Blog: William McKnight

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April 4, 2008

Jeffrey Ma, "21"

Jeffrey Ma was the keynote speaker at the MDM Summit Sunday night in San Francisco. He is the subject of the (current top box office) movie "21" about the MIT Blackjack team that took their system to Vegas on weekends. The system gave them, at most, a 2% advantage over the house. When deployed over time, that is sure to be most profitable. I saw the movie and I really enjoyed it.

One thing you'll notice, if you saw the movie, is that Mr. Ma does not look like the actor who portrayed him in the movie, who is Caucasian.

Aaron Zornes, Chief Research Officer for the MDM Institute, kicked off the session by rightfully announcing that CDI (customer data integration) was important in bringing the MIT team down.

The team's success at blackjack came from the same places where our success in other business comes from: trust and teamwork, planning and organization, common goal setting and commitment to analytics.

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Posted by William McKnight at 2:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 27, 2008

Where are the Encryption projects?

There's been another data security breach. This one at Sweetbay Supermarket. They join Hannaford, Agilent, Harvard University, Pfizer, Presbyterian Intercommunity Hospital, Georgetown University and others as the latest companies where one of the various forms of data breaches has occured.

With lawyers pouncing immediately with class-action suits on the perpetrators, fines and shame, why does the vast majority of the data which is interesting to theives still unencrypted and vulnerable? My Gartner Top 10 review didn't include encryption, not because it should not be there, but because I have yet to see much being done about it. I'm looking for the tipping point, like about 1988 in the credit card business, where credit cards companies got serious about fraud and made it reduce dramatically, to levels it has stayed at ever since.

Perhaps data breach has become so common, it's not viewed as problematic.

These events are not going away anytime soon.

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Posted by William McKnight at 3:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 19, 2007

Top 10 ways a consulting, traveling, speaking, writing consultant can get hurt... literally

1. At the airport with last words “mind the cart”
2. Ducking from a client at Ozzfest, I end up in the mosh pit
3. Parking near Britney Spears (this could be anyone)
4. Having heart broken by client who promised the contract process would be painless
5. Inadvertently uttering the word “federated” during Teradata Partners presentation
6. During slow time, take a gig at Luigi’s Laundry and start asking why my first SQL query shows millions in revenues
7. Caught in internal cross-fire during Inmon vs. Kimball debate
8. Exploding in client meeting from holding off bathroom run
9. In trying to follow the advice of other consultants, I end up running in circles until dangerously dizzy
10. Under a hail of expo hall give-aways tossed during a presentation

Posted by William McKnight at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

October 22, 2007

So, this bird walks into a store

This is funny. From Scotland. A shoplifting seagull. He's a regular at this store, always grabbing the same brand of Doritos.

Posted by William McKnight at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 15, 2007

Jicpsraavt serblcmas wrdos but you can siltl read tehm

According to research, we only need to see the first and last letters of a word in order to understand it. This is the first paragraph of my last blog entry, scrambled:

"Tihs miornng, it was aounecnnd that SPA itnneds to buy Beisunss Otbjecs for the elvueiaqnt of $6.8 biillon. Wlihe Bnsesuis Ocebjts will inililaty be run as a wollhy-oewnd siiusradby, I can ciltnaery see the vuale of Bsseunis Objtecs swaortfe being adedd to the SAP ERP - elalpesciy the paotrl, the OALP tool and the data qliatuy tool. SAP saftwore eentualvly colud be rpehesad by this atosiicquin, not olny the ERP, but also the Business Wohurease."

Other than the acronyms, yes, I think I would get this.

I sbrmeelacd this wtih the Jaiprsacvt code at tihs link.

It’s an editor’s productivity-turbo charging tool. Why edit all the letters? If there are 6 letters in the average work and now you only need to get 2 out 6 right you can forget 4 out of 6. For writers with bigger words the productivity on a percentage basis gets even better. It seems like a tremendous productivity enhancer, not to mention how many months of school our kids are wasting on spelling - they could get productive sooner in life and the compounding effect would probably advance humanity generations into the future – it's either brillant or the most useless piece of code ever written.

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Posted by William McKnight at 9:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)