System Z Stands for Zombies

April 24, 2014 Guest Authors Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

We’ve all seen the movies: the lone, ragged survivor of the zombie apocalypse / nuclear disaster / alien attack is forced to confront a decimated landscape, mankind scattered, life as we know it fundamentally changed. While it’s a chilling vision, it’s something that doesn’t repulse or scare us as much as it could, because it just seems so… implausible. You sit in the theater thinking, “Wow, that’s crazy. What would I do in that situation?” Then you get up, get in your car, and drive home, secure in the knowledge that you’ll never need to answer that question. Or will you?

The Great IBM Impact Melting Pot

April 22, 2014 John Mark Ivey Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

With IBM Impact 2014 around the corner (next week!), I was excited to take a long look at the sessions being offered. Wow, what a great line up! This year’s event is at The Venetian in Las Vegas. Maybe that’s why I noticed that my list of sessions I want to attend has an international slant. Speakers from Turkey, Italy, China, Brazil, Scotland, Japan, and other nations are traveling to Nevada next week to share their insights on IBM products.

Analytics and Magical Thinking

April 15, 2014 Adam McClellan Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Any disruptive technology brings with it a disruption in thinking. The Industrial Revolution led for a brief while to a belief in almost infinite human mastery over the physical world. The IT revolution gave us new awareness of our physical and metaphorical interconnectedness with others around the world. So, given the disruptive nature of data analytics and its associated technologies, what disruptions in thinking can we expect from it?

Performance Metrics and “Gaming the System”

March 7, 2014 Adam McClellan Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Performance metrics are a key building block of an organization’s analytics capabilities—with good reason. Everyone wants to understand how well their organization performs, and there’s often data around for easy picking. But, beware. As you develop the discipline of organizational self-analysis, be mindful of the effects your analysis can have on employee behavior.

Top 5 Things SOA Is Not (and What It Really Is)

January 28, 2014 Adrian Rossi Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

During my many years of providing training and consultation on service-oriented architecture (SOA), I have seen many organizations struggle with its adoption. Often, the struggle is because people don’t really know what SOA is.