Notes on data, AI, IT
and security
No marketing fog. The way I think about real problems with founders and managers.
Real-time data: when the business actually needs it, and when it is over-engineered
How to tell which business tasks genuinely need stream processing, and which ones work perfectly well with regular batch updates.
WannaCry: a lesson for any company with an aging estate and weak recovery
What the WannaCry attack reveals about the real state of patch management and recovery readiness in most organisations.
Cobots in manufacturing: economics before automation
How collaborative robots change the calculation for small and mid-sized manufacturers, and why the return-on-investment question matters more than the technology question.
Vendor dependency: calculate the exit cost before you sign
Why the cost of switching an IT vendor needs to be assessed upfront, and how it affects platform choice and contract terms.
The gap between an ML experiment and a production system
Why machine learning in a notebook and machine learning in a running product are different tasks with different requirements.
A data catalog: the discipline of knowing what you have
Why metadata management is not a technical project but an operational necessity for companies that work with data seriously.
Lift-and-shift: when moving to the cloud does not deliver what you expected
Why mechanically moving infrastructure to the cloud without changing architecture preserves old problems and adds new costs.
Forgotten accounts: the quiet debt in access management
Why access audits are not a one-off check but a continuous process, and how former employees and contractors stay as entry points into systems.
A data lake without governance becomes a swamp
Why corporate data lake projects often end up as a file store nobody knows how to use.
Microservices: the real problem is not service size, it is contracts
When companies move to microservice architecture, they discover that the main difficulty is not splitting the monolith - it is managing dependencies across APIs.
IT budget for 2017: infrastructure versus product
How to think about IT budget allocation when pressure to cut costs and pressure for digital transformation arrive simultaneously.
Robots now compete on software, data and simulation - not mechanics
Competitive advantage in robotics is shifting from hardware to software, data, and development environments.