Notes on data, AI, IT
and security
No marketing fog. The way I think about real problems with founders and managers.
Five years of big data: what survived and what did not
A retrospective look at the big data wave: which promises were realised, which turned out to be hype, and what from that period is still worth applying today.
Cobots in mid-size manufacturing: economics and realistic expectations
What a manufacturing company executive should know before considering collaborative robots as an automation tool.
GDPR: personal data becomes an architecture problem
What GDPR changes in how companies must design their systems, not just what policies to write.
Cloud cost management: from IT expense to managed budget
Why cloud costs get out of control, and what it takes to turn them from an unpredictable line item into a managed operational expense.
A single source of truth for operational reporting
Why most companies lack a single authoritative number, and what it takes to create one - without a large IT project.
Cambridge Analytica: a data governance lesson beyond platforms
What the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica story means for ordinary companies - not platforms, but those that use data about people in their daily work.
Kubernetes: when it helps and when it adds complexity
A practical look at container orchestration - for which companies Kubernetes solves real problems and when it creates more issues than it resolves.
GDPR data inventory is not a legal task
Why the personal data register that GDPR requires is operationally useful - and how to build it properly before the regulation comes into force.
AI readiness: what companies confuse with actual preparation
Why the gap between interest in AI and operational readiness to deploy it is much larger than it appears after a conference or a demo.
The real cost of moving to microservices
What gets overlooked when companies plan a migration from a monolith to a microservices architecture, and how to assess those costs before the work starts.
A data pipeline is a production system, not a script
Why companies lose trust in their analytics when they treat data pipelines as one-off tasks rather than operated systems.
Meltdown and Spectre: when the CPU layer became a security problem
What processor vulnerabilities mean for executives, and why they change the conversation about security at the infrastructure level.