Learning journey – Agile@Scale – The video
22 Wednesday May 2019
Posted in agile, 4th generation Data Warehousing, agile@scale
Monthly Archives: May 2019
Personal Integrity Key: Ensuring personal legitimacy in the social-media age
21 Tuesday May 2019
Martyn Richard Jones
Bruxelles 21st May 2019
Listen up!
What the world needs now is the concept of a Personal Integrity Key. It really would stop a lot of hassle.
But, I hear you ask “So, what’s a Personal Integrity Key, then, Mart?
I’ll come to that in a moment, but first some scene setting.
Consider this: Zionism, Nationalism and Suffragettes
20 Monday May 2019
Posted in Economics, Good Strategy, Philosophy, Politics, Strategy
Martyn Richard Jones
Bruxelles 20th May 2019
Listen up!
For me, a young person in the UK who claims to be a Zionist is like someone shy of a hundred years of age pretending to be a suffragette. Continue reading
Consider this: Huawei, Google and the USA
20 Monday May 2019
Martyn Richard Jones
Bruxelles 20th May 2019
Listen up!
I have just read Simon Jenkin’s article, published in The Guardian, on the current barney between the USA and China – “Google’s Huawei ban is good news: tech giants shouldn’t always get their way“.
This is one of those rare occasions when I don’t agree entirely with what Simon has to say, but, the piece still carries a lot of good sense and finely tuned criticism.
For me, this quarrel isn’t fundamentally about security or reining in big-tech. This is essentially about trade wars, base protection, maintaining power and imposing influence. In short, it’s about hubris, intimidation and violence on the global political stage.
But, at the bottom of all of this is the Trump administration’s Homeric ignorance and epic ability to simply fanny-around.
Consider this: Clueless in IT: Can‘t listen. Aren‘t learning. Won‘t win.
19 Sunday May 2019
Posted in 4th generation Data Warehousing, IT Circus, IT fraud, IT strategy, IT World, listening, Philosophy, Polemic, Politics
Martyn Richard Jones
Bruxelles 19th May 2019
Listen well
I am a big fan of listening well and in continually improving listening skills. Yes, there are times when we can over-listen but this is also linked with skills of diplomacy and politics. How we listen should inform us a lot about what we and others really are.
So, whilst I am a big advocate of listening well I see that the world of business, and especially the sub-world of IT, is plagued with vain, impulsive and badly informed vote-takers who stubbornly resist the need to listen well and who will attempt to deftly fill the whole of the available time bashing their gums in communicating what are to all intents and purposes vacuous inanities and long litanies of meaningless clichés, full of terms that they either abuse or misunderstand; or even a bit of both.
And, as anyone who has worked with IT will know, I am not making this up. We used to call this charlatanry now we simply call it consulting. It still isn’t turning a pig’s ear into a silk purse, no matter how much people insist. But, there it is, in all its magnificent mediocrity.
Some people tell me it’s because IT attracts people with autism and Asperger’s syndrome; whatever that is.
I tend to put this refusal to listen down to other things; my money is firmly on arrogance and ignorance.
But, they just don’t get it, do they? Continue reading
Agile@Scale is Corporate Terrorism – Discuss
15 Wednesday May 2019
Posted in 4th generation Data Warehousing
Afilonius Rex
Madrid 15th May 2019
If terrorism went full in your-face digital it could do no worse than adopt the tactics of those management consulting companies and IT laughing academies who are encouraging corporations to fully embrace Agile at Scale, a short, succinct and precise term for labelling a sure fire way to turn your decent, reasonable and western liberal oriented business into a failing totalitarian corporate hell-hole of an enterprise gone awry.
Just think about it for a moment… Continue reading
Faking It – Data, media and manipulation
12 Sunday May 2019
Martyn Richard Jones
Brussels, 12th May 2019
It has recently been revealed that political campaigns are taking the unprecedented step of hiring the services of consulting companies that will assist them in reaching, convincing and influencing voters.
This is a scandalous abuse of power, privilege and technology.
Big Data and data science are being used on a massive scale to manipulate political elections, control voter behaviour and to undermine constitutional democracy and the rule of law. There is no doubt about this; I read it on the internet. Continue reading
Learning to hate Agile-to-scale
11 Saturday May 2019
Afilonius Rex
Cordoba, 12th May 2019
Ladies and gentlemen, the performance is about to start!
In 1998, as Programme, Product and Competence Centre manager at Hewlett-Packard, I signed the Agile Manifesto.
At that time, I had been using elements of the Agile-method mindset for the best part of sixteen years.
Previously, in 1995 I was trained and certified in Iterations, an iterative and agile-like methodology for building, maintaining and expanding data warehouses and data marts. Continue reading
Deep learning and shallow understanding
11 Saturday May 2019
Posted in 4th generation Data Warehousing, AI, All Data, Big Data, deep learning
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Martyn Richard Jones
Bruxelles, 29th April 2019
To begin at the beginning
In spite of or perhaps because of the many years I worked in artificial intelligence I believe that the current long-distance love affair with AI and what is also euphemistically termed ‘deep learning’ to be somewhat irrational in its exuberance.
In the eighties I was experimenting with automatic feature extraction, pattern recognition and parallel distributed processing (see Rumelhart and McClelland), which led me to adaptive neural networks.
As a result, my research and development in this field showed me that automatically mining nuggets of gold or automatically gaining real insight from data is not easy, far from stable and frequently not achievable. Interesting experiments, but frequently impractical in a business setting. Continue reading
