Make Your Data Pretty
June 19, 2015
It is very easy to read and interpret data when it is represented visually. Humans are visual creatures and it can be easier to communicate via pictures for an explanation. Infographics are hugely popular on the Internet and some of them have achieved meme status. While some data can be easily represented using Adobe Photoshop or the Microsoft Office Suite, more complex data needs more complex software to simplify it visually.
Rather than spending hours on Google, searching for a quality data visualization tool Usability Tools has rounded up “21 Essential Data Visualization Tools.” What is great about this list is that it features free services that available to improve how you display data on your Web site, project, or whatever your specific needs are.
Some of the choices are obvious, such as Google Charts and Wolfram Alpha, but there are some stand outs that combine JavaScript and draw on Internet resources. Plus they are also exceedingly fun to play with. They include: Timeline.js, Tableau Public, PiktoChart, Canva, and D3.js.
None of the data visualization tools are better than the others, in fact the article’s author says what you want to use is based on your need:
“As you can see, there is plenty of Data Visualization tools that will make you understand your users in a better, more insightful way. There are many tools being launched every day, but I managed to collect those that are the most popular in the ‘industry’. Of course, they have both strong and weak sides, since there is no one perfect tool to visualize the metrics. All I can do is to recommend you trying them yourself and combining them in order to maximize the efficiency of visualizing data.”
It looks like it is time to start playing around with data toys!
Whitney Grace, June 19, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Trash Organizational Silos? Not So Fast
June 18, 2015
I read “Three things You Need to Break Down Those Company Silos.” Enterprise search vendors have harped on the impossible dream: Federate an organization’s information and data. Make the content available to authorized users.
The reality is a bit different from the cute PowerPoint slides with photos of farm silos and placid bovines.
The article comes at silos is a different, almost Lord of the Rings fantasy way. The write up states:
The title of this feature makes it pretty clear that we think a company operating in a silo mentality is a Bad Thing and that the structure needs to be sorted out…Take the information security function of your business. Can you let individual departments look after their security? Of course not, because they don’t know how to and they won’t do it anyway – particularly the sales function because given the choice of employing a security specialist (who costs money) or a salesperson (who does quite the opposite) the decision is a no-brainer.
Yep, security. Let’s reflect a moment. There are issues in the popular press about the security rupture at the unit of the White House, called Office of Personnel Management. That’s the outfit that kept track of me as a contractor, employees, and Snowden types. Then there is the Anthem health care thing, the Target thing, the hacking of the US Army’s Web site, and, gee, lots of other examples.
Broken silos, like this one, kill folks. One giant silo, if it breaks, may kill lots of farmers. The CBS news crew wisely observed from a helicopter. And silos can burn or explode. Boom. Stay back may be good advice.
What’s this tell us? Talk about security sells consulting work. But the mechanisms within many organizations ignore security. So, silos and security? Yep, these work pretty well in the pharma industry. Some helpful folks in marketing are just not allowed to know who is working on what in which lab, and for good reason. Silos are best implemented by stakeholders. No perceived stake, no security.
Let’s move on.
The article in a somewhat parental fashion tell me what I need, and you too, of course. The suggestions are MBA baloney. A person not in top management is not going to get through to the top dogs. Maybe Bain, BCG, Booz, Allen and McKinsey consultants can communicate at this carpet land level. But my hunch is that most others are going to get a smile and not much else.
I want to take a moment and consider these suggestions. Let’s assume that I am a 25 year old working on a project and I have some “matrix” responsibility for technical quality assurance for a software product.
The article wants me to help the senior managers to understand the big picture. As a 20 something, my concept of a big picture was the 20 inch TV in Sears. When I was 25, I had zero—and I am speaking from the experience of my 50 year work history—idea what the big picture of the company employing me is. I worked at Halliburton Nuclear and Booz, Allen for years. I then moved into senior management at other big outfits. No reasonable senior officer expected me, no matter how clever I was supposed to be, to know what the organization’s big picture is. The two or three men and women at the top, in my experience, struggled with figuring out where on the wall the picture was located. Big was quarterly numbers. Inputs from below are like pellets fired at a military aircraft cruising at 30,000 feet.
