Information Architecture

Visual pattern recognition

martin — Sat, 08 May 2010 12:54:21 +0000

Today finds me in Frankfurt working at a customer site. What with jetlag and late nights it leaves me less time to work on blogs. But it’s Saturday and I have some time, so here goes. Today’s blog is a brief survey of interesting visualization techniques for complex data. I have a lot of experience in this area dating back to my graduate studies in which part of my work was to reconstruct the tracks of subatomic particles through detectors.

Data centralization

martin — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:27:56 +0000

I read an interesting article about how the pendulum is swinging back to centralization of IT resources. Two of the most important results are an increased effectiveness in decision rights – the way technology investment decisions are made – and in information flows from IT to the rest of the business. This is related to, but not identical to some of the observations I’ve been making in this blog. With centralized data, everyone can see the same information as it

Mining for information

martin — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 18:28:43 +0000

Mining for information is established on a much less solid foundation because the nature of the information you will uncover is by definition unknown, and hence the potential profits are also unknown. I'm not talking about business information systems that analyze sales trends and help identify emerging trends so you can make money by recognizing and keeping up with the trends. These are clearly tied to the profit motive and the business imperative is undeniable. I'm talking about the other types of information in the system such as project statistics, emails, twitter feeds, source code repositories, feature requests, performance statistics, operations logs, and so

Tweets in your information architecture

martin — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 21:56:22 +0000

If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past 30+ years of user interface development, it’s that a given action should be invoked via multiple gestures. For a given command there is no single gesture that everyone can agree on is perfect for the task. Personally, when I’ve used a command more than about 3 or 4 times I start looking for its keyboard equivalent. Other people seem content to use a mouse for everything, but my carpal tunnel starts

When to purge data

martin — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 17:48:22 +0000

Occasionally I have to shift around my financial records from the early stone age – 1997 and before. My wife gets on my case to get rid of the paperwork but I never seem to get around to it. It doesn’t take up much room so why bother? In the back of my mind I can imagine a social anthropologist finding the files in an attic some 200 years from now and wondering in awe over the quaint practices of

Baselines, checkpoints and process maturity

martin — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 01:25:59 +0000

Volunteering is a great way to give back to the community, meet new and interesting people, and keep me from playing Civilization until the wee hours of the morning. OK, sometimes not so wee. I know it’s seriously time for bed when I hear traffic on the road – that means people are heading in to work and perhaps I should think about it too. Fortunately I don’t do that too often. Anyway, one of the things I have volunteered

Categories of metrics

martin — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 01:38:22 +0000

In my previous post I discussed the challenges related to quality of predictions and inferences you can make from data you collect in a corporate repository. Fortunately, the data you collect are not all required for making inferences. Some of them are extremely useful no matter how much data you have. It all depends on what you intend to do with it.

The following is a list of categories of metrics that can be used to shed light on your organization

Metrics and macroeconomics

martin — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 02:19:13 +0000

I can see in my mind a Hollywood movie where a junior employee (a junior actress in a cameo role) runs to the shop floor to her cigar-chomping boss (a well-known character actor in the latter part of his illustrious career), shows him a chart that clearly demonstrates a fatal flaw in the factory operations, he takes decisive actions to fix the situation, and together they take over the world of widget manufacturers. This, of course, never happens. Somehow Hollywood

Metrics frustration

martin — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:06:01 +0000

Ultimately, that is the lesson of metrics in a knowledge-based industry: No one metric is going to tell you the answer you are looking for. Metrics that work in some circumstances will not work in others. Even from one company to the next, in the same industry, following the same methodologies, you are going to find some unexplainable

User data and web service constraints

martin — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:57:30 +0000

Cloud computing is so big these days that I’m even getting emails from more or less reputable organizations imploring me to jump on the bandwagon and get rich off this latest fad. Clearly we’re well on our way if not already in the trough of disillusionment. As we pull out of the trough, we will have to deal with some very challenging issues – both technical and economic. On the technical side, I’ve been dealing with an interesting aspect of