Grace Hopper, U.S. Naval Rear Admiral and the oldest active-duty officer in the U.S., was also a computer scientist who developed the first working compiler in 1952, and led the effort in the 1960s to develop COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) a programming language still in use.
However, she was also probably the world’s first data scientist.
Did you think an old Tweet just goes into the internet abyss, never to be thought of again?
How wrong you are.
“Big Data” is in vogue today. It’s the new fashion in business and technology. It’s a phenomenon that is difficult to explain but somehow managed to trek from the Technology Street to Wall Street and now blazing its trails into the Main Street.
The technocrats, the data scientists and the business executives are claiming that there hasn’t been anything like this throughout the human history.
But, is this true?
Happy Birthday, Ada Lovelace.
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day celebrating the life of Lady Lovelace, a nineteenth-century countess who published a paper that might be the first computer program ever devised. Ada Lovelace Day uses her as a symbol for women in science, hoping to bolster support for girls around the world who might be discouraged from pursuing science, technology, engineering, math, chemistry and the like.
Are you a Data Hoarder, or a Data User?
Just as there’s gold in them thar hills, there’s insight hidden in that data, insight that can make a difference, and there are some pretty straightforward applications that can have quite an immediate impact.
The value of most organizations today is less determined by their physical assets than their intellectual assets. Intellectual property such as patents, technologies, ideas and designs are what keep leading companies like Bose, 3M, Medtronic and Boeing ahead of their competition. A big challenge for many organizations is to document and pass on important knowledge to others in their organization so that they can benefit from the discoveries of others. According to the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC), knowledge management (KM) is defined as: “a systematic process of connecting people to people and people to knowledge and information they need to effectively act and create new knowledge.”
While the first use of the term “business intelligence” was in a 1958 paper by IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn, it was Howard Dresner in 1989 (later with Gartner) who defined the term and the practice as we now recognize it. Even I could have invented the concept in 1999, but it was Dresner’s talent that he recognized a decade earlier that the disparate data warehouse, analytic and reporting projects and initiatives needed to be unified under a single umbrella.
The fundamental problem that BI addresses is: scarce IT resources.
A recent survey of 1,000 Americans was conducted by Wakefield Research for Citrix. The results suggest that Americans like to think they’re on top of the latest innovations in cloud computing, but in reality know little about it. Unfortunately, even more people think that the cloud is tied to the weather in some way.
Read some of the [highly embarrassing] statistics here.
Marketing’s focus on measurement and ROI is challenging CMOs to hire employees into the emerging discipline of marketing operations who have skills and experience that have not been in the traditional domain of marketers. These attributes include technical savvy and systems-thinking skills, as well as a diverse blend of cross-disciplinary expertise and management skills.
What are some key attributes to look for in a marketing operations team member?
There’s big talk these days about “big data” in education—looking for patterns of behavior as students click through online classrooms and using the insights to improve instruction. One start-up company that manages online discussion forums for thousands of courses recently performed its first major analysis of behavioral trends among students, and found what its leaders say amounts to advice for instructors.