The second thing I need, according to the article, is identifying tasks that belong elsewhere. Okay, let’s think about this. I visited a company 10 days ago. The firm had a headquarters which contained computers, products, and people. The company had dozens of offices. As an outsider with decades of business experience, I could—note the word “could”—have told the firm to move to lower cost real estate, migrate the computer systems to Amazon, get rid of full time staff and shift to contract workers whom the company would call when there were tasks to perform, shift suppliers from vendors in Europe to Vendors in Cambodia, etc. What I did was focus on a handful of suggestions that were within the resource capacity of the company. What is the point in telling the three senior managers to do things which the company cannot afford, cannot match to the firm’s business processes, or to the technical capabilities of the staff? If I were 25 and slogging through some fun stuff related to nuclear fuel, I would be unable to identify meaningful actions for our designated Halliburton leader, an impressive fellow named Thomas H. Cruikshank, who when I knew him had not yet become the chairman and CEO of Halliburton Energy Services. I watched, I learned, and I kept my mouth shut. My job was to process nuclear data and do whatever the top dogs told me to do. I found this approach to be quite beneficial to me and my career. When asked, I would formulate a response. Tell top dogs what belonged elsewhere? Nope, not for me.
The third thingI need to do, according to the article, is to do my job well. Okay, easy to say, but for me and the majority of the hundreds of employees I have hired, trained, and managed over the last 50 years, the key is to help people succeed. The “well” stuff is subjective and irrelevant. A script or program works or it does not. Let’s do the works part and tackle the well later or maybe never. The more reliable objective approach is to define tasks so that a specific employee can perform that task, learn along the way, and complete the work so that his or her output is useful to a co worker, a customer, or a friend of the senior vice president’s spouse. Screw ups occur with broad generalizations. “Well” is not the same as completion and feedback and improvement. Excellence results from doing tasks, making errors, adapting, and producing outputs that others can use. If I were a 20 something and my boss told me to do something well, my reaction would have been, “Why did you hire me if you did not think I was [a] bright, [b] a hard working task oriented individual , and [c] committed to doing what I had to do to win the respect of my co workers and clients?” The question would cause me to lose confidence in that manager.
Let me circle back to enterprise search. For decades vendors took the Fast Search & Transfer approach (other vendors used this method as well). The vendor would say, “We can index all of your organization’s information.” Then the vendor would suggest, “Search will unlock the value of the knowledge in your organization.”
Gag.
The vendors who took and continue to take this approach are unaware that their customers will quickly learn that the emperor has no clothes. No one wants “all” information available. Do you want your personal health records online and searchable? What about the drafts of the contract for the sale of the unit in Princeton, New Jersey, to a Chinese investment firm? What about the golf scramble data on your laptop which you run as a favor for a pall in the Kiwanis Club of Topeka, Kansas?
Silos are not going away. Silos of information are central to many work processes? Individuals who yap about removing information silos, work silos, or any other kind of silo are trapped within a large, somewhat oily MBA sausage on
Management precepts like Fast Search-type assertions do little to solve some very real, very important business problems. Focus and appropriate control are more helpful that business school saucisson.
Stephen E Arnold, June 18, 2015
The Digital Gutenbergs Spur Their Chargers. Giddyap.
June 18, 2015
Forget the mom and pop app. A couple of big outfits are going to select and present information you will consume. Choice? Well, for those who are [a] busy, [b] unable to read, and [c] those with short attention spans—your life is going to be just peachy.
