Tag Archives: Professional Development

Toward an Analytics Code of Ethics

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In data management and analytics, we often focus on correcting apparent inability and unwillingness on the part of business leaders to effectively gather and capitalize on data resources. With that perspective, we often see ethics as a side issue difficult to prioritize given the scale and persistence of our other challenges.

At least that was my perspective, and my initial response when confronted recently by a family member on this topic. Her view from outside the field was that ethics should be a primary concern. As I’ve reflected on this conversation, I’ve come around to her point.

In recent years we’ve seen many examples of data misuse due to ethical lapses. Here’s a post that gives five examples, including police officers looking up data on individuals not related to any police business, an employee passing personal data including SSNs to a text sharing site, and Uber’s “god view”, available at the corporate level, which an employee used in 2014 to track a journalist’s location. Continue reading →

Sound Data Culture Enables Modern Data Architectures

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Modern data architectures, by enabling data analytics insights, promise to drive order of magnitude value gains across many business sectors (here, here, and here). Not so long ago, big data presented a daunting challenge. Although tools were plentiful, we struggled to conceptualize the architecture and organization within which to capitalize on those tools. Now solid frameworks have emerged. This post reviews two promising models for modern data architecture, and discusses two key cultural values critical to their successful adoption: drive to solve business challenges and drive for universal data correctness. Continue reading →

Leader’s Data Manifesto Annual Review: “It’s About the Lopez Women”

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A year ago I recounted proceedings from the 2017 EDW World conference, which included release of the Leader’s Data Manifesto (LDM). Last week’s EDW World 2018 served as a one-year status report on the Manifesto. The verdict: there’s still a long way to go, but speakers and attendees report dramatic progress and emergence of shared values supporting data management’s role in enabling success and reducing risk.

To me the most compelling example of progress was the story of the Lopez women, told by Tommie Lawrence, who leads patient data quality efforts at Sharp Healthcare, a major San Diego, Ca, healthcare network. Ms. Lawrence’s team is responsible for data quality related to about six million patient records in the 40 highest priority of Sharp’s ~400 systems containing Patient Health Information (PHI).

A few years ago, Sharp Healthcare had two patients named Maria Lopez*, with birthdays one day apart. One suffered from kidney disease, the other had cancer. After a long wait a kidney was found, and the hospital called the Maria with kidney disease and asked her to come to the hospital for a transplant immediately. During operation prep, an assistant noticed that Maria had cancer, and put a halt to proceedings – it didn’t make sense to give the kidney to someone with cancer. Continue reading →

Values and Behaviors of the Successful Agilist

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Of course, any discussion of Agile values starts with the Agile Manifesto. The first sentence declares that Agile development is about seeking better ways and helping others. Then, as if espousing self-evident truths, the founders present four relative value statements. Finally, they emphasize appropriate balance, saying that the relatively less valued items aren’t worthless: implying that they are to be maintained inasmuch as they support the relatively more valued items.

While there is value in the four relative value statements, I believe most successful Agilists value the first and last statements more. So to me, the core Agile values are continuous improvement, helping others, and balance.

There’s a lot written about Agile behaviors, but as I read most is geared toward scrummasters or managers, and most is about transitioning from the waterfall world. Starting from the premise that Agile methods are established, focusing on participants rather than managers, and based on the assumption that behaviors are grounded in values, this post details the values and behaviors I’ve observed of those who succeed as Agile team members.

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Escaping Teradata Purgatory (Select Failed. [2646] No more spool space)

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If you are a SQL developer or data analyst working with Teradata, it is likely you’ve gotten this error message: “Select Failed. [2646] No more spool space”. Roughly speaking, Teradata “spool” is the space DBAs assign to each user account as work space for queries. So, for example, if your query needs to build an intermediate table behind the scenes to sort or otherwise process before it hands over your result set, that happens in spool space. It is limited, in part, to keep your potentially runaway query from using up too much space and clogging up the system.

