Ask Martyn and questions you may have that are related to Organisational Strategy and Information Architecture and Management.
This weekend I read a piece on the Information Management website by Steve Miller with the title of Big Data vs. the Data Warehouse. It’s an old piece, from March 2014.
It was in response to a piece by Bill Inmon titled “Big Data or Data Warehouse?” Turbocharge Your Porsche – Buy an Elephant, in which he singled out for criticism the ad campaign of a big-data and Hadoop promoter.
The IT business suffers a malaise, it also affects other businesses. In IT, like in other lines of business, much of what has been made is eventually sidelined and forgotten. If it was ever on the radar in the first place. (more…)
Martyn Richard Jones
Remastered for 2026
I came into IT at the tail end of the seventies, joining one of the original computing pioneers.
It was a conservative company led by veterans, engineers, accountants, and sales professionals, with many ties to the US administration, the Department of Defence, and intelligence agencies.
My interests at the time were in philosophy, politics and economics. I liked meeting people and talking, and I also enjoyed helping people solve real-life business problems, so I was always engaged with corporate staff and executive management rather than with the real hard-core technicians and engineers.
The thing is, I had no idea what constrained IT, so I never had that baggage when thinking about solutions.
What triggers a review of organisational strategy?
Well, typically organisations usually shy away from major strategy reviews when things are just ticking over quite nicely. The old axiom of “if it isn’t broke don’t fix it”, has a lot of power of persuasion, even in cases where the logical and coherent thing to do would be to continually review strategy.
If you judged everything by what the media tells us, you would get the impression that the world is in continuous revolt. Violence, destruction and protest is everywhere. It’s like as if every hour of the day there is one reason or another to go marching, standing or sitting somewhere about something.
Well, that’s the impression one may get.
It’s 9:45 on a cold and wintry Monday morning; crowds of people are huddled around the water fountains as gossip spreads throughout the building like wildfire. There has been a multiple data pile up in the Widget and Wodget data centre, there are a few casualties but no reported fatalities. No one knows what quite is going on, as shadowy rumour hints at flying pigs, rebellious ducks and rolling heads.
It was to be a big day for Widget and Wodget, “your neighbourhood’s favourite Prime Brokers”, it was billed as the Senior Mega Monday to end all Mega Mondays. A mega coup for the hallowed financial institution of W&W; today would be the day that would herald in the culmination of two major IPOs and one multi-billion global M&A deal signed off, as well as the launch of a raft of CDOs.