Kindle – Back to serious reading

Back to my blog after a long time and I hope I can keep writing more regularly. Have repurposed my blog to extend beyond MDM and talk about technology and experience other than MDM as well. And first on that list is about my recent device KINDLE.

Planned to start serious reading after a long time, so I wanted to start with a fresh mind and of course the latest technology. Last few years it has been mostly technical reading on either the Laptop or IPAD. So decided to get myself a Kindle as have been haring good things about it from my friends. While searching on internet to buy it, I realised there were multiple generations of Kindle and we are already in the 3^rd generation. Oh I have already become ancient as have not got one yet :-(. There are multiple variations like Paperwhite, Voyage,Anti Glare etc and also available in various sizes. I was confused of what I needed. Went back to the basic question of what did I need. Answer to that was a simple device which could make reading easy by providing easy access to e-books, easy to carry around and the most important was access to reviews and suggestions on what should I read. One of the reasons why non-technical reading had reduced lately was because of not able to decide what to read. And sometimes when I did land up buying a book at airports or a book store it was more by instinct and lot of times left me disappointed.

So the Kindle arrives after few days from Flipkart and day of arrival happens to be a Friday. Nice Saturday afternoon I sit down with a cup of Coffee post lunch.  The first thing I realize that It is lighter than an IPad. Easy to carry around like a mobile. Awesome!!. Though screen touch and feel not as good as IPAD, but for book reading it is simple and serves the purpose. I realize the whole collection of e-Books that I can download. The fact that it gives you recommendation based on your earlier selection and reviews and rating is awesome. The reviews make the decision to read easier. The navigations and the menu are simple. Since the only purpose of Kindle is reading you are not diverted by things like games, adds and other apps in other devices.

4 weeks since I bought it and have downloaded and read some awesome books. My first Murakami book, Norwegian Wood which I probably would have not picked up otherwise, was excellent. Planning to read more of them. The current read is Elon Musk Biography.

And boy I am loving it.  :-)

So all folks who do want to get back to serious reading and have been very busy, get a Kindle. This is from experience friends. I guess one can also download the Kindle app on phones and other devices but nothing as good as the device itself.

Happy Reading !!

MDM 11.4.0.3 Installation Improvements

As a continuous effort on improving the actual Installation process of MDM, 11.4.0.3 was released in the month of July with significant improvements to the same. MDM Installation flows now will follow a 2 step methodology that splits the install process into two parts –

1. The first process is the Base Installation Process that leverages Installation Manager as the tool for collecting input parameters, for performing pre-requisite checks and for file extraction
2. This is followed by the Configuration process which is an ant based command line utility that allows configuration of specific, user selected MDM Components in the target environment

In addition to the Base flow of Installation, various smaller enhancements have been done to the product like:-

1. Support for SSL Enabled Database Installation. More details available at below location in Knowledge Centre - https://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/?lang=en - !/SSWSR9_11.4.0/com.ibm.swg.im.mdmhs.release.install.doc/Topics/installing_std_adv_editions.html 
2.  Library of mad configuration scripts to modify configurations.More details available at below location in Knowledge Centre - https://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/?lang=en -!/SSWSR9_11.4.0/com.ibm.swg.im.mdmhs.release.installpostcfg.doc/topics/madconfig-configtargets.html

 

The new videos demonstrating this installation process in details has been published at the location http://bit.ly/1LOef4N 

Here it is -> IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management V11.3

As we know InfoSphere MDM is a comprehensive suite of products and capabilities that you can use to manage the master data in an organization. With V11.3 release it goes a step ahead to Big Data Platform as well

MDM V11.3 also brings in significant improvements to the products from Installation and Configuration and performance improvements. The Big Match capability in this version combines the proven IBM MDM probabilistic matching engine & pre-built algorithms & IBM InfoSphere BigInsights for customer matching natively within Hadoop

Along with theses there are some very good integration samples with Data Explorer and Salesforce which could give jump start in the integrations between these products with IBM MDM  A much more improved documentation using Knowledge Center will help in navigation to various sections lot more easier.

