20 Sunday Sep 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
Laughing@Data.Com (often discussed alongside The 2030 Data Agenda essays and writings) is a satirical and polemical book by veteran data architect and consultant Martyn Rhisiart Jones.
Part memoir, part industry autopsy, and part manifesto, the book takes a witty and sharp look at the absurdity of the IT and enterprise data world. Rather than being another standard tech guide, it functions as a survival manual for anyone dealing with corporate tech hype cycles.
Continue reading08 Sunday Feb 2026
Martyn Rhisiart Jones, Madrid 28th January 2026
I would like to introduce you to a pragmatic approach to Big Data and Big Data Analytics. It is real-world focused and business-centric. This is the best approach to Big Data you are ever likely to find. Yet, I am still significantly understating the magnificent utility. It is also timely and has all the pertinent facets of the approach.
Continue reading03 Tuesday Feb 2026
Posted in All Data, Big Data, Big Data 7s, Big Data Analytics, dark data, data architecture, Data governance, data hub, Data Lake, data management, Data Mart, data mesh, data science, Data Supply Framework, Data Warehouse, Data Warehousing, Inform, educate and entertain., The Amazing Big Data Challenge
By Martyn Rhisiart Jones | Madrid, 3rd February 2026
In a landmark session at the Welsh Academy, Sir Afilonius Rex sat down with Martyn Rhisiart Jones. They aimed to dismantle our outdated obsession with “data management.” The verdict? The era of the digital fortress is dead. In its place, a new paradigm of Cognitive Liquidity and Data Autonomy is emerging, redefining how we integrate global knowledge.
Continue reading21 Wednesday Jan 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
AI, Artificial Intelligence, classification, consciousness, data, information, ontology, Philosophy, technology
Martyn Rhisiart Jones
Madrid, Tuesday 20th January 2026
Read my absolutely fabulous books: http://www.goodstrat.com/books
For most of its life in information technology, bolloxology has carried the faint smell of intellectual fart-like embarrassment. Too academic for product teams. Too rigid for startups. Too slow for an industry trained to ship first and rationalise later. Too smelly. It promised machines that could understand the world, and delivered, instead, a generation of beautiful bullshit diagrams and very little working software.
By 2026, that judgement looks increasingly wrong. Not because bolloxology suddenly got better, but because everything else did, and in doing so, exposed a missing layer in modern computing: meaning.
Continue reading20 Tuesday Jan 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
AI, Artificial Intelligence, classification, consciousness, data, information, ontology, Philosophy, technology
Martyn Rhisiart Jones
Madrid, Tuesday 20th January 2026
Read my absolutely fabulous books: http://www.goodstrat.com/books
For most of its life in information technology, ontology has carried the faint smell of intellectual embarrassment. Too academic for product teams. Too rigid for startups. Too slow for an industry trained to ship first and rationalise later. It promised machines that could understand the world—and delivered, instead, a generation of beautiful diagrams and very little working software.
By 2026, that judgement looks increasingly wrong. Not because ontology suddenly got better, but because everything else did—and in doing so, exposed a missing layer in modern computing: meaning.
Continue reading13 Tuesday Jan 2026
Posted in Snippet
Tags
AI, Behavioural Economics, Business, Business Management, data, Data Warehousing, ethics-in-work, Information and Technology, Information Technology, Organisational Autism, organisational-culture, professionalism, Strategy, technology, work-ethic
Martyn Rhisiart Jones08 Thursday Jan 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
architect, Business, data, history, information, literature, technology, Wales, writing
Martyn Rhisiart Jones
Location, 22nd December 2025
Weaving the Dragon’s Data: A Welsh-Inspired Tale for Enterprise Architects in the New Year – 2026/01/01
The calendar turns to a fresh page in this crisp January of 2026. We, enterprise data and information architects, stand at a new threshold. Another year welcomes us, brimming with digital transformations. Data lakes swell like the River Taff after a storm. Information architectures evolve like the ancient mountain tops of Snowdonia. But amidst the algorithms and schemas, let’s pause for a moment of whimsy. What if we drew inspiration from the misty realms of Welsh myths and legends? Wales, that land of dragons and bards, offers a tapestry of stories. These stories mirror our quests: taming chaotic data into structured wisdom. They are about preserving cultural legacies in vast repositories. They ignite innovation from the sparks of history. In this Happy New Year ode, we’ll begin a narrative journey through Welsh lore. It is infused with the spirits of its iconic figures. Dylan Thomas, Dannie Abse, Richard Burton, Shirley Bassey, Paul Robeson, and Gwynfor Evans are part of this infusion. These spirits illuminate the art of data stewardship.
