Some more free training materials from MSFT

Windows 7 Introduction – here.

This is an older one but a very good one for those looking for an introduction to SSIS 2008 – here.

Windows 2008 Fundamentals – here.

Silverlight Fundamentals – here.

Windows Server 2008 R2, new features – here.

Jeff Bezos Interview

It is truely inspirational to hear technology leaders like Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates talk about innovation and Entrepreneurship.  You can read more on one of such interviews in Om Malik’s post here.

Transparency and Data.gov

Yesterday, we had talked about the power of data and how it can be used to make intelligent decisions.  In these turbulent times, there is an evergrowing need for the companies to be transparent to their shareholders.  We had blogged about it before when we were covering the news about the possibility of the broker vote going away.  The Obama government has been taking a very similar stance to provide the public visibility into the &787 billion stimulus that it is providing to revive the economy.  There is an excellent article on internetevolution.com that talks about it in detail:

http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=176439

Read the article in its entirety.  It is very well written and talks about the different initiatives taken by the department of federal CIO Vivek Kundra.  One other step that the government has taken is to provide the information via their site data.gov.  This site is intended for the businesses as well as fellow US citizens to be able to search the large data sets of government information.   Right now though, it is not aimed at the casual home user.  The aim of the site seems to be to provide the raw data as well as some online tools for helping with the data consumption and analysis.  Their build by collaboration approach is excellent since it not only gives the much needed transparency and helps restore the faith of the people, it also will pave the way to incorporate the great ideas from the public.  Time will tell though whether it proves to be a successful project or another one where a lot of money is spent but returns are not as they were envisaged to be.  But the efforts that this government has taken and continues to take are indeed praiseworthy.

Data is Information which leads to knowledge if analyzed properly

Maybe, we are biased since all of us at Decipher consider ourselves to be data people.  What do we mean by that?  Are only database developers and DBA’s the data people?  Not really.  A data person is anyone who understands the data, their relationships, their patterns and can glean meaningful and useful information out of the vast amount of data that we are faced with everyday and can make good business use out of it.  This could be an IT person, a business person or a person in any field of study.  Key thing to understand is that data leads to information, information leads to patterns that if analyzed properly lead to knowledge and that helps in finalizing how to make use of that knowledge to help improve the business processes and the technical solutions to solve the business issues.

In many of our consulting engagements, we have seen that this inherent understanding of the data is missing.  People get too much caught up in the technology side of things without trying to understand the underlying data that builds their system(s).  As a result of that, they end up designing and developing systems which either are below the actual performance levels that they can really achieve or end up not gleaning all the useful information out of that data set(s).  The same is true with the business folks – just writing specifications and business/process flows without properly understanding the data and their relationships is not a savvy thing to do.  All this becomes even more complicated in companies which use outsourcing companies from seven seas across.  A clear communication channel talking about business flows and analysis in terms of the raw data is very critical and that is why we think that having good data people in your team/projects is a key to any successful project.

One of the best articles out there which explains these different concepts of Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom is an article by systems-thinking.org.  You can access it here:

http://www.systems-thinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm

It is a great read.

Now, while having a discussion on this topic with one of our client teams the other day, they were trying to see how they can integrate twitter or yammer into their corporate offices.  This is a client with offfices in many counteries and wanted to harness the power of the micro-blogging platforms to help collaboration between the different teams within the same company as well as use it for customer service as well.  They are not the first ones to do that of course.  Companies like JetBlue, Zappos, Alcatel-Lucent and many others are infact using these social networking tools for a better collaboration between their teams as well as with their customers.

