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brenda michelson's technology advisory practice

Active Information: Streaming through Computational World, Changing change via experimentation platforms

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My latest posts on the HPIO Active Information blog:

Streaming through a Computational World — (most popular post to date)

To take advantage of the computational world, or the nearer term internet of things, we need to infuse smarts throughout our data collection networks.  We need to employ up-front and intermediate filters, traffic cops, aggregators, pattern detectors, and intelligent agents.  We need to get over being data hoarders, and have the astuteness to leave data behind.

Busting cultural resistance via experimentation platforms — (changing change)

Culture, mistrust of the data, lack of interest. These very human factors are adoption barriers for 46% of the respondents. Yet, these barriers aren’t new. Nor, confined to big data and advanced analytics. To change a culture, you need to bring proof to the table.  And proof requires hands-on experimentation and real-world data. We need data to prove that we need data. How will we get that?

Roundtable: Enterprise Architects & Complex Event Processing

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I recently moderated a roundtable to discuss the Enterprise Architect / Complexity Event Processing (CEP) survey that I worked on with StreamBase.

The roundtable featured Nigel Green of 5Di Limited and Jennifer Kennedy of Linden Lab, along with Richard Tibbetts of StreamBase Systems.  We discussed the report results, and then some.  Check out the webcast replay.

 

[Disclosure: StreamBase is a client of Elemental Links]

Absence of Event = Event

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In this week’s Active Information post, I riff off a quote by Jud Valeski the CEO of Gnip, on the dearth of event-driven talent:

“Beyond infrastructure issues, as engineers, the web app programming we’ve been doing over the past 15 years has taught us to build applications in a highly synchronous transactional manner…”

“…You would be shocked at the ratio of engineers who can’t build event-driven, asynchronous data processing applications, to those who can, yet this is a big part of this space.”

If you are a frequent reader here, you’ve seen the event constructs I published over there.

One that I didn’t include is the fact that the absence of an event can be an event.  Chris Martins brought that up on Twitter.

In my initial event writing, I wrote of a system heartbeat example:

“…a business-to-business order gateway is supposed to be emitting System Heartbeat events every 15 minutes. The System Heartbeat events inform IT operations the gateway is up and running. The absence of a heartbeat event indicates a failure. If the order gateway is down, business customers are likely to place an order with a competitor.”

On Twitter yesterday, I mentioned an event-driven billing subsystem I’m currently working on.  In that system, we’ll be generating a (standard) projected monthly invoice.  The invoice generation starts when the party is approved for billing.

Invoice regeneration is triggered by a set of events, including a change in plan, the receipt of a payment, or the absence of the receipt of payment.  In this subsystem, the absence of a receipt is a non-payment event.

So, yes.  The absence of an event is absolutely an event.

Brenda M. Michelson

Brenda Michelson

Technology Architect.

Trusted Advisor.

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