Database guru and 2014 Turing Award winner Dr. Michael Stonebraker is not a big fan of MapReduce. Or so we can readily surmise, based on some of the comments he made (together with co-author David DeWitt, another highly acclaimed database researcher) in a blog post in early 2008. He and DeWitt called Mapreduce a “giantRead… Read more »
This past March, the Association for Computing Machinery announced that its 2014 Turing Award would go to Dr. Michael Stonebraker. As a Google V.P. put it (Google puts up the $1M cash prize that goes with the award), “The efficient and effective management of Big Data is crucial to our 21st century global economy …Read… Read more »
One of the many challenges involved in architecting “Big Data” solutions is in just moving the stuff around. Sometimes it makes sense to move the work to the Data (instead of the other way around). This assumes that your Data is already in a form that is amenable to heavy-duty analytics. More typically, you’re lookingRead… Read more »
Wunderkind Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talks about risk taking: “The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.[1]” And yet a recent government-industry conference[2] included a discussion on the question of whether federal leaders will take onRead… Read more »
These were the words of a career procurement specialist who shall remain unnamed, at an agency that shall remain unnamed, as the point is not to embarrass an individual or agency so much as it is to identify an attitude that is all too widespread in the federal procurement and contract management world. And ifRead… Read more »
A common thread among the recent spate of state health insurance exchange rollout failures (e.g., Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oregon) was the states’ inability to effectively procure, manage and coordinate IT services from multiple contractors. In each case, the aftermath was a rash of finger-pointing between and among agency managers and contractors, and in someRead… Read more »
Implementing something like this is hardly a technical challenge any more. It just needs the agency to make it a priority and get it done.
Imagine knowing that you are not the person that others seem to think you are. A true impostor. Like Ravi Desai, who persuaded Slate.com via e-mail that he was actually “Robert Klingler”, “North American head of BMW”. Slate published two articles by “Klingler” before alert readers pointed out that they could find no references toRead… Read more »
Let’s think a bit about social capital, and what it might mean for your organization. Per Wikipedia[1]: In sociology, social capital is the expected collective or economic benefits derived from the preferential treatment and cooperation between individuals and groups. Although different social sciences emphasize different aspects of social capital, they tend to share the coreRead… Read more »
What’s an early clue that your IT project is in trouble? Perhaps when “a group of … employees took a 60-day ‘retreat’ for the express purpose of articulating the project’s requirements, and they returned empty-handed”?[1] Or when you learned that critical project-related decisions were “going to be made by a group of inexperienced people, whoRead… Read more »