17 Tue Feb 2015
Posted in Big Data, Consider this, Good Strat, Good Strategy, Martyn Jones, Martyn Richard Jones, Strategy
Tags
Analytics, Big Data, data management, Good Strat, Good Strategy, Martyn Jones, Martyn Richard Jones
Hold this thought: Big Data is King.
Is there just nothing that Big Data isn’t capable of fixing? From terrorism, world hunger, Ebola, HIV, fraud, money laundering and hiring the ‘right’ people through to winning the lottery, curing hangovers, arranging entrapment and finding the love of your life. Big Data is King. Continue reading
12 Thu Feb 2015
Posted in Big Data, Consider this, Good Strat, Information Management, Martyn Jones
Normally I would send such people to see a specialist – no, not a guru, but a sort of health specialist, but because this has happened to me so many times now, I eventually decided to put pen to paper, push the envelope, open up the kimono, and to record my advice for posterity and the great grandchildren.
So, here are my top seven tips for cashing in quick on the new big thing on the block.
1 – A business opportunity for faith
Like every new religion, trend or fad, Big Data has its own founding myths, theology and liturgy, and there is money to be made in it; loadsa lovely jubbly money. By predicating and evangelising Big Data you will be welcomed with open arms into the Big Data faith, and will receive all the attendant benefits that will miraculously and mysteriously fall upon you and your devout friends. Go on, I dare you. Be a Big Data guru, a shepherd to a flock of sheep, and enjoy the wealth, health and happiness that most surely will come your way. You too can look cool in red Prada slippers, a flattering and flowing gown and matching accessories.
2 – Acquire it, multiply it, weigh it, mark it up and sell it on
Simply stated, this is about acquiring other people’s data, by sacred means or profane, marking it up and then selling it on. The value you add is that you act as a trusted conduit, a conduit for good. You may care to enrich the data, swop the order of data, replicate and embellish data, make stuff up, etc. which all serves to ‘add value’ to the data. You may even consider adding nuggets of value to the data, just for kicks and giggles. My best friend’s favourite is injecting the good old ‘diaper and beer’ and ‘friends and family’ clichés into every Big Data collection, as it never fails to thrill, please and delight.
3 – Anything can be anything
The good thing about making money from Big Data is that it doesn’t need to be anything to do with Big Data. Make a 20GB Enterprise Data Warehouse? Call it a Big Data success. Sell 20 boxes of dodgy doughnuts down the alternative market? Proclaim a Big Data triumph. Sell your digital porn stash to your best mate? Point to the incredible invisible hand of the Big Data market at work. See what I’m doing there. Anything can be anything, and you too can cash in on that opportunity, big time.
4 – Big Data Patronage
Tense, nervous headaches? Do you like making up stories about Big Data, or for that matter anything else? Are you a natural born fibber but are strapped for cash? Then worry no longer. If you get a Big Data patron you will be sorted for ‘life’; get two and you’ll be sorted for the afterlife as well. With a Big Data patron you can get the most tenuous, crappiest and superficial of pieces published, promoted and vaunted – globally. Can’t make it up yourself, then outsource and offshore it, after all, just get the keywords right for SEO ranking and the gullible will flock to you in droves. The down side of this profession is that you will be targeted for writing half-truths, quarter-truths and downright lies, and you will be pilloried as a purveyor of rank hyperbole. But don’t worry, take heart and never lose the faith, you will be in good company. As one Big Data guru was want to say ” If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.” Amen! brother.
5 – Big Data Certification
By 2016 there will be global demand for 30 billion Big Data professionals. Are you prepared to cash in on that inevitability? No? Then consider this.
One of my best friends makes his living as a completely phony Big Data Scientist. For two hundred bucks he can make you a Data Scientist or a Big Data guru. Some guys give you an education but this guy gives you immediate access to high paying jobs, sex and a life in the city. Moreover, for an extra 250 bucks you can also become a certified Big Data Trainer, which will allow you to do unto others what has been done unto you.
6 – Creative Technology Reuse
Big Data has heralded in the biggest innovations known in the history of computing, and arguably in the entire history of humankind. One of those new inventions has been the now widely acclaimed and revolutionary ‘flat file data base’ (FFDB), and this has been accompanied with developments in low level operating system primitives that allow for the processing of these collections and hierarchies of FFDBs. So, if one has a mind to do so, one can get some real business leverage off of these new tendencies by borrowing 21st century technology found in old operating system hacks from the sixties and seventies and eighties and nineties and… Well, the point is that in order to get serious funding it is no longer good enough to have a half page business plan, it is also necessary to eke out ‘stuff’ that works within the new paradigms of Big Data and Big Data Analytics. For my next venture I will be looking for serious funding for my ‘Arbitrary Dawdle Down Data Street’ (AD3S) Big Data Analytics platform, a platform designed to support virtual 1k bit processing and the massively parallel provision of global regular expression search and match (S&M), concatenation and listing, and cooperative data-driven and streamed data extraction and reporting. I’m hoping to attract the attention of governments, the EU, the Manic Street Preachers, the UN, China, Vladimir Putin, the DOD, HP, Oracle, Gartner, Lana Del Rey, Deloitte and IBM. So, this is going to be absolutely massive. Word!
