-
Continue reading →: When Tough Gets ToxicA recent report from Reuters about the death of a 35-year old investment banker who worked in Bank of America’s high-demand FIG team has reinvigorated debate around what it means to be a toxic work environment. While articles are quick to note that the official cause of death was an…
-
Continue reading →: Accountability: Getting Real About What We CAN DoWhen you hear the word accountability, what do you think of? In cultures with low psychological safety, accountability can be a scary word. Who’s going to whip the horses harder to get them to go faster? (This is particularly frightening if you’re one of the horses.) As long as there…
-
Continue reading →: “Us vs. Them”: There’s A Better ChoiceOver the past 25 years (at least), I’ve routinely noticed two (and only two!) patterns of interaction emerge between people, and one of those patterns is wildly superior to the other. This post is my attempt to make you aware of them and recognize there’s a better choice than letting…
-
A Solid Data Architecture Pays Off
Published by
on
Continue reading →: A Solid Data Architecture Pays OffEarlier this year, the people who (rightly) decided the “collective we” needed better tools to manage all our spaghetti SQL (dbt) acquired the “semantic layer” company, Transform. In one of the merger announcements, I read this: Imagine instead that you could disentangle metric definition from visualization. In this world, the…
-
Continue reading →: Enterprise Data and the Holy GrailTL;DR – A core principle of systems engineering and software engineering isn’t readily applied (or even recognized!) among people who build, operate, and maintain enterprise data ecosystems… leading us to inadvertently make fragile systems more fragile, and confusing data flows even more confusing. The Holy Grail is a legendary artifact…
-
Continue reading →: ETL is So Much Easier NowWhen I think about the rich landscape of ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) tools that organizations can choose from in 2023 to reduce the time to access and manipulate data, I feel like a fossil. Back in the 90s, we didn’t have it that easy. We had to walk to…
-
Continue reading →: “The Bear” Season 2: A Poignant Story About Building Quality CultureConfession: When I originally viewed The Bear (Season 1) last year, I thought it was “just OK.” It’s a drama that centers around a group of 8 people who work in a restaurant, and I’ve never worked in a restaurant. I had little to relate to. Plus, the excellent cinematography…
Hello,
I’m Nicole
Since 2008, I’ve been sharing thoughts and insights about Digital Transformation & Data Science for Performance Excellence here. For 20 years, I’ve been helping organizations build teams, programs, and strategies bridging data, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML)… while building and training models in R and Python on the side. More About Me or Inquire @ Engaging a Team
Quality and Innovation 