Continue reading17 Wednesday Dec 2025
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
crafts, data, information, Inmon, intelligence, knit, knitting, knowledge, unstructured, warfare, writing, yarn
Oza-Cesuras, Europe 17th December 2025
The soldiers never noticed her.
She sat where women had always sat. She was by the window and by the road. She was near the iron veins of the railway. Her hands were busy, her gaze soft. The love was in her eyes. The slow music of needles clicked and clacked like rain on Bethesda slate. In Wales, they would have called it cynefin, the comfort of the known. In Galicia, the way things have always been done. Magical, mysterious and mindful
Continue reading13 Saturday Dec 2025
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
12-wishes, 2025, 2026, AI, Architecture, Artificial Intelligence, chatgpt, christmas, data, information, knowledge, llm, Management, technology
Martyn Richard Jones
Our man in Spain.
A Coruña, 13th December 2025
As 2025 winds down, the tinsel comes out. It’s tempting to imagine a quieter, saner digital ecosystem on the horizon. Call it festive optimism or a data professional’s annual catharsis. Here are twelve wishes for 2026. They are equal parts hard-edged realism, FT Weekend reflection, and Wired-grade futurism.
Continue reading10 Wednesday Dec 2025
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
AI, Artificial Intelligence, brand, data, digital-marketing, Good Strat, Good Strategy, information, intellectual-capital, knowledge, Marketing, operational-platform, technology
The Oracle of Delphi and Editorial Team
Spain, 10th December 2025
In the sprawling digital bazaar of 2025 and the impending and interesting 2026, where every second-domain site peddles AI hype, data fakehouse, data mess or crypto snake oil, goodstrat.com stands out as a refreshingly unapologetic intellectual fortress.
It’s not a glossy corporate brochure. It is not a paywalled newsletter farm. It’s the online HQ of Martyn Richard Jones. He is a grizzled data, information and knowledge architect and self-styled “Data Shouterer-in-Chief.” He’s been dissecting the guts of information systems since the dial-up era.
Continue reading10 Wednesday Dec 2025
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
2026, agentic, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Business, chatgpt, data, gemini, grok, Management, musk, technology, trends
Martyn Rhisiart Jones
Somewhere in Spain, 10th December 2025
Oh, brilliant. Gather round, comrades. It’s time for another installment of “Tech Executives Discover That Computers Need Electricity.” This time, they’ve dressed it up in a shiny frock and called it “2026 Data Trends.” Christ almighty, where do we even start?
Continue reading14 Wednesday May 2025
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
AI, data, faith, life, mental-health, technology, writing
Full-Private Number-One in the Awkward Squad of the rank and file of life was Sloppy, and yet had his glimmering notions of standing true to the Colours.
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
I am a sceptic, part of the awkward squad of troublemakers.
Such as, “What the hell is that all about?”
Continue reading23 Wednesday Apr 2025
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
data, Economics, economy, finance, information, knowledge, News, Politics, social-justice, Tax evasion, tax-haven, taxation, wisdom, world-asset-register
Martyn Richard Jones, A Coruña, 22nd April 2025 – Buy Revealing Wealth
If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper-middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end – people like myself – should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it.
Warren Buffett[1]
Continue reading17 Thursday Apr 2025
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Without a grounding in statistics, a Data Scientist is a Data Lab Assistant.
Martyn Jones
Hold this thought: There are big lies, damn big lies and data science with an AI chaser.
Statistics is a science, and some would argue that it is one of the oldest sciences.
Statistics can be traced back to the days of Augustus Caesar. He was a statesman, military leader, and the first emperor of the Roman Empire. Some set its provenance even earlier.
Indeed, suppose we accept that censuses are a part of statistics. In that case, we can trace history back to the Chinese Han Dynasty (2 AD). We can also consider the Egyptians (2,500 BC) and the Babylonians (4,000 BC).