Bookmarks for MDM V11.3

How and what to Download for various MDM offerings

 

MDM V 11.3  Hardware and Software requirements

Whats new in MDM Advanced and Standard Edition  in V11.3

Whats new in MDM Collaborative Edition  V 11.3

IBM MDM developerWorks Community

Reach out the MDM developerWork Community for any queries, concerns and feedback.

Data Scientist as a role

As promised in my last blog, here is my analysis on what does a Data Scientist Role mean and why it is not a new jargon replacing Marketing Consultants or Product Manager or an IT Manager Role which some of my friends pointed out in the last blog.

Remember our teenage days when we were in probably 10^th Std and this profound question was asked , Are u going take Science or Arts?.80% of my friends who mostly are Engineers would have said of course Science without a blink of their eye. Little did we know that every innovation has an artist behind that and every scientist has that artist in him which gives him that imagination to innovate. So what I am trying to make a point is that they are just two sides of a same coin.

Coming back to our Data Scientist Role, it is the best example of how a person can present data in the most creative and intuitive manner that it helps business. Also note that the KPIs are different for each business so the rules of analysis differ. The Data Scientist should be able to interpret the data using mathematical and analytical tools and understand the trends.  There is no more need to be an Engineer and learn all the programming languages like C++, java, Dot-net etc. to get a Data Scientist Role. I believe a Business person who understands the Business and can play with some tools is the best person suited for role. It is the best example of a Role which brings Art and Science together. 

As expected this answer did make the students very happy and suddenly there was lot of eagerness to know what this role entails. So I believe there are just few things which can help to make a Data Scientist:-

1.   Business knowledge and acumen in the stream where one wants to take the role

2.   Statistical and analytical tools usage to bring creativity and make sense of the big data

3.     Good communication

Lots of Universities have already started providing full time courses to specialize in this role. Saint Peter’s University in US provides a full time degree course in the same.

There is no need of being an expert on Hadoop platforms and MapReduce functions because they are just another enterprise platforms where the analytics is done. As per Heidrick & Struggles report a single company like Wipro already has around 8000 people on data science and analytics role and it is just going to grow.

Here is what  VP of Development for Big Data projects at IBM, Anjul Bhambhri says in the following blog. 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/danwoods/2012/02/16/ibms-anjul-bhambhri-on-what-is-a-data-scientist/

Big data ->Big Employment

I recently visited a college for a talk on Big Data. The College had a combination of MCA and MBA students and a nice set of smart enthusiastic students with gleam in their eyes.  Now I always get excited to see this enthusiasm because I feel that energy and enthusiasm of our youth is what will make a difference to the world in the coming decade.

As we started discussing on usual Big Data topics the discussion started flowing into how this is going to create and shape new requirements and drive the technology in coming future. The most important aspect being how this huge nexus of Data is going to drive new roles in the market and the skills required for the same. Here I was actually able to touch the cord because suddenly they all were very excited on what this new role entails.

The fact that Gartner’s prediction is Big Data is going to create around 4.4 million new IT jobs globally by 2015 reflects this fact. The jobs would involve around technology to handle the data and capabilities to analyze and make sense out of this data set. By 2015 it is also predicted that 80% of the data is going to be uncertain, so in spite of us having all data available there would be a need to know and  determine how to use the data, then determining what confidence level needs to act on the data and in what context is the data available.

So the next question of course from then was what are these new jobs?

Now I had grabbed their attention fully and tried explaining how the counting of mouse clicks on an advertisement, traditional analytics and CRM and MDM data collection, mobile phone updates, and so many more combine together to keep data analysts and data engineers including the CDO and CEO and CMO and everyone concerned with accumulation of data busy and thus keep creating employment opportunities.

The newest and hottest job in Data Management is the person that can interpret such data in innovative ways for their employer, the Data Scientist.

What exactly is a Data Scientist?

“A data scientist is that unique blend of skills that can both unlock the insights of data and tell a fantastic story via the data.”

Anjul Bhambhri, Vice President of Big Data Products at IBM describes the Data Scientist role as below 

“Data scientists are part digital trend spotter and part storyteller stitching various pieces of information together. These are people or teams at organizations that sift through the explosion of data to discover what the data is telling them.” 

And that drove them to next set of question what skills are required to be a Data Scientist. And the answer made them happy and that would be in my next blog.

What does it take to be a Data Scientist?