You Want to Be a Real Data Scientist?
April 1, 2014
With $900 million in funding, Cloudera is making an attempt to legitimize data scientists. If you have a degree in statistics from CalTech, that might not be enough to land you a job in the Clouderaverse.
The fix is revealed in “Cloudera Launches Data Scientist Certification.” According to the write up:
Consisting of an essentials exam and data science challenge, the new program helps developers, analysts, statisticians, and engineers get experience with relevant big data tools and techniques and validate their abilities while helping prospective employers identify elite, highly skilled data scientists.
Will Cloudera become the equivalent of the American Bar Association and NCEES? Cloudera challenges me to prove my expertise at the highest level. Okay. Will a doctorate from Cambridge University’s or Moscow State University’s math program do the trick? Would my relative (now deceased) Vladimir Ivanovich Arnold make the cut? (He was a data lackey for Kolmogorov, who could add and subtract pretty well my relative told me.)
In the world of information technology, the ability to make something work or to code up a script that solves a problem are useful skills. Tossing in numerical recipes for Big Data cook outs adds spice.
The problem, in my opinion, is that anyone from former middle school teachers to failed webmasters can say, “I’m a Big Data expert.” The lack of certification in some application spaces is normal. Enterprise search has no certification. Look at the outstanding track record consultants, search procurement teams, and vendors have compiled. Enterprise search delivers solutions that 50 to 75 percent of a system’s users find wanting. Big Data, Cloudera style, wants to avoid the enterprise search train wreck.
But can a cloud centric company become the equivalent of the 1950s beacon, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, just for data wizards? Does the company’s move speak to the needs of Cloudera’s marketing organization or call attention to the abrogation of certification from institutions of higher education? Perhaps Cloudera has concerns about a “hiring gap”? One way to snag candidates is to offer to train them. The best and brightest become data fish in a Big Data barrel.
Stephen E Arnold, April 1, 2014
Innovation Tips for Information Management
April 1, 2014
Inmagic is an information management brand from Lucidea. Lucidea’s claim to fame is its development and implementation of social knowledge network for enterprise organizations. Social knowledge network is a new term for us and according to Lucidea it means mining information silos and creating knowledge-based communicates to improve productivity, collaboration, and better initiatives. In the recent white paper “Addressing The Innovation Imperative For B2B Companies,” Inmagic covered the topic of innovation.
The white paper explains that innovation is imperative to companies and highlights several key practices to make innovation work for a company. The first practice is to align innovation to strategy:
“Mapping innovation and product decision-making processes to business strategy ensures that product development efforts are consistent with your company’s goals. Since ideas from customers may not correlate with company strategy, this ensures that ideas – even good ideas – that are strategically misaligned are not inappropriately prioritized.”
The biggest problem with starting with this practice is assuming that a strategy exists in the first place. Many businesses have trouble focusing their goals into a conceivable strategy. Building a strategy should be the goal.
The second practice involves keeping product managers and other necessary employees in the loop. It is another practice that assumes the company already has products and product managers. What about organizations that do not have either, but instead offer a different type of service?
That leads to another question: what is innovation? We can always go by the dictionary definition, but would it not be better to define how Inmagic defines it in this white paper?
Whitney Grace, April 01, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Digging for Data Gold
April 1, 2014
Tech Radar has an article that suggests an idea we have never heard before: “How Text Mining Can Help Your Business Dig Gold.” Be mindful that was a sarcastic comment. It is already common knowledge that text mining is advantageous tool to learn about customers, products, new innovations, market trends, and other patterns. One of big data’s main scopes is capturing that information from an organization’s data. The article explains how much data is created in a single minute from text with some interesting facts (2.46 million Facebook posts, wow!).
It suggests understanding the type of knowledge you wish to capture and finding software with a user-friendly dashboard. It ends on this note:
“In summary, you need to listen to what the world is trying to tell you, and the premier technology for doing so is “text mining.” But, you can lean on others to help you use this daunting technology to extract the right conversations and meanings for you.”
The entire article is an overview of what text mining can do and how it is beneficial. It does not go further than basic explanations or how to mine the gold in the data mine. That will require further reading. We suggest a follow up article that explains how text mining can also lead to fool’s gold.
Whitney Grace, April 01, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
The Enigma App
April 1, 2014
Information can be an enigma, which is probably why the developers named their new app that. Visiting the Enigma Web site opens on a picture of either New York or London with the headline “navigate the world of public data.” It is an intriguing idea that one would think could be accomplished with search engine or academic database. Then again when you think about the process and how time consuming it is, it would be handy to have a search engine that did most of the work for you.
Enigma was built as a solution to this problem. The company says they have:
“Enigma is amassing the largest collection of public data produced by governments, universities, companies, and organizations. Concentrating all of this data provides new insights into economies, companies, places and individuals.”
Enigma’s services do come with a fee, however. They offer public data search and quick analytics for free with sign-up, but if you want API access and online support you need to upgrade to plans that start at $195/month. The data search must be gold, when you consider that many of these records are available for the public. It is worth exploring to see how the service differs from a basic search engine, but it is hard to sign up. The registration page is finicky.
Whitney Grace, April 01, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Microsoft Dynamics Marketing
April 1, 2014
SharePoint is showcasing its brand new marketing automation features. Dynamics Marketing marks a formal entrance into a market where Microsoft previously had no presence. CMS Wire covers the details in their article, “Will Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Trigger the SharePoint Effect?”
Their coverage says:
“At last month’s Convergence conference in Atlanta, Microsoft revealed what it had been internally assembling around its 2012 acquisition of Marketing Resource Management (MRM) specialists MarketingPilot. The resulting digital marketing suite has the potential to shake up the marketplace just as SharePoint did in the enterprise content management (ECM) market in 2001.”
Many wonder if Microsoft Dynamics will enjoy the same momentum as SharePoint, or the “SharePoint effect.” Simply stated, many companies don’t care if Microsoft offers the best product; they just want a simple implementation that integrates with their other Microsoft products. Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime leader in search and covers a lot of SharePoint news on his Web site, ArnoldIT.com. We will have to see if Dynamics Marketing stands the test of time like SharePoint.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 1, 2014
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