The first rumble comes from lovable Apple. Navigate to “Apple Inc. To Hire Journalists For Curated Content On News App.” I highlighted this passage:
Apple’s decision to hire journalists is the latest example of fusion between news media and tech companies. In the last few years, many social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, have hired editors and reporters from high profile news media, such as NBC and News Corp. Recently, Snapchat also hired reporters from CNN, and The Verge, a tech site.
The article reminded me that Facebook is ambling down a content path as well.
The next it is that the recruiting tool LinkedIn is going to use humans to “tailor news.” The details, which I assume are spot are, appear in “LinkedIn Brings Back Human Editors to Tailor News to You.” I circled this statement:
But to compete with these other products, Kothari knows that Pulse must offer something different. It’s the “world’s first personalized business news digest,” he says. More importantly, perhaps, LinkedIn’s Pulse is bringing back human editors, not just algorithms, to tailor the news you see to what it already knows about you. And yet it may not be alone—Apple is reportedly planning to curate news with the help of humans, too.
Also, the GOOG, already armed with APIs and the warm and fuzzy news service is taking another baby step into content as well. The story I printed out is called “A New Window into Our World with Real Time Trends.” Yep, just family because it is “our world.” Google says:
On the new google.com/trends, you’ll find a ranked, real-time list of trending stories that are gaining traction across Google. In addition to Search, we now look at trends from YouTube and Google News and combine them to better understand what topics and stories are trending across the web right now. The redesigned homepage is now available in 28 countries around the world, and we’ll continue to add more locations in the coming months.
What’s the impact of these digital Gutenberg twirls?
My initial reaction is that TheNeeds.com and similar services will be doing some talking with their investors. Whatever money these news recyclers have is probably not going to be enough to deal with the Apples, Facebooks, Googles, and LinkedIns of the world. Heck, LinkedIn may need more dough too.
Second, are there enough readers to allow each of these services to meet the expectations of the spreadsheet jockeys who project revenues? My hunch is that the answer is, “Nope.” More concentration ahead I opine.
And, third, what about the old line publishing companies which continue to pretend that their products and services are exactly what the market wants? More pain and not much gain I assume.
Exciting times for the digital Gutenbergs? Too bad my study Google: The Digital Gutenberg is out of print. If you are curious about this trend, let me know and I will spin up a PDF of that original study. Write seaky2000@yahoo.com.
Stephen E Arnold, June 18, 2015
Chris McNulty at SharePoint Fest Seattle
June 18, 2015
For SharePoint managers and users, continued education and training is essential. There are lots of opportunities for virtual and face-to-face instruction. Benzinga gives some attention to one training option, the upcoming SharePoint Fest Seattle, in their recent article, “Chris McNulty to Lead 2 Sessions and a Workshop at SharePoint Fest Seattle.”
The article begins:
“Chris McNulty will preside over a full day workshop at SharePoint Fest Seattle on August 18th, 2015, as well as conduct two technical training sessions on the 19th and 20th. Both the workshops and sessions are to be held at the Washington State Convention Center in downtown Seattle.”
In addition to all of the great training opportunities at conferences and other face-to-face sessions, staying on top of the latest SharePoint news and online training opportunities is also essential. For a one-stop-shop of all the latest SharePoint news, stay tuned to Stephen E. Arnold’s Web site, ArnoldIT.com, and his dedicated SharePoint feed. He has turned his longtime career in search into a helpful Web service for those that need to stay on top of the latest SharePoint happenings.
Emily Rae Aldridge, June 18, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Search Improvements at Twitter
June 18, 2015
Search hasn’t exactly been Twitter’s strong point in the past. Now we learn that the site is rolling out its new and improved search functionality to all (logged-in) users in TechCrunch’s article, “Twitter’s New Search Results Interface Expands to All Web Users.” Reporter Sarah Parez tells us:
“Twitter is now rolling out a new search results interface to all logged-in users on the web, introducing a cleaner look-and-feel and more filtering options that let you sort results by top tweets, ‘live’ tweets, accounts, photos, videos, news and more. The rollout follows tests that began in April which then made the new interface available to a ‘small group’ of Twitter users the company had said at the time. The updated interface is one of the larger updates Twitter’s search engine has seen in recent months, and it’s meant to make the search interface itself easier to use in terms of switching between tweets, accounts, photos and videos.”
