Brave For Free

Analytics, we are repeatedly told, will enable us to have these wonderful insights that will change our business and transform society, probably abolish world hunger at the same time. And the only reason they're not doing so is because we have not been able to implement it well. All true, but to my mind a bit of bollocks. Its a bit like Nike advertising the same shoe that Michael Jordan has, and the only reason we're not in the NBA Basketball Hall of Fame yet is that we just haven't put in the hours of practice required. Here's the problem with insight in analytics. One, insightful analytics is very very hard. It requires a lot of investment; to go back to the Jordan analogy it takes thousands of hours of practice to get anywhere near the NBA. One basically sacrifices everything else in life - something the average person is just not going to be able to do. A company whose job is analytics will put in the investment (an investment research firm, for instance) but a ...

The three-tier architecture has dominated application deployment for decades. Presentation Layer, Logic Layer, Data Layer - every application designer is fed this bag of chips again and again, till every other chip is forgotten. Most companies have rigid policies that ensure that this holy trinity of layers is hammered into every policy document and SOP. But... As is true of so many religions, this one is also a bit outdated (Microsoft has even discontinued that page in their architecture). The theory was that many presentation layers could reuse the same business logic (encapsulated neatly in a application layer) but in my many years of slaving at these things I've rarely seen an app layer used by anything more than a single presentation layer as part of a single application. Indeed, this model was created for the client-server world and should have been thrown out when the world moved on but it was what everyone knew in those days so it somehow made it to the web world. A wh...