Nidhi Aggarwal, VP of Product Strategy at Tamr, Prat Moghe, Founder and CEO at Cazena, Bill Simmons, CTO at DataXu, Paul Sondregger, VP Big Data Strategy at Oracle and Bob Zurek, SVP Products at Epsilon. The panel was ably moderated by Jo Hoppe, until recently CIO at PAREXEL.

Here is what I heard from the panel.  Continue reading →

2015 Predictions

[My post in Virtual-Strategy Magazine, January 5, 2015]

2015 promises to be an exciting but challenging year for IT departments. The further availability of affordable devices will lead to an increase in network bandwidth and security issues while the much anticipated Windows 10 will make its debut. Based on my observations, here are four predictions for 2015 with a better than average chance of playing out.  Read more…

Plan an Internet of Things Architecture in the Data Center

[Some of my comments have been included in TechTarget’s SearchDataCenter post on IoT by Alan R. Earls, December 2, 2014.  Earl’s article is also included in Modern Infrastructure: Internet of Things coming to an infrastructure near you]

The rapid development of IoT poses certain threats to the data center, like chaos and added storage demands. How do you plan for such a surge of new technology?  Read more…

Two Steps to Ensuring a More Successful Transition to the Cloud

[My post in IT Security Hub, November 17, 2014 and All Things Managed File Transfer, November 17, 2014]

The evaluations are complete and the decision has been made, a move to the cloud is in the best interest of your organization. Transferring workloads to the cloud in order to free up or discard costly on-premise resources for the fast deployment and flexibility of an elastic environment has overwhelming appeal, but now what? Despite the many advantages of a cloud environment there are still pitfalls that need to be navigated in order to ensure a positive engagement and user experience. To that end, I would offer two pieces of advice to colleagues looking to transform their organization from a strictly on-premise environment to a cloud user.   Read more…

Branch Office Computing Performance

[IDG’s Scott Koegler posted my comments on his blog site Building the Converged Branch, November 10, 2014]

Branch office computing environments can always be improved upon… just like any computing environment. The difficulty with actually pulling that off is that they are, by definition, remote from the central office, its datacenter, and its support staff. Azmi Jafarey, CIO at Ipswitch offers his approach to addressing branch office performance issues with a series of questions.  Read more…