TECH AND BUSINESS TEAMS HAVE DIFFERENT CULTURES

Programming languages are different from each other,
they have completely different fundamental concepts.
This translates into misaligned communication, the root of all problems.

Software fails!
We don’t know all of the infinite possibilities of getting things wrong.
However, people still look at it as being a traditional technical discipline, where failure is unacceptable. 
This is driving business and tech culture apart.

Business don’t actually realize that by definition, developers are often introverts.

They speak languages that are fundamentally different than English-turning ambiguous, contextual ideas 
into software that is completely unambiguous and non-contextual.

It’s really important to have people on both sides to bridge this gap in thought process,
you need business people that understand the pressure of technical execution, and developers
who speak human.

ALIGNING TECH AND BUSINESS

The process of software development is still siloed.
Developers
have built things they have been handed, and have not been required to speak human because they hav
e been excluded from the most important part of designing solutions.

Now more than ever, this is a crisis because software is really powerful. The world doesn’t function witho
ut software anymore.
Because programming is so powerful, developers have the responsibility to do it right,
especially in the impact space.

In order to better engage developers, a more holistic approach is needed on the business side. Business 
don’t like to think about failure, but the reality is that software fails. 
Every piece of software has millions of features that require decisions. As a developer, you can’t manage 
all of those decisions. 

Not only will your tech team make decisions on your behalf, they will link directly to the happiness of yo
ur end users. This is a big deal, and it becomes a problem if developers
obsess over something the end user doesn’t care about, if they are afraid of failing early and often, or if t
hey are solving the wrong problems.

A tech business hinges on the fact that the tech team has to translate a bunch of crazy ideas into hard re
ality. It costs a lot of money, and people are going to screw up. It’s an iterative process of co-creation an
d co-failure, and that’s fine. We have to tear down silos within our organizations, or we all sink.

BIG DATA

To really understand big data, it’s helpful to have some historical background. Here is Gartner’s
definition, circa 2001 (which is still the go-to definition): Big data is data that contains greater variety
arriving in increasing volumes and with ever-higher velocity. This is known as the three Vs.

Put simply, big data is larger, more complex data sets, especially from new data sources. These data sets
are so voluminous that traditional data processing software just can’t manage them. But these massive
volumes of data can be used to address business problems you wouldn’t have been able to tackle
before.

While big data holds a lot of promise, it is not without its challenges.
First, big data is…big. Although new technologies have been developed for data storage, data volumes
are doubling in size about every two years. Organizations still struggle to keep pace with their data and
find ways to effectively store it.

But it’s not enough to just store the data. Data must be used to be valuable and that depends on
curation. Clean data, or data that’s relevant to the client and organized in a way that enables meaningful
analysis, requires a lot of work. Data scientists spend 50 to 80 percent of their time curating and
preparing data before it can actually be used.

DATA SCIENCE