Category: Data Roles & People
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Did Agile kill the Business Analyst Star?
Where have all the business analysts gone? Agile seems to have placed less emphasis on having a formal business analyst role. Teams end up looking to product owners and developers to analyze and gather requirements. But that can lead to some frustrations and potentially slow your velocity. Is it time to formalize the business analyst…
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Bletchley Park: The Birthplace of Artificial Intelligence
We started Datagami because we wanted to highlight positive uses of data. This month I was thrilled to be able to visit Bletchley Park – one of the most impressive and positive uses of data I know of. The town of Bletchley is just about an hour’s train ride north of London and Bletchley Park…
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Is it me or a toxic teammate?
Yesterday wasn’t a good day. I work on a small “team”. We don’t really interact as a team ought to. We end up working in silos because that is the path of least resistance. We lack any cross training, change control process, and basic communication. One developer deployed code into production without informing anyone. It…
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Trends in Data Management: The Increasing Demand for Product Management
If you had asked me five years ago what direction I wanted to take my career, I am absolutely certain I would not have said product management. Yet here I am, managing a data products team and loving it. Product management wasn’t much of a thing in data five years ago – there were product…
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Looking for a…platypus?
Everyone understands the phrase “looking for a unicorn.” Are you that BI engineer with great people skills? “You’re a unicorn!” Are you a data scientist with a talent for visualization? “You’re a unicorn!” But everyone’s really looking for a platypus, that odd combination of duck, beaver, and otter. While looking for a new position last…
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The Workplace of the Future
We often ask children what they want to be when they grow up. I have no idea what my answer was when I was a kid – some people have memories of wanting to be a doctor or fireman but I was in high school before I decided and then I changed my mind 100…
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New Year’s Resolutions Already?
I don’t know where the rest of the 2018 went. All I know is that it’s December, the last month of the year. Instead of feeling rushed through the last 31 days of 2018, I decided that I will purposefully slow down, reflect, and get a head start on my New Year’s Resolutions. If you’re…
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Interview with Dave Doyle, City of Seattle’s former Open Data Manager
City governments have accumulated enormous amounts of data, and up until the last decade, accessing it was a challenge, even for those working in city governments. With more information going digital, many cities now share datasets publicly. The potential civic benefits are huge: greater government transparency and trust, better-informed decision-making, large-scale efficiencies, and more. Seattle…
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We’ve come a long way and …
My 16 year old daughter recently participated in the Western Aerospace Scholars (WAS) sophomore program. She spent 3 days researching, learning and designing a rover for a robotic mission to Mars. What fun! I was curious about the demographics of her co-participants, specifically, how many other young ladies were participating in the program. Reason for my curiosity;…
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Diversity Goals: A Necessary Discomfort?
When I started out in my undergraduate program, women made up about 50% of my freshman class in Computer Science. But by my senior year, that percentage had dropped to 10%. Bias was part of life – the look of concern when a student who didn’t know me got me for a group assignment, the…
BI Over Beers 