Twitter has been working on other features meant to make the site easier to use. For example, the revamped landing page will track news stories in specified categories. Users can also access the latest updates through the “instant timeline” or “while you were away” features. The article supplies a few search-interface before-and-after screenshots. Naturally, Twitter promises to continue improving the feature.
Cynthia Murrell, June 18, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Basho Enters Ring With New Data Platform
June 18, 2015
When it comes to enterprise technology these days, it is all about making software compliant for a variety of platforms and needs. Compliancy is the name of the game for Basho, says Diginomica’s article, “Basho Aims For Enterprise Operational Simplicity With New Data Platform.” Basho’s upgrade to its Riak Data Platform makes it more integration with related tools and to make complex operational environments simpler. Data management and automation tools are another big seller for NoSQL enterprise databases, which Basho also added to the Riak upgrade. Basho is not the only company that is trying to improve NoSQL enterprise platforms, these include MongoDB and DataStax. Basho’s advantage is delivering a solution using the Riak data platform.
Basho’s data platform already offers a variety of functions that people try to get to work with a NoSQL database and they are nearly automated: Riak Search with Apache Solr, orchestration services, Apache Spark Connector, integrated caching with Redis, and simplified development using data replication and synchronization.
“CEO Adam Wray released some canned comment along with the announcement, which indicates that this is a big leap for Basho, but also is just the start of further broadening of the platform. He said:
‘This is a true turning point for the database industry, consolidating a variety of critical but previously disparate services to greatly simplify the operational requirements for IT teams working to scale applications with active workloads. The impact it will have on our users, and on the use of integrated data services more broadly, will be significant. We look forward to working closely with our community and the broader industry to further develop the Basho Data Platform.’”
The article explains that NoSQL market continues to grow and enterprises need management as well as automation to manage the growing number of tasks databases are used for. While a complete solution for all NoSQL needs has been developed, Basho comes fairly close.
Whitney Grace, June 18, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Need Confidence in Your Big Data? InfoSphere Delivers Assurances
June 17, 2015
I spotted a tweet about a white paper titled “Improve the Confidence in Your Big Data with IBM InfoSphere.” The write up was a product of Information Asset LLC, a company with which I was not familiar. The link in the tweet was dead, so I located a copy of the white paper on the IBM Web site at this link, which I verified on June 17, 2015. If it is dead when you look for the white paper, take it up with IBM, not me.
The white paper is seven pages long and explains that IBM’s InfoSphere is the hub of some pretty interesting functions; specifically:
- Big Data exploration
- Enhanced 360 [degree] view of the customer
- Application development and testing
- Application efficiency
- Security and compliance
- Application consolidation and retirement
- Data warehouse augmentation
- Operations analysis
- Security/intelligence extension.
I thought InfoSphere was a brand created in 2008 by IBM marketers to group IBM’s different information management software products into one basket. The Big Data thing is a new twist for me.
The white paper takes each of these nine topics and explains them one by one. I found some interesting tidbits in several of the explanations, but I have only enough energy and good humor to tackle one category, Big Data exploration.
The notion of exploring Big Data is an interesting one. I thought one normalized, queried, and reviewed results of a query. The exploration thing is foreign to me. Big Data, by definition, are—well—big. Big collections are data are difficult to explore. I formulate queries, look at results, review clusters, etc. I suppose I am exploring, but I think of the work as routine database look ups. I am so hopelessly old fashioned, aren’t I. Some outfits like Recorded Future generate reports which illustrate certain query results, but we are back to queries, aren’t we.
