Notes on data, AI, IT
and security
No marketing fog. The way I think about real problems with founders and managers.
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.
Real-time data and right-time data: the difference and why it matters
Not every task requires real-time data. Getting this choice wrong costs money and complicates architecture without benefit.
Vendor lock-in: measure the cost of leaving, not the cost of entry
The question when adopting a platform is not only what it costs to get in. It is what it would cost to get out - and whether you can honestly answer that before signing.
Feature engineering is a business decision in disguise
The variables you feed into a machine learning model are not a purely technical choice. They encode assumptions about your business that deserve explicit review.
Collaborative robots: the economics of a cobot for managers
Cobots are not new, but in 2016 their cost and ease of deployment have reached the point where the economics conversation has become practical.
Who owns the data pipeline when the answer is nobody
In most companies data pipelines are built by whoever needed the data, owned by nobody, and relied upon by everyone. That is a systemic fragility, not a technical problem.