One of the most highly valued features of information architecture is accuracy. Everyone wants everything to be perfect: every answer should be as factually accurate as possible and available immediately to whomever needs it. This was the promise of the internet as a whole, and of the web specifically (especially the “semantic web“, which I [...]

News.com has an article about HorizonOne, a company that is utilizing technology in a way that makes a difference and makes a profit.  They have created new, high-tech vending machines for schools that dispense healthy food and teach children how to eat in a more nutritious manner. According to the article: Software installed in the refrigerated box connects the student IDs [...]

In the IT world, I am not sure if I should take user-driven innovation to be a sign of progress or a sad display on how difficult things have become. With all the talk about Web 2.0, wikis, social media, and the cathedral and the bazaar, I would think that any technologist who isn’t at least passingly [...]

In the IT world, I am not sure if I should take user-driven innovation to be a sign of progress or a sad display on how difficult things have become. With all the talk about Web 2.0, wikis, social media, and the cathedral and the bazaar, I would think that any technologist who isn’t at least passingly [...]

Steve Hamm at Business Week has a short post about the hiring practices of Chinese IT firms, which hopefully will open the eyes of some of the leaders here in the west. Symbio is an outsourcing company that was facing a problem with not having enough qualified recruits. Their response? [Symbio CEO Jacob] Hsu and his colleagues decided they needed a [...]

GigaOM has an interesting article about the impact of web 2.0 on network engineers. Namely, that the maturation of the internet has made the skills of a good network person a lot less important: I see the current state of the Internet as the ultimate success … You can deploy a wildly successful Web 2.0 application that serves millions [...]

An interersting finding in IT World relating the people who commit sabotage in the workplace and their work behaviors. The article details that … The research suggests that potential troublemakers should be easy to spot. Nearly all the cases of cybercrime investigated were carried out by people who were “disgruntled, paranoid, generally show up late, argue with colleagues, and generally perform [...]

The Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Journal has a very detailed article discussing the implications of spreadsheets on compliance and financial regulation. It is a well thought out, well written piece that gives very specific, very conservative steps to ensure that an organization doesn’t run into regulatory issues from day-to-day business practices. One thing I appreciated in the article was its realistic [...]

Steve Tuck from Datanomic has an post about data quality on dq:view, where he discusses (and tries to dismantle) the use of a government produced master data file for mailing addresses in the UK. While the posting is very specific to a single application, it speaks to a situation that drives a lot of data management issues. He writes: Authorative [...]

I have been working with Amazon Web Services (and EC2) a lot lately, and have made some observations that really fly in the face of conventional wisdom. I work in ETL, which means I need to get a hold of big iron to crunch on big data. Machines are expensive, licenses are expensive, storage and networks are cheap. Scalability [...]