Here’s what I learned about InfoSphere’s capabilities. Keep in mind that InfoSphere is a collection of discrete software programs and code systems. Data scientists need to explore and mine Big Data to uncover interesting nuggets that are relevant for better decision making. A large hospital system built a detailed model to predict the likelihood that patients with congestive heart failure would be readmitted within 30 days. Smoking status was a key variable that was strongly correlated with the likelihood of readmission. At the outset, only 25 percent of the structured data around smoking status was populated with binary yes/no answers. However, the analytics team was able to increase the population rate for smoking status to 85 percent of the encounters by using content analytics. The content analytics team was also able to use physicians’ and nurses’ notes to unlock additional information, such as smoking duration and frequency. There were a number of reasons for the discrepancy. For example, some patients indicated that they were non-smokers, but text analytics revealed the following in the doctors’ notes: “Patient is restless and asked for a smoking break,” “Patient quit smoking yesterday,” and “Quit.” IBM InfoSphere Big Insights offers strong text analytic capabilities. In addition, IBM InfoSphere Business Glossary provides a repository for key definitions such as “readmission.” IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management provides an Enterprise Master Patient Index to track readmissions for the same patient across multiple hospitals in the same network. Finally, IBM InfoSphere Data Explorer provides robust search capability across unstructured data.
Okay, search is the operative word. I find this fascinating because IBM is working hard to convince me that Watson can ingest information and figure out what it means and then answer questions automatically. For example, if a cancer doctor does not know what treatment to use, Watson will tell her.
I must tell you that this white paper illustrates the fuzzy thinking that characterizes many firms’ approach to information challenges. Remember. The InfoSphere Big Data explorer is just one of nine capabilities of a marketing label.
Useful? Just ring up your local IBM regional office and solve nine problems with that phone call. Magic. Big insights too.
Stephen E Arnold, June 17, 2015
Predictive Analytics Applied to Marketing As a Service
June 17, 2015
In the good old days, content processing provided outputs to those who knew how to ask quite specific questions. Today analytics are predictive and the outputs are packaged to beckon to marketers who are struggling to generate leads and sales.
I read “The Story Behind Syntasa: A Rising Data Analytics Startup With DoD Contractor Roots.” The article is a success story with a dash of emotion and gloss of cheerleading. The company profiled is “a new species of data analytics company, combining national defense expertise with big data marketing technology.” That is an interesting combination.
According to the write up:
The digital marketing and data analytics tech startup offers the “very latest predictive behavioral analytics technology to help enterprises use their large amounts of data and identify actions and outcomes,” said Marwaha, “We do that by providing software that goes through mountains of consumer data gathered by each brand and analyzing click strokes to understand and predict online consumer behavior while they peruse the sites of particular brands.” Syntasa’s CEO added,”[the company] has taken off as more and more enterprises are moving to open source tools like Hadoop and Apache Spark, which can handle large amounts of data. We’ve brought the expertise once used in the federal government’s efforts to fight national security threats through intelligence gathering online, and unleashed it at the enterprise level.”
I noted this passage as well:
When I [author of the article] asked Syntasa’s CEO whether he believes we will begin to see other cyber security companies and intelligence experts expand and/or pivot into marketing/advertising ventures, he offered an interesting counter response: “The converse is more likely. There is a sense of behavioral analytics taking shape in the cyber security market in order to proactively predict where an attack may occur. Which comes first isn’t really the point. The two markets are BOTH now leveraging the power of big data and machine learning to predict events — whether it is leading to a potential threat or a potential customer.”
If you are looking for an outfit with predictive marketing analytics, perhaps Syntasa’s capabilities are spot on for you.
Stephen E Arnold, June 17, 2015
Jargon: Chief Digital Officer
June 17, 2015
Navigate to “‘I Can Imagine a World Where We Have CDOs Instead of CIOs’ – Says Atkins CIO and CDO.” Sounds like a coinage designed to remove an important corporate function from reality.
I visited a company without a chief information officer. Hold that. The company did not have an information technology manager. Instead several individuals did different computery things. One of the senior managers told me, “We need to move everything to the cloud.”
