Speaking on Big Data in 2012

For my last post of 2012, I thought I’d review some of the major themes that I covered this year.

I completed several posts on Big Data’s organizational challenges. Big Data is a significant opportunity for CIOs and IT Leaders because of its managerial challenges and talent/organizational opportunities. For the CIO, the data largely often exists in multiple repositories and there are technology challenges managing the volume, velocity, and variety of data, but the bigger challenges lie in analytics, exposing the truth, and getting the business to act more data driven. I posted three ways data scientists can differentiate and suggested that spreadsheet jockeys needed to retool to stay relevant – posts to help data junkies see beyond their number crunching activities. For those wanting to read about architecture or technology, I posted my top five tools for big data analytics. In my most recent post, I answer the question of what really is big data. Look for more posts in 2013.

I’m still a big agile in the enterprise advocate and in 2012, followed up my many posts on agile development and agile planning with two highly strategic posts. My strategic agile thinking post is a tool I use to get engineers and product owners to prioritize and think about business value, innovation, technical complexity, and architecture. A personal favorite post is on how and why to estimate in agile where I document the specific process I’ve used in several companies to develop and leverage estimates to make decisions on what to build, and what not to build.

I also wrote a number of posts for CIOs and IT leaders from the art of listening and answering questions to developing executive level presentations. My more detailed posts covered topics on visiting offshore teams, learning from startups, my tweets from this year’s Gartner symposium, and on the CIO Paradox.

What can you expect in 2013? A little more of what you see on Big Data, Agile, and CIOs plus more. I will start a new theme covering innovation in the enterprise. Thanks for reading and tweeting!