Edd Wilder-James

Being data-driven is a hot phrase, but what does it mean in practice? As the tide of digitization rises, every industry sector is poised to be transformed: digital manufacture such as 3D printing has commoditized prototyping and product development; mobile apps have put every business in direct contact with their customers; and the Internet of Things promises the ability to manipulate processes and environment. The result of this digitization is an unprecedented flood of data.

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Being data-driven is a hot phrase, but what does it mean in practice? As the tide of digitization rises, every industry sector is poised to be transformed: digital manufacture such as 3D printing has commoditized prototyping and product development; mobile apps have put every business in direct contact with their customers; and the Internet of Things promises the ability to manipulate processes and environment. The result of this digitization is an unprecedented flood of data.

The ability to make decisions based on this data, and to use it to experiment rapidly, has become an imperative for today’s companies who wish to play a part in tomorrow’s market. An “experimental enterprise” is a company whose infrastructure is designed to make experimentation possible and efficient. It is not about finding analytical fairy dust that you can sprinkle to make everything better, but rather a deep-rooted approach to operations, innovation, and competition.

Although digitization is unquestionably an issue for the entire company, it places a laser focus on the IT organization. In a digitized marketplace, IT must transform from being “faster paper” to one in which it underpins strategic advantage. This is not an incremental change, but a radical reassessment. Within IT, there are six critical building blocks that can be used to build an experimental enterprise: the cloud, devops, and open source; agile development and platforms; and data science. This video introduces each of these building blocks in turn, and explains how the audience can use them in their own organizations to adapt and thrive under challenging and rapidly changing market conditions.
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Predictive analytics, data science, artificial intelligence, bots. The waves of advances in the application of data keep on coming. You can’t read the pages of the mainstream or business media without being impressed by the opportunity. Yet, although the power of analytics is common currency, it’s spoken of far more often than it’s practiced. The biggest obstacle to using advanced data analysis isn’t skill base or technology; it’s plain old access to the data.

Being data-driven is a hot phrase: but what does it mean in practice? It’s not about finding analytical fairy dust that you can sprinkle to make everything better, but a deep-rooted approach to operations, innovation and competition. Creating an organization designed for data-informed decision—the experimental enterprise—is the key to competing in a world that’s being rapidly digitized.

At the Strata Conference in New York, he will present “Big Data
is a hotbed of thought crime,” highlighting the implications of “computerized thought” for privacy, morality, ethics, and the law.

In an age where everything is measurable, understanding big data is an essential. From creating new data-driven products through to increasing operational efficiency, big data has the potential to make your organization both more competitive and more innovative.

As this emerging field transitions from the bleeding edge to enterprise infrastructure, it's vital to understand not only the technologies involved, but the organizational and cultural demands of being data-driven.

Ready to learn Rails? Get up to speed using the framework’s latest release. This Live Edition has been updated to cover Rails 2.3.5, making it an ideal guide for Rails beginners. Unlike most Rails books, Learning Rails is for web developers, and not for programmers. You’ll start from the foundations of the Web you already know, and learn how to create something visible with Rails before reaching the more difficult database models and controller code.

This no-fluff, lab-style guide jumps right into Mono 1.0 as you work through nearly fifty mini-projects that introduce you to the most important and compelling aspects of the 1.0 release. You'll learn how to acquire, install, and run Mono on Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X. You'll work with the various Mono components: Gtk#, the Common Language Runtime, the class libraries (both .NET and Mono-provided class libraries), IKVM and the Mono C# compiler.

Linux Unwired is a one-stop wireless information source for on-the-go Linux users. Whether you're considering Wi-Fi as a supplement or alternative to cable and DSL, using Bluetooth to network devices in your home or office,or want to use cellular data plans for access to data nearly everywhere, this book will show you the full-spectrum view of wireless capabilities of Linux, and how to take advantage of them.

Written for the intermediate to advanced wireless user, Wireless Hacks is full of direct, practical, ingenious solutions to real-world networking problems.

XML-RPC, a simple yet powerful system built on XML and HTTP, lets developers connect programs running on different computers with a minimum of fuss. Java programs can talk to Perl scripts, which can talk to ASP applications, and so on. With XML-RPC, developers can provide access to functionality without having to worry about the system on the other end, so it's easy to create web services.