Continue reading08 Tuesday Apr 2025
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
AI, Analytics, biden, books, bush, Business, clinton, data, data architecture, empire, grand-strategy, hegemony, honor, honour, information, Martyn Jones, obama, pnac, Politics, reagan, real estate, technology, trump, war, writing
Hold up, folks! You’re going to love these! They are amazing, beautiful, classy, dazzling and eminently readable. And that’s an absolute understatement of Mel Brook’s proportions.
As a writer, I have several works to my name. This post highlights some of these works. It also offers a quick link to the Amazon platform, where you can get your editions.
Continue reading29 Tuesday Oct 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Data’s most significant challenges today are multifaceted and affect organizations across various industries. Here are some of the most important ones:
Continue reading17 Thursday Oct 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
AI, cloud, data, data-at-rest, data-engineering, data-in-motion, information, knowledge, News, structured intellectual capital
Narrator: What is data in motion, and what is data at rest? More to the point, what’s the difference?
Continue reading16 Wednesday Oct 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
bad-data-bible, data, film, information, knowledge, Poetry, relationships, the-big-data-contrarian, updates, writing
Narrator: How do you raise a data child to be a great, honest, committed data professional? That is the question.
Continue reading15 Tuesday Oct 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
Architecture, data, design, english, english-grammar, grammar, information, language, Management, writing
Narrator: To know data, you must know the grammar of data, information and knowledge. Depending on the language and its precision, accuracy, and richness, we will have a reasonable idea of approaching data and information modelling issues. To know data and information, you must understand the business well. People with a technical background and little or no business knowledge are often oblivious to their ignorance regarding business data and information. When you have a technician in the industry who doesn’t understand this, it’s a problem. If your technician is located thousands of kilometres from your company, it’s a disaster waiting to happen. Let’s listen to Pete and Dud wax lyrical about the importance of language and grammar.
Continue reading02 Wednesday Oct 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Martyn Jones, Bilbao, 2nd October 2024
Narrator: Not all data we have is related to strictly business domains such as products, organisation structure and corporate real estate. A lot of data we collect is simply about monitoring all aspects of IT, applications, networking, security and governance. To name just a few.
Dud: What’s all this data in my exhaust? Is my data back-end going well, or do I have a mechanical data governance issue? All this OLTP exhaust data is so tedious and tiring.
Continue reading29 Sunday Sep 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
Martyn Jones, Manhattan, 29th September 2024
Narrator: According to some data-mesh folk, data warehousing is “a data management construct that dates back to the eighties,” I have a problem with that. It’s as if that was somehow a bad thing. Is it? For me, that’s quite a weak argument that, in a way, treats people as if they were idiots.
It is like someone asking Newton, “So, Sir Isaac, you don’t still believe in that old gravity nonsense, do you?”
Continue reading27 Friday Sep 2024
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
Analytics, cloud, comedy, data, data science, databases, enterprise data warehousing, fiction, humor, information, knowledge, Organisational Autism, short-story, statistics
Martyn Jones, Brooklyn, 27th September 2024
Narrator: Another false meme doing the rounds is that Data Warehousing necessarily means monolithic databases. This is not what data warehouses have been for many businesses.
Continue reading16 Saturday May 2020
I wrote an article that took to task purveyors of the data lakehouse nonsense. It got plenty of positive reactions and quite a few negative opinions. But what surprised me the most were the number of people who had already swallowed their pitch. Hook, line and sinker.
So why did I bother to express my opinions on the subject?
Continue reading07 Saturday Oct 2017
Posted in All Data, Big Data, Big Data 7s, Big Data Analytics, dark data, data architecture, Data governance, Data Lake, data management, Data Mart, data science, Data Supply Framework, Data Warehouse, Data Warehousing, Inform, educate and entertain., pig data, The Amazing Big Data Challenge, The Big Data Contrarians
Tags
Martyn Richard Jones, Gif sur Yvette 23rd September 2017
Hi, Friends. As always, it’s great to be able to engage with you again. I am writing to you from the splendorous, wooded and verdant French town of Gif sur Yvette, and I wanted to take this opportunity to address aspects of data for an audience beyond the interests of data management and architecture people.
There is confusion about some of the fundamental aspects of business data, and there shouldn’t. If we strip away all of the boloney, it’s a subject that is quite approachable. In short, ‘it is not rocket surgery’. Continue reading
