Last year I got to visit a software company in India. We were evaluating if they could be our offshore software development partners. It is very hard to distinguish the software development companies of similar size in India from each other because they have similar websites, similar service portfolios and similar projects. I prepared a list of questions which I sent to them in 3-4 days in advance before my visit to which they had to reply by email.

After I had received the answers, I spent a day speaking with their teams by actually walking on the work floor of their office and sitting behind the developers’ screens to see working examples of their practices. This gave us good insight in to what this software company was capable of doing.

I would like to share the list of questions that I asked. I understand that this is not an exhaustive list of question that you can ask your...

I attended an industry briefing on mobile computing by Gartner in Amsterdam in Feb 2015. This blog covers a part of the briefing

The mobile apps are everywhere. We take photos, pay our bills, speak with our friends and listen to our favourite music using mobile apps. The high engagement of general public with the mobile apps has made enterprises constantly explore what is next in mobile apps and platforms. Mobile commerce, which was in its infancy couple of years ago, has now taken off.

Mobile revolution started when enterprise started exposing their existing business processes using mobile apps by giving their staff and customers anytime anywhere access to their services by launching self service apps such as apps for flight check-in or emails. This was followed by enterprises offering their product and services by catching the moment in which the employee or customer finds himself...

The powerful technology behind the capturing and processing of massive amount of data, also known as big data, has become very accessible to the world either by the popularity of open source software or by the aggressive marketing by the vendors. Any business event having “big data” in its title runs houseful which is a testimony to the success of marketing and plain curiosity of humankind about something that has a potential to change the world. Once curiosity is over then people ask what can we do with big data? Is big data a solution looking for the right problem which is yet to be found in my company? Or plain simple do really we have a big data problem?

Silicon Valley tech giants Google, Netflix and Facebook have successfully built business models around collecting data from hundreds of millions of web users and using it to create personalized products, such as online ads and...

The analytical DELTA is an acronym for the five success factors that you need to have a successful analytics program or project in your organization, so that you can compete in the market by data powered decision-making. The Data Lake or the Enterprise Data Hub are the common terms used in the industry to represent a massive central data storage (typically Hadoop based), where the data of the entire enterprise is stored and made available for analytical goals.

The analytical DELTA has been described in the book titled Analytics at Work by Thomas H. Davenport, Jeanne G. Harris publisher Harvard Business Press.

DELTA covers the following five success factors:

• D for accessible, high quality data
• E for an enterprise orientation
• L for analytical leadership
• T for strategic targets
• A for analysts

All these success factors gave to be present if an analytics project or program...

Last week, I attended Big Data Analytics 2014 event in London. Before and after my talk titled Big Data: An Opportunity to Reinvent Your BI Department, I had a couple of good conversations with the event participants.

Let’s talk about the essence of three great conversation topics that I was part of during this event:

Visualisation Complements Data Science

Software engineers have learnt over a period of time that for the end user GUI is the system. You can create a perfect software architecture and design but if you have a lousy GUI then you will fail to impress the end user. I am not arguing here that no programmer can design great GUI. Though I am suggesting here that you should invest in good GUI designers because the combination of a great GUI designer and a great programmer is hard to find in a single human being.

You can present the solution of a data science problem in...

Suppose you are writing a web application and you quickly need a clean Tomcat container running on Ubuntu to test it. Manually building such a container from scratch will take time. If you have team of developers who quickly need a container to test the software in a standard environment then you can use Vagrant. Using Vagrant, you can create Linux based servers with Tomcat on the fly.

Vagrant can provision virtual machines (VM) using a simple command line tool. You have to define the configuration for VM once in a configuration file. Using this configuration file, anybody in your team can launch a VM on a system. This is very handy when you have a team of developers who would like to have access to consistently configured servers for development and testing.

Vagrant uses VirtualBox to provision the virtual machine. You need to have VirtualBox installed on your system before you can...

Scrum Framework is deceptively simple. It does not prescribe the processes, matrices or any other artifacts that you would expect a framework to define. In the view of this lack of prescriptive approach, as a manager, you have to invent your own artifacts if you are accountable for the performance of one or more Scrum teams.

As a manager having no direct involvement in the self organizing scrum team, you have a very few handles to get grip on the team performance and to get an early warning when your team’s performance sets in to slow decline.

As a manager, if you just see the performance of a single sprint then you are likely to miss the important early warning signs of the simmering issues in the project before they blow up and put you in trouble.

To solve this problem, we created a simple tool to capture the sprint performance data, which was much more than just the team velocity...

Growing interest in gaining value out of the data stored in the enterprise systems and the freely available data on the World Wide Web, has led IT industry to invent a new term called Data Lake. The term Data Lake or Business Data Lake has been aggressively adopted by major big data software vendors, such as Pivotal and Hortonworks. It often dominates their marketing and sales pitches. Other vendors such as Cloudera call this concept Data Hub with minor scope changes.

The Industry Analyst from Gartner, Merv Adrian, has named this concept Data Reservoir (Dam) because the stored water flows out of reservoir under control. ‘Lake’ in Data Lake is not a good term because ‘Lake’ does not have a controlled outflow of water, in his view.

There is a general consensus about the need for a centralised data store for the enterprise to create new business insights. However, the debate ensues about...

Hadoop Summit 2014 in San Jose is the North American edition of Hadoop event, which is managed and run by Hortonworks. This was my latest stop in the big data conference circuit.

This year, I have been moving around in the Big Data conference circuits in the US and Europe. I spoke at Hadoop Summit in Amsterdam. Hortonworks people have recently uploaded the video of my talk, which you can watch here:
http://youtu.be/739v1-v9Y9A

In February 2014, when I visited Strata Conference in Santa Clara, I questioned to myself that why every major software vendor was present in the Strata, except the bellwether of data, Oracle. They became big by selling technology to store large volumes of enterprise data. Strata Conference is a conference on data related topics, which is organised by O’Reilly Media. O’Reilly Media can be safely considered as a vendor neutral event organiser dedicated to...