Join Top Social CIO at the First #CIOChatLive!

If you're a CIO, CISO, or CTO and want to connect with the brightest, most socially vocal group of CIOs then please join us for the first ever  #CIOChatLive in Boston on March 14-15th!

If you are not familiar with #CIOChat, it's a twice per week gathering on Twitter that you can follow with this hashtag. On Thursday at 2pm ET, moderator Myles Suer sends out 4-5 questions around a topic while the Saturday, 10:30am chat is around a single theme.

It's a rotating group of experts weighing in on a wide range of topics

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Critical questions to help define winning AI experiments

Remember the days when big data was the super buzzword and IT invested a ton of money and effort building up Hadoop clusters? Many of them learned the hard way that if you build it, the business may not come. In addition, when you have the infrastructure, you might not have the talent, cleansed data, or practices to demonstrate results.

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3 Reasons Why People Aren't Using Your Data Visualizations

Are you getting the expected usage out of your BI dashboards?

Are the users of your dashboards just accessing them to download the raw data only to review it as a messy, siloed, spreadsheet?

If you taught people how to use one of your dashboards, would they have a basic understanding of how to use other ones developed off the same data sets?

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How Using Big Data Can Be Beneficial For Your Business

By Ashley Lipman

In a recent study, marketing professionals claimed that understanding the interactions their customers had across all of their touchpoints was their biggest challenge. For years, business owners have relied on customer data to help them with things like setting a course for things like marketing and even product development.

While most business owners understand how useful big data can be, many of them are intimidated by the thought of collecting and analyzing this information. Working with software developers is a great way for a business owner to customize their methods of data collection. Are you interested in how developers can help you with the use of Java and other programming languages? If so, be sure to read the Java code coverage tool Cobertura article by Loggly.

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Killing Spreadsheets and Empowering Data Driven Organizations

One of the more polarizing discussions I've had with IT leaders on Twitter chats #IdgTechTalk (Thursdays 12pm ET), #CIOChat (Thursdays at 2pm ET) or at conferences is around the use or misuse of spreadsheets.

From the comments, you can guess people are either "for" or "against" using spreadsheets, but what we are really saying is, "Use them wisely" and find ways to replace them with more robust tools when they become operational.

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How to Capture and Manage Technical Debt in Agile Development

If you're concerned about the technical debt accumulated by your organization, then consider developing ways to capture and measure it.

In my last post, I suggest teams should target nimble architectures and leverage agile principles that enable iterating on the design. Don't plan to get it perfect, plan to get it wrong, iterate on what you learn, and recognize when the business is impacted by architecture limitations.

Here's one approach agile teams can use to capture technical debt during their planning and commitment process.

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Agile Mindsets: Don't try to get a perfect architecture; Plan to get it wrong

I still find teams that have adopted scrum and other agile practices, but still strive for perfection when trying to conceive architectures and implementation plans. Some will also try to think through every edge case to ensure that designs are fully future-proofed.

This is an unrealistic proposition for most teams and people. There's too many unknowns, too much complexity, and businesses do not give technology times sufficient time to perform exhaustive planning. And as we know, the requirements evolve and new needs materialize.

We're practicing agile to support evolving requirements, yet many want their architectures and technical planning to be prescriptive and comprehensive.

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