Phil Simon is a keynote speaker and recognized technology expert. He is the award-winning author of eight management books, most recently Analytics: The Agile Way. His ninth will be Slack For Dummies (April, 2020, Wiley) He consults organizations on matters related to strategy, data, analytics, and technology. His contributions have appeared in The Harvard Business Review, CNN, Wired, The New York Times, and many other sites. He teaches information systems and analytics at Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business.
Is big data becoming too big to ignore? An increasing number of organizations seem to think so. As Matt Asay on ReadWriteWeb writes: According to a recent Gartner report, 64% of enterprises surveyed indicate that they're deploying or planning Big Data projects (emphasis mine). Yet even more acknowledge that they
Early in my career, I spent a great deal of time looking at and analyzing employee compensation data. Among my early discoveries: even the secretaries in Hawaii make a great deal of money. (The cost of living is quite high there, I'm told.) While I've since moved on to other
Data scientist is one of the hottest jobs in the country right now, and probably the world. In an oft-cited report, McKinsey estimated that the U.S. will soon face a shortage of approximately 175,000 data scientists. Demand far exceeds supply, especially given the hype around big data. Universities like UC
Timeline: August 5, 2013, 11:50 am, PST I'm on the treadmill in my gym in Las Vegas, Nevada, glued to the television set. Any moment now, Major League Baseball is going to announce the suspension of Alex Rodriguez. Reports put the suspension at 214 games to life. Many people loathe the
As I write these words, AMC is gearing up for the final eight episodes of its award-winning show Breaking Bad. In the press leading up to the premiere, show creator Vince Gilligan has been giving plenty of interviews while concurrently keeping a lid on how the show ends. Gilligan has
One man's transparency is another's humiliation. –Gerry Adams If Edward Snowden taught us anything, it's that transparency is a double-edged sword, particularly in furtive environments. While not quite at the same level as the NSA, many educational institutions have been criticized as antiquated and opaque.
Bestselling author Steven Covey has made a fortune with tips like begin with the end in mind. I've never met the man, but I'm virtually certain that Covey was not talking specifically about data visualization when he gave that advice. Yet, it's remarkable how often that ostensibly logical axiom seems
Facts about Google astonish me. For instance, one in ten of its searches is on a person. So says Todd Silverstein, CEO of Vizify, a personal data visualization company. Imagine if Googling a person didn't just return a home page or a LinkedIn profile, but a visual, 360-degree view of
It seems that more than a few people believe that Big Data is all hype. Leena Rao of TechCrunch writes that the term is "outdated, and consists of an overly general set of words that don’t reflect what is actually happening now with data."
“Culture eats strategy for lunch.” –Peter Drucker One of the major emphases of Too Big to Ignore is the role of organizational culture. "Doing Big Data right" involves much more than hiring data scientists, deploying non-relational databases, storing petabytes of unstructured data and dropping terms like analytics. In many instances,
