brenda michelson's technology advisory practice
Readers here at Elemental Links know that I’m an idea collector. I’m constantly on the look out for interesting articles in business, news and trade journals that either relate to my current work, or more likely, provide fodder for future work.
Lately, I’ve been highlighting these discoveries over on Active Information. This week, I discuss an intriguing piece in the Economist’s Technology Quarterly on Game Theory in Practice. Check out the Active Information post.
This week on Active Information I highlight an article on IT Failure from the September Issue of Harvard Business Review that is focused on Managing Complexity.
The authors describe what they learned by taking a radically different approach to the study of IT Failures. Ignoring averages and general trends, they worked from the Black Swan principle that “rare events can be more significant than average ones — and may occur more often than we think”.
Their findings were quite enlightening. Standish, et al, take notice. Even better, they offer new investment guidelines that every CxO should be aware of.
Read my Active Information post.
This week on Active Information, I highlighted a piece by Houston Rockets GM, Daryl Morey, on the value of data over hot-shot analysts. Check it out.
For the last few months, I’ve been hunkered down applying my SOA, active-information and execution skills on a [redacted] project for an organization in the [redacted] industry. It’s a cool project. But, it seriously stymies my writing. First, I can’t write about it. Second, I don’t have time to write, or hardly think, of anything else.
So, for me — a so-called low metabolism writer — it’s a good thing I was previously contracted to write for Esther Schindler at the HP Input Output site. Over the last few weeks, I’ve published the following Active Information posts:
“As digital emitters and sensors pervade the physical world — cars, bridges, medical devices — the opportunity to exploit active information patterns for business and societal innovation increases exponentially.
However, with technology-driven innovation comes risks. The most cited risk associated with digital pervasiveness is lack, or even absence, of privacy. But those of us with development and engineering backgrounds realize there is another, potentially more significant risk. Bugs…” [Read the post.]
Lessons from US CIO Vivek Kundra: Data-driven innovation:
“Buried between tech bubble talk in the most recent Fortune Magazine is a good interview of Vivek Kundra, US CIO. The interview is a retrospective on Kundra’s term as the first CIO of the US…
…The interview covers a lot of ground, including Kundra’s Cloud First technology plan [pdf], being stymied by bureaucracy, the power of data for transparency and publishing data to spur innovation…” [Read the post]
Big Data as Story Teller — Story of Big Data:
“…Too often, we geek types think about visibility in terms of business analytics and intelligence tools. However, an interesting, and very powerful technique is data visualization.” [Read the post.]
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.