7 – Big Data Brokerage
According to leading management consultants and industry watchers Gartner, McKinsey and Deloitte, data needs to be managed and accounted like any other asset, such as money. To get into a similar view-point requires a massive leap of faith, but it is a conversion that might drive dividends. One avenue to be explored in eking out value from the apparently massively valuable Big Data lakes, silos and pools is through the operation of a Big Data Brokerage. A Big Data Brokerage is a business whose main responsibility is to be an intermediary that puts Big Data buyers and Big Data sellers together in order to facilitate a transaction. Big Data Brokerage companies are compensated via commission after the Big Data transaction has been successfully completed. They may also charge introductory fees. Just imagine the wealth of business opportunities in that. You could become the Goldman Sachs of data.
I hope you enjoyed this piece and would be pleased to hear your views on this and other subjects.
Whilst I understand the attraction and even the need of creating a new and significant growth industry, I would also advise a degree of restraint, and whilst I see that “Big Data” (the consideration of the potential value of All Data) has its allure, I also think that some good sense and informed caution should also prevail.
Thank you so much for reading.
Martyn Richard Jones
08 Sun Feb 2015
Posted in Big Data, Consider this, Good Strat, Good Strategy, Martyn Jones, Stories
Tags
Analytics, Big Data, data lake, Good Strat, Good Strategy, Martyn Jones, Martyn Richard Joens, trading
The Wow Wow Factor! Trading, Big Data and 7 HabitsHi, I’m Ricky Jones, boss and co-founder of Becci Boo International Investments. Last week we said goodbye to our best ever Big Data energy commodity trader. He’d been with us for years.
Sadly, Coco Jones was determined to retire to the countryside, to his birthplace, to his real home, a snug little village in the hills of Montseny, and there was absolutely nothing we could do to convince him to stay. The thing about Coco is that he is not like you or me, he’s a highly intelligent Catalan sheepdog.
So, you might ask, how did Coco get to be a star trader at the Becci Boo Hedge Fund? Was it the tools he used? Was it the techniques he adopted? Was it the food he ate? What was so special about him and his amazing abilities? It’s a long story that I will relate as briefly as I can.
Back in time, there was one particularly disastrous week of trading at Becci Boo. Something had gone really wrong with our once reliable Big Data Trade Analytics platform, and wrong bets were being placed right, left and centre – and against trader’s better judgement. The CFO was livid. Out he comes onto the trading floor, swearing and blinding. “God! You guys are the damn pits! What the hell do you think you are doing? Can’t you get anything right? A Catalan sheepdog could trade more effectively than you feckless lot of feckless things.”
I try and diffuse the situation. “Come on, Jordi, don’t be like that, we’re only human and this is a tough business.” “You don’t believe me” he replies. “Sure, but you’re not going to convince me that a Catalan sheepdog could be a substitute for a highly experienced human trader are you?” “How much do you want to bet? These superior four legged beings would never place any faith in things that they don’t understand or can’t control, and they certainly wouldn’t need your Big Data gizmo to make a success of things.”
So, in the following weeks we arrange to run an experiment. We ring around all the owners of registered Catalan sheepdogs and ask them if they would like their dog to take part in our simple trading experiment. Food, lodging and generous expenses all included. We easily manage to get together 64 Catalan sheepdogs and their owners from all over Europe. The experiment we design is quite simple.
We give each dog a gadget (and actually for the more sophisticated dogs it was a smart phone and specially designed app) with two big buttons on it, a red button and a yellow button.
Every Monday morning we ask the assembled dogs to press one of two buttons depending on whether they think that the chosen energy commodities market will close higher or lower at the end of the week.
Red button for a higher closing price, yellow button for a lower closing price. As you might imagine dear reader it’s a walk in the park for these cunning canines. To make sure that all of the participating dogs have equal and fair chances in the experiment, we provide guardians with access to all our big data analytics, and we have multiple screens set up in each studio apartment so that each dog can follow all of the financial news that they need to take in and then view the results of machine learning, data mining and predictive analytics.
