John Parkinson

Businesses have been accumