Hi, I’m Sven Balnojan. I think data will power every piece of our existence in the near future. I collect “Data Points” to help understand this near future. If you want to support this, please share it on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook. Here are your weekly three data points: Simple Data Discovery, Modern Data Architectures & Data Meshes. 1 Whale, a Dead Simple Data Discovery Tool “What does this column mean? Where can I find the order data?” Questions that bug every data engineer, every machine learner, and every analyst every day. There are a lot of powerhouse tools to […]

Office Hours There are four ways to decentralize and structure data teams. Learn how to choose the right one. (The four typical data team organization forms. Image by the author.) Introducting Data Organizations Data organizations within companies look like snowflakes. From close up, they are all unique, but if you step back, they all kind of look alike. They all deal with data and are usually organized around some data or analytics department. That makes it hard to make organizational changes because it’s really hard to see the overarching picture. I like to propose a simple viewpoint that might make this easier. […]

The three organization forms Uber, Linkedin and AirBnb explored to integrate machine learning into the organization Functional, central, or hybrid team org? Image by the author. Uber, LinkedIn, and Airbnb all are massive machine learning success stories, not because they produce cool research or got lots of talent, but because they actually manage to turn data into money, and lots of it. All three companies spent years exploring different ways of organizing machine learning work. I’d like to share the key insights that I took away from their efforts, so you don’t have to spend years exploring different models. Three Ways […]

Photo by Fernando Hernandez on Unsplash. Let’s update our productivity instead of updating our software packages again and again… “Ever thought of updating yourself instead of updating your mobile” — Yash Gupta Whenever I clone a new public repository and start the setup process, I think about the concept of the .go concept. I now start every new public repository I release with a “./go” script, which makes the setup process for everyone as simple as typing “./go”. However recently, I started to think that equally the ./get-up-to-date script should be part of every repository as well! A ./go script is an amazing practice, but for a […]

Understanding decentralization will help you understand, evaluate & adapt to current technology trends. Photo credit: Nhia Moua “Decentralization is based on the simple notion that it is easier to macrobull***t than microbull***t. Decentralization reduces large structural asymmetries.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life The human body is an amazing system. Optimized over a couple of million years, it seems to work pretty well. Scholar and statistician Nassim Taleb is a huge fan of nature, and as I recently reread some of his work, what stuck with me is the level of decentralization that nature built […]

“Leveraging exponential technology to tackle big goals and using rapid iteration and fast feedback to accelerate progress toward those goals is about innovation at warp speed. But if entrepreneurs can’t upgrade their psychology to keep pace with this technology, then they have little chance of winning this race.” ― Peter H. Diamandis, Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash. Introduction It’s still Day 1 for data. Companies, governments, non-profits around the world are already extracting a whole lot of value from data. But really, compared to the things that are coming, […]

Understand what Good Data looks like and quickly discover Bad Data Good Data vs. Bad Data. Good Data, derives the data strategy from the company strategy, feeding into the datacisions cycle. Bad Data has lots of “initiatives” flying around the company, without a coherent data strategy. Image by the author. In 1990 the Virginia based bank “Signet Bank” decided to trust two smart people, Richard Fairbanks and Nigel Morris, and make a major investment into data. They decided to turn the customer credit department into a large laboratory, “testing” out different kinds of credit terms on different credit taker characteristics and thus […]

Continuous Intelligence, DataOps, Data Democratisation, and Data Meshes are the four major trends in data & analytics I’ve been observing lately. All of them could become relevant to your business in 2020–21, not because they are the “latest thing” but because there are three major underlying forces pushing those trends forward. And they will come to you in one form or the other. Analytics & data strategy: the three forces, data demand, data growth, and complexity growth with the four trends. Image by the author. In this article I will explain: What the three forces are that will define analytics strategies in […]

Saying “No” is the most important job of the product owner. It’s really the reason d’etre for this role. But there are lots of different ways and reasons to say “No”. This is my stab at categorizing three important “No”’s a product owner can deliver. A typical SCRUM backlog, colors imply different projects or feature areas. All images by the author. I still like the definition of a product owner as “if you’re responsible for building a product in a company using scrum, then you’re a product owner.” Or to say it with the words of Melissa Perri Product Owner is […]

Why you should delete requests that are past what you consider “soon & forecastable”. (Created with http://www.stripcreator.com by the author) With 100s of requests for a product, what do you do with the ones that simply are not on your current horizon? Do you put them into the “in two quarters” column? Do you put them on the “idea pile”? Do you keep pushing them back quarter by quarter? I suggest a different method, which is the honest & transparent one in my opinion, but not the ones people tend to like at first. Delete them. More precisely, delete everything that […]