Big Daddy of Big Data

I’ve just spent the last few days as the guest of the New Frontier Group as one of the keynote speakers at their CEO retreat in Austria. The theme of the event was “Shaping Future – Delivering Results”. The two day session was designed to stimulate the attendees thought processes in relation to business innovation.

New Frontier assembled one of the most impressive set of business thinkers I have seen in the last few years. Knell Nordstrom from Finland, the author of “Funky Business Continue Reading

Well it’s a big question, but certainly one Chris Yiu of the Policy Exchange thinks the answer to is “Yes” Big Data can save the UK Government £33bn per year. I’ve just attended a Policy Exchange event which EMC Greenplum co-hosted with Francis Maude at the Policy Exchange where The Cabinet Minister, Chris and James Petter, the EMC MD, all discussed how this could be achieved. One important recommendation was that the Government should adopt a Code for Responsible Analytics. Something Continue Reading

Is there anything to be learned from the music industry? The Derby? And the Jubilee Celebrations?

I never sit down and write a blog just because it’s been six days since my last post. Usually I’m working through a business concept or challenge and something in another World will bring clarity to my thoughts.  And like London busses sometimes several ideas will arrive at once!

My last blog, “What is the collective name for a group of Data Scientists” got such a positive response that I wanted to continue on the theme of community. Also I’ve just returned from the 2nd Data Science summit, where Greenplum announced our continuing commitment to community with the launch of the Greenplum Analytics Workbench. This will enable the Apache Hadoop open source community to validate code to scale on a regular, ongoing basis. With contributions certified at scale, enterprises can run them with confidence. (download technical paper here)

I’d also attended a meeting of the Data Science
London community with EMI to plan our next “Crowd Sourcing” data science Continue Reading

120 days into my tenure leading the Greenplum business in the UK and Ireland and we’ve just completed our first sponsorship of a global “Hackathon”.  What a great experience. Working closely with the Data Science London community, as part of their Big Data Week, together we organized 200 plus data scientists in 10 cities to compete, over a 24 hour period, to predict the air quality in Cook County in the US.  Seeing all the data scientists at Big Data Week got me thinking. What is the collective noun for a group of data scientists?

Continue Reading

I’m here at Newbury races and in the horse racing community the end of March is a time of both reflection and anticipation.

The jumping community reflects on how their horses performed at the Cheltenham festival in March. Years of work cumulating in one week of championship racing in the Cotswold countryside. Others in the community are anticipating the Aintree festival where the most famous of races, The Grand National, is to be run in a few weeks.

And anticipation is the watchword in the flat racing community. With the first of the five classic races only six weeks away the new season is just under way and trainers and connections wait to see Continue Reading

So there I am sitting on a horse waiting to compete in a show jumping competition when one of the other competitors, having just completed their round, appears back in the warm up ring. She says to her coach

“I don’t know what went wrong, I corrected his (the horses) position before each fence, but we still knocked several of them”

The coach, clearly had been here before;

“Yes you did and that’s the problem. You’re correcting the horse after the fact. You’re waiting for something to happen before you react. The winning riders are reading all the signals and predicting what might happen and taking corrective action first”

“But there is so much going on” says a clearly frustrated pupil, “The crowd, the speed and rhythm of the horse, the type of fence, the line of the fences, the next fence, the time left, my position, the horses lead leg…”

Having attended the Greenplum Data Science Event on Feb 8^th it’s clear that whether you are Marcus Du Sautoy, Peter Hinssen or Professor Nigel Shadbolt predicting outcomes based on vast quantities of data, just like our rider, is a key skill that business needs to develop.

Peter Hinssen discussed how the

“power of participation is changing the world” and that “markets are becoming networks of intelligence and the need to have deep technology but also a drastically different consumption model.”

Whilst Marcus Du Sautoy cautioned about identifying patterns too early Continue Reading

I’ve just returned from my “sheep dip” sorry new hire training on the US west coast. What movie did I watch on the plane on the way over, you’ve guessed it

MONEYBALL

How kul is that?

(You can tell I’ve been on the west coast as I’ve started using words like kul which I haven’t done since the 70’s.).

The story of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane’s successful attempt to put together a winning baseball club on a budget by employing computer-generated analysis to draft his players.

A film with data science and predictive analytics at the heart of it – I’m now trendy, I can tell people what I do at dinner parties and they’ll understand.

“Yes I employ Peter Brand Characters who are great with numbers”

One of the points I took away from the film was that the Billy Beane character had to stand firm with his commitment to a radically new approach despite a torrent of resistance Continue Reading

As well as taking on a new job this year I’m also just completing the renovation of a house from top to bottom. I remember the day the plumber arrived to discuss “The Heating”.

Lawrence asked “Is there anything that frustrates you about your current system?”

A long list of niggles we’ve put up with for years came to light;

“Well there’s the pressure for one thing, the water just dribbles through at times, especially when there is high demand, if guests are staying you have to be careful not to flush the loo when someone is in the shower, also we keep getting air locks and are constantly bleeding the system, the flow’s not great and it’s noisy. Apart from that it’s excellent and I’ve put up with it for 20 years”

Lawrence grins; “You do know we had people on the moon in 1969. Architecture has moved on. You’re running an old system called a Combi Boiler that’s just not up to the requirements of your modern day life. Continue Reading

Day 6.  I’ve just taken over the running of EMC’s Analytics business (Greenplum) in the UK&I. Drinking from a fire hose!

Big Data this Big Data that, Massive Parallel  Processing, Scatter Gather Technology, Sentiment Analysis, Bayesian Statistics, met twenty new people already. Chaos? Typical first week.

Then some bright spark from marketing tells me I’m to meet Marcus du Sautoy at a Data Science event on Feb 8^th. “Look forward to it” I say as I type his name into Google.

His big thesis is that although the world looks messy and chaotic, if you translate it into the world of numbers and shapes, patterns emerge and you start to understand why things are the way they are.

I need to be there. Marcus may be able to help. Thinking about it I can’t be the only person trying to make sense of a deluge of data from many different sources and then trying to make some money from it. If you find yourself in the same boat join me at the Data Science Series and hear not only Professor du Sautoy but also Peter Hinssen, Sean Gourley and others who have some great ideas and learning.

http://www.datascienceseries.com/index.php

If you’re interested in learning about building an analytics business for the future and learning about analytics in general then join me on my journey on my blog throughout 2012.