Okay. The statement is easy to make, but without someone who knows about technology options, migration methods, work processes, and making technology do what users need to do their jobs.
The write up assumes that a company will have a CDO or chief digital officer. Well, many some companies have the funds to add a full time equivalent to manage “digital” zeros and ones. For me, the notion of a CDO is just a bit of a priority and responsibility problem.
The write up does not agree, stating:
The CIO and CDO of engineering juggernaut Atkins, Richard Cross, has weighed into the chief digital officer debate, suggesting that CDOs could one day replace CIOs.
The write up adds:
Cross, who told Computing yesterday that his job is to ensure that the firm is “digital by default” by 2020, said that despite some CIOs believing that the CDO role is just a ‘fad’, it could in fact replace the CIO position.
So, one person wants to have a more lofty title? I understand that, but it may be useful for the article to define the acronyms, provide some facts or semi facts about why the phrase “information technology manager” is not useful. I understand that there are some people who believe they know about social media, programming, marketing strategy and tactics, system architecture, and computing infrastructure. I have met a couple of people with this span of expertise.
The problem is that most companies today have pretty basic and quite difficult technical problems. These range from the Office of Personnel Management type of security issues to figuring out why the cost of the company’s Web site is rising more rapidly than any other information technology expense item. Search probably is a burr under employees’ saddles. The company is clueless when it comes to dealing with analytic methods which can be used by an employee quickly and easily.
The propensity to generate dorky buzzwords is blurring the very real technical work that organizations must do.
CDO? Forget that. Focus on the basics. Can employees locate the final version of the CEO’s PowerPoint used three days ago? How many organizations will have today’s staff on the payroll in five years? Heck, how many companies in business today will be viable in five years? My hunch is that doing the work is more important than printing a business card with a different title.
Stephen E Arnold, June 17, 2015
Video and Image Search In the News
June 17, 2015
There’s been much activity around video and image search lately. Is it all public-relations hype, or is there really progress to celebrate? Here are a few examples that we’ve noticed recently.
Fast Company reports on real-time video-stream search service Dextro in, “This Startup’s Side Project Scans Every Periscope Video to Help You Find the Best Streams.” Writer Rose Pastore tells us:
“Dextro’s new tool, called Stream, launches today as a mobile-optimized site that sorts Periscope videos by their content: Cats, computers, swimming pools, and talking heads, to name a few popular categories. The system does not analyze stream text titles, which are often non-descriptive; instead, it groups videos based only on how its algorithms interpret the visual scene being filmed. Dextro already uses this technology to analyze pre-recorded videos for companies … but this is the first time the two-year-old startup has applied its algorithms to live streams.”
Meanwhile, ScienceDaily reveals an interesting development in, “System Designed to Label Visual Scenes Turns Out to Detect Particular Objects Too.” While working on their very successful scene-classification tool, researchers at MIT discovered a side effect. The article explains that, at an upcoming conference:
“The researchers will present a new paper demonstrating that, en route to learning how to recognize scenes, their system also learned how to recognize objects. The work implies that at the very least, scene-recognition and object-recognition systems could work in concert. But it also holds out the possibility that they could prove to be mutually reinforcing.”
Then we have an article from MIT’s Technology Review, “The Machine Vision Algorithm Beating Art Historians at Their Own Game.” Yes, even in the highly-nuanced field of art history, the AI seems to have become the master. We learn:
“The challenge of analyzing paintings, recognizing their artists, and identifying their style and content has always been beyond the capability of even the most advanced algorithms. That is now changing thanks to recent advances in machine learning based on approaches such as deep convolutional neural networks. In just a few years, computer scientists have created machines capable of matching and sometimes outperforming humans in all kinds of pattern recognition tasks.”
Each of these articles is an interesting read, so check them out for more information. It may be a good time to work in the area of image and video search.
Cynthia Murrell, June 17, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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