After briefly setting the stage, this post presents the top three tactics I use to avoid or overcome spool space errors. For the second two tactics I’ll show working code. At the end of the post you’ll find volatile DDL that you can use to get the queries to run. Continue reading →

The Faith of Tolerance

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Yes this is a post about religion, so at the outset let me assure you that I won’t try to talk you into or out of any religion or otherwise. Nor will I reveal my beliefs. Instead, I will make the case that the beliefs of others are to be celebrated.

To those thinking this is off-topic, the “about” page says that this site deals in “motivated professionals working together to solve problems.” In order to cooperate closely and harmoniously, co-workers must share values that foster mutual trust. IT teams tend to be diverse. In this time when some of our elected officials sow distrust it is important to remember the last of the agile team values listed by Scrum Alliance: “As we work together, sharing successes and failures, we come to respect each other and to help each other become worthy of respect.”

I was motivated to write this after accidentally finding Landon Fowler’s 2016 article called The Faith of Atheism. To briefly summarize the argument (Landon correct me if I mischaracterize): Continue reading →

Protect Your Culture: Screening for authoritarian project leaders

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Bugs BunnyIt’s fashionable today to talk about the risks of authoritarianism in the political sphere. I’m not going to speculate on that, but such talk got me thinking about the same tendencies among IT project leaders. What is an authoritarian personality? (Yes, that’s actually a thing.) Is it truly antithetical to a healthy project? If so, how can you screen for it in hiring?

Recently, ArsTechnica ran an article that offers a survey of research on authoritarian personalities conducted since the 1940s. The bottom line for us is that those with authoritarian tendencies more often Continue reading →

Tableau Startup: First Lessons Learned

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XAs I mentioned in the February post, I’m new to Tableau, and as the tone of that post implied,enjoying it very much. Tableau is a robust and flexible solution for data delivery. Like Qlikview, which I worked with a while ago, it is supported by outstanding, and free, introductory training and a very active user community.

As I’ve made my first steps in Tableau I’ve been a frequent user community visitor, and generally have gotten the answers I’ve been looking for. However, like any tool there still have been a few surprises. I’ll run down the top few in this post:

  • Measures can have complex logic
  • Big extracts are tricky
  • Changing data sources is really tricky
  • Sorry, there are some things you just can’t do

Hopefully this post helps other novices negotiate those first few steps a bit more easily. Continue reading →

No Silver BI Bullet: Tableau Edition (It’s a good thing!)

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For complex work, a very simple app requires a very smart user. That point was driven home to me in Tableau Fundamentals class this week. I don’t see that as bad news at all.

Not so long ago I wrote a piece that attempted to inject a bit of reality into the claims then made by some data visualization tool vendors. I cited unexpected challenges that those adopting such tools for their obvious and compelling data presentation abilities might face. The challenges included unexpectedly complex data integration, establishing solid reporting standards and practices, scaling report distribution as demand for the visualizations expands, and the conversion work that can result from version upgrades.

Although a Fundamentals class, the experienced and enthusiastic instructor and the small, intelligent student group combined to make the two days immensely valuable, going far beyond the basics on the program (more on specific lessons learned will appear in an upcoming post). The instructor’s focus on principles rather than recipes drove home this point: in order to effectively use Tableau you have to understand not only how to operate Tableau itself but also the underlying data management, usability, and statistics principles.

Could it be that adopting easy-to-use Tableau in place of, say, SSRS, Cognos, or SAS requires an upgrade in staff knowledge and expertise? Continue reading →

Assumptions: A Key to Technical Leadership

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DonkeyThere’s an unfortunate and rather rude saying about assumptions that I’ve found popular among IT folks I’ve worked with. I say unfortunate because, to me, assumptions that are recognized early and handled the right way are a key to successful projects. Technical players who use assumptions well can help set projects on the right path long before they go astray.

Sometimes on waterfall and hybrid projects technical players are asked to estimate work early, before requirements are complete. My instinctive reaction is not to provide an ungrounded estimate, but that’s not helpful. The way to handle this uncomfortable uncertainty is to fill out the unknowns with assumptions: detailed, realistic statements that provide grounding for your estimate. Continue reading →