At the end of week one, 32 dogs remain in the experiment, and the other 32 are sadly sent home. Every week the exercise is repeated, and every week less dogs move on to the next round. By the end of week 5 only two dogs remain. By the end of week 6 we have a sole winner, Afi Bastò, who has accurately predicted the market movement of our energy commodities market for a record six weeks in succession. It’s an amazing success that proves Jordi right. Unfortunately, this is where things start to go wrong. Our marketing department tweets the news of the amazing Afi and it immediately goes viral.
Articles appear in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Economist, Cinco Dias and Les Échos, hailing the amazing brilliance of the newly discovered Catalan commodity trader.
Hundreds of interviews are held and millions of photos make the rounds of the social and professional networks. Over the following year Afi is interviewed, researched, studied and investigated. Academic papers are written about him.
Amazing claims are made about his canine knowledge, wisdom and experience. This is shortly followed by the publication of a plethora of bestselling business books, with titles such as: The 7 Habits of the Highly Effective Canine – Personal Lessons in Trading; Be More Afi and Grow Rich; The Gos d’Atura That Conquered Chicago; Learn to Trade like Afi; Good Sheepdog, Great Afi; Who Moved My Dog Food; How Afi outperformed Big Data Analytics; etc.
Which unfortunately all goes to Afi’s head, and he begins to seriously lose his commodity trading mojo. So much so, that by the end of the year, we let Afi go, and we bring back “the incredible” Coco Jones, the dog that managed to get the market movements right for five weeks in a row, and who was only pipped at the post by “the amazing” Afi.
Since then, Coco has helped us to win far more than we lose, he has had an innate knack of being able to combine market knowledge with statistical analysis and a certain indescribable ‘insight’ that no one quite manages to understand never mind emulate, and all combined with an amazing caring character.
So, as you might imagine, we were really sad to see him go. After his epic leaving party, where he is acclaimed by all and sundry, but especially by Jordi, all the staff assembled outside the office entrance to see him off, and as he was slowly chauffeured away down the driveway he turned and looked back, and his face said it all. “I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life”.
Many thanks for reading.
Here’s Coco paddling in his Big Data Lake
File under: Good Strat, Good Strategy, Martyn Richard Jones, Cambriano Energy, Iniciativa Consulting, Iniciativa para Data Warehouse, Tiki Taka Pro
19 Mon Jan 2015
Posted in Analytics, Big Data, Consider this, statistics
Hold this thought: If Data Warehousing was Tesco then Big Data would be the “try something different”.
Since the publication of the article Aligning Big Data, which basically laid out a draft view of DW 3.0 Information Supply Framework and placed Big Data within a larger framework, I have been asked on a number of occasions recently to go into a little more detail with regards to the Analytics Data Store (ADS) component. This is an initial response to those requests. Continue reading
17 Sat Jan 2015
30 Tue Dec 2014
Posted in Big Data
I Martyn Richard Jones
I have looked into the immediate twelve-month future of Big Data, and the immediate future looked back and said, “Be more goat”.
20 Sat Dec 2014
Posted in Big Data, Data governance, Data Warehousing
Tags
Martyn Richard Jones
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!
From the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Big Data is dead! Long live Information Management. Continue reading
09 Tue Dec 2014
Posted in Big Data, Marty does
Martyn Richard Jones
2026 Remaster
HERE WE GO WITH BIG DATA VIBESClive: Yeah, well, you had to, didn’t you? You had to stand up for what you stood for, didn’t you? I mean, the only time I remember a similar occasion was, I was in, errm… I was at Spurs, Tottenham Hotspurs.
Derek: Yeah.
Clive: I was watching a game against Arsenal, and this bloke come up to me and said, “Hello”.
Derek: Oh no…
Derek and Clive – This Bloke Came Up to Me Continue reading
11 Sat Oct 2014
Posted in Big Data, BS, Data Warehouse, disinformation, information, Knowledge, wisdom
Martyn Richard Jones
Remaster for 2026
I am a sceptic. Part of the awkward squad of troublemakers.
People who ask questions and who won’t stop asking.
People who won’t take bullshit for an answer.
People who are not preprogrammed to unquestioningly follow specific paths.
But to question everything.
Such as, “What the feck’s that all about then?” Continue reading
08 Wed Oct 2014
Posted in awareness, Big Data, business, Business Intelligence, Data Warehouse, operational, pig data, Strategy
Martyn Richard Jones
Remastered for 2026 – Buy my books! Get my advice! Benefit from me!
I frequently include the term Operational Awareness in talks.
I think it’s important for strategy.
So I wrote a piece that tried to convey what I mean by the term. Continue reading
GOOD STRATEGY 