Teryl @ Work

Is 2016 the year of mainstreaming Business Intelligence and Analytics? In IT circles, IoT and Analytics are mainstream!   In the real business world, there appears to be an appetite and a genuine need, but the question is “Is it really happening?” I have rather belatedly read Ajeet Singh’s article – 2016 Anti-Predictions for Analytics, and found it very interesting.   Some of the statistics mentioned were a surprise eg 99% of data still being on premise. Business technology trends do take multiple paths.   I remember when we first started selling biometric solutions at Accsys over ten years ago,  we would get in the door with biometrics, but the majority of clients still felt safer with cards.   It is the same with Employee Self Service, the take up is happening, but it is still largely at the early adopter stage in the SME market, in spite of overwhelmingly strong ROI indicators. So for the majority of businesses, Analyt...

This topic has been on my mind for the whole month of March based on the LinkedIn brief of the hottest positions in my industry. It has to be a role in Analytics and Business Intelligence. Security is a serious contender, too.  What else? Web development is still in demand. According to Robert Half, the positions with the most potential salary growth are : Big Data Engineers Mobile App Developers The one thing we know in IT is that you need to constantly keep current with trends. Are there IT jobs you should be fleeing from?  I don’t think so - there are legacy products in use keeping traditional IT skills busy - as long as you are enjoying what you are doing and keep your skill set relevant.   A career in IT is not industry specific, and companies are on the look out for IT specialists who combine deep IT skills with the ability to translate that into strategic, business development wisdom. A favourite (and I think relevant) TS Eliot Quote...

Back in the day when I was a Systems Analyst, I was sent on an Advanced Programming course.   We learnt how to follow a business problem from start to finish using logic and flow charting.   It is amazing how often I use this method to understand problems, sometimes just in my head, sometimes on paper.   I also learnt that if I shared the problem with a few people, and brainstormed, the answers came even more quickly. About a month ago, I noticed that our lounge couches and chairs were all pushed up against the coffee table.   I thought that our domestic helper had been cleaning the carpets and forgotten to move them back, and so I moved them back into place.   Over the next few weeks this kept happening, but as we are not often in the house at the same time, I would just replace them and forget about it.   Finally, I had a chance to ask her, and she told me that she thought I was doing it in the evenings.   I questioned my family, but it remained a ...

Sometimes Right Now feels like an impossible dream, being able to work to a plan, tick all the items in my To Do list, and work from 8 until 5... So many things get in the way of running according to a schedule.   We have implemented a number of different initiatives at  +Accsys (Pty) Ltd  to try and allow people to complete tasks by deadline and take the pressure off.   But we do find that there are incoming tasks and requirements that are part of corporate life that throw out all the best laid plans. So can a Right Now model change that?   To an extent, yes.   In one of my meetings today, one of my managers told me that it was taking a long time to finalise some of her requirements from a shared resource, and yet mine had been managed in a very brief time frame.  Its true that I do have seniority, but I also attached an absolute deadline to the job that had to be done.   So the Right Now model is very much around setting boundaries and time ...

And, like Superman,  its all in the Cloud! One of my favourite quotations is by the extraordinary poet, TS Eliot "Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" The sheer size and volume of the data we are dealing with every day, is forcing us to find new ways to make sense of it all.   So Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics joined Cloud and Big Data as key to understanding business in the 21st Century. As an avid reader, my experience in dealing with Amazon and choosing a book, compared to going to my local book store, throws me right into the 21st Century and new sales technologies.  Not only do Amazon have my buying patterns from the books they have sold me, they bought Goodreads, my on-line book club, so they now have access to books I have read, and personal preferences.   Every time, I go onto Amazon a list of recommended books is waiting for me. ...