In addition, all this data that is available in these tweets/yams which can help provide meaningful business insights to these companies.  Internet is of course the biggest database of all – per Alexa, there are over 18 million sites and more keep getting added everyday.  Couple that with the micro-blogs, the SMS, videos etc. and you have a sea of information with many data points floating around which do have relationships with each other.  Take this example: A vendor in the US releases a product in the global market, a reputed blogger with mass following sitting in Asia blogs about the product and also uses one of the micro-blogging platform to lambast the product and outlines it’s shortcomings.  The vendor is unaware of such pieces of information being available over the net.  That story is captured by the analysts, newspapers etc. through a viral network and suddenly the stock for the company plummets.  And the vendor does not know why till it starts researching and finds the negative sentiment leading to the issue.  It ends up losing money, trust and goodwill in the market because it is too late to respond or counter (or fix) some of the negative sentiments.  If the vendor was monitoring the net (not only the search engine based data but more importantly the micro-blogging data), they could have issued an update, mentioned the corrective measures that the company was going to take, addressed some work arounds etc..  Bottom line – they could have used the data in the social media to piece information together to make knowledgable business decisions and hence provide their customers (or critics) with a platform to vent or to their loyal customers an opportunity to help generate new ideas for products or help improve their service.  Again, data is information which leads to knowledge (and $$$) if analyzed properly.

When it comes to IT also, the same thing applies – how often have you gotten a call from a customer or from your internal team saying that the performance of a system suddenly went down and they don’t know what to do or even where to start from?  Well, do you have some past baseline data?  Do you have the trend analysis of that data?  Are you capturing and analyzing the data for all the different tiers – co-relating them in order to see what the relationships are between them?  If you are, then using this performance baseline system, you would just run another analysis and compare it to the baseline and trends to point out the problem area and then immediately dig into the specifics and find and fix the issue (as well as add it to the existing data set to help improve the analysis for the next time).  Individual data points don’t always communicate the story…you need to put the relationships between the different data points in order to look at the picture as a whole.  The more prepared you are and the morre you treat your group and your company as a “data” company, the easier it becomes to predict issues and take pro-active measures.

We live in the information age but information becomes knowledge only when you remove the noise and co-relate the different data points.

FreeStyle, anyone?

No, we are not talking about freestyle wrestling here   We are talking about Coke’s new RFID based freestyle dispensers.  The new dispensers will not only provide the consumers with more than 100 beverage choices, the real benefit of it is the business intelligence data that Coke will be able to gather based on the consumption of thosse beverages.  There are many more data points of interests as well – you can read more on it in the information week article here.

Plenty of new features in iPhone 3G S

There are plenty of new features in the new version of the iPhone.  Our favorite ones are internet tethering, find my iPhone, a much needed improved battery life and more storage and RAM.  You can read more on the feature sets in the apple blog here.  Though the phone is wonderful, the network that supports it is aweful.  You can read more on that on Om Malik’s blog.  And here is another post at gigaom which talks about how AT&T’s new network may not help the old iPhone users.  Maybe it is time for Apple to partner with someone besides AT&T.

Microsoft’s new search engine – Bing

On June 3rd, MSFT is all set to launch it’s new search engine called Bing.  The search market is really dominated by Google and Yahoo at this time.  As per this article on CIOZone.com, statistics indicate that close to 30% of the searches done by the end user fail to provide satisfactory answers to the end user and hence there is still a lot of scope in the search market.  Bing is being touted as a decision engine by MSFT and it will be more geared towards certain domains and the accompanying presentation tier, commercial content, ads etc. will thus be also geared towards those domains.  You can read more here:

http://www.bing.com/

Google Wave

A friend passed along the link to this article on TechCrunch about Google’s Wave which is essentially a new tool from Google for facilitating communication and collaboration over the web.  It is scheduled to be released later this year but there is a cool demo video available for us to look at.  Here are the links:

The techCrunch article – here.

The demo video – here.

Ten ways Twitter will change American Business

An interesting article at 24/7 Wallst – discussing the micro-blogging platform Twitter and how it can change the American Businesses – you can read it here.

Tim Berners Lee: Next web of open, linked data

The internet is the biggest database of all.  With so much data available, gleaning out meaningful information out of it and establishing the relationships between the data sets i.e. linking them to create a web of data is where the next growth is going to be per Sir Tim Berners Lee.  Here is his presentation and the video of his talk:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html

http://www.w3.org/2009/Talks/0204-ted-tbl/#(1)