It can be very challenging to pull together reporting, analytics, data privacy expectations and support for legislation for information in your systems. People – those users that you support – are learning to request more and more from reporting. They’re expecting systems to be smarter about the information stored in your databases. Azure does amazing things with analytics, looking at […]
Ethics
Complexities of Deep Customer Knowledge
It’s the dream, really, to know more about your customers. To know how they use your services or goods and how you can better serve them. To have some sort of predictive knowledge about what they’ll want and to be able to be right there, right on time, just as they need, so they’ll never stray. This requires information – […]
Brings New Meaning to “Show Your Work”
(Or: Fail Forward Fast) It’s said, and said frequently, that you learn more from your failures than from your successes. Given that a lot of us tend to have plenty of failures to learn from, we can certainly hope that that’s true. However, in order to learn from your failures, you have to know what you did that lead up […]
The Great Hack, The Creepy Line, and Our Job
These are some really intriguing movies (Netflix, etc.) – they’re finally talking about data, data use, data ownership, privacy, customization (sort of) and all sorts of things that have significant implications on our career ethics and responsibilities. When you watch these, they can quickly lead to a rabbit hole of TED talks, blog posts and more. Probably result in some […]
Your Job as a DBA Just Got Harder
Privacy – not just a problem for the legal and risk management departments anymore. These days, issues of privacy, security, and data ethics are squarely in the DBA’s court. We just added Steve’s session, Data Ethics, Protection, and Privacy, to the PRO library. Want to learn more? Check that out HERE. As data is critical to organizations, the DBA’s job […]
Data is Like Evidence
When you hear about breaches, so many times it’s because someone didn’t do their job protecting their SQL Server, protecting the data, or protecting the pipes that feed and move the data around. It’s a big deal – and with your (likely) cloud environment, the model and approach to all of this is changing. Chain of custody… “that records the […]
Weird Shift Going on with Data Reputation
There’s an odd thing happening with data. I say “odd” but really it’s expected I suppose with the privacy concerns, privacy mandates and wild-wild-west of managing information that we’re all facing right now. With so many new regulations, so many new expectations, and so much fear about data mis-use, I suppose it’s probably to be expected. Essentially, when I talk […]
Will Fake News Become Fake Data?
These are interesting times to be working with data – from the issues that Facebook has seen with sharing information without consent and their ongoing response to that whole thing to the breaches and other illicit accesses to information. From data trust issues to IT trust issues in a much broader sense. There have been a number of things happening […]
GDPR Doesn’t Mean Useless Data
A huge challenge with data systems right now is “OK, great. So I have to do all of these things to comply with the GDPR and other privacy laws that are out there now (or will be soon, surely), but I have a conflicting obligation to provide useful information to my company, what do I do?” Depending on your company, […]
Data Architecture Challenge – “Active Archives”
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges that we’re all working through right now is working with the volumes of data on hand, and maintaining it in a usable way. We’ve been working with a couple of different clients to create ways to either use some of Azure’s Elastic Database approach, or move different information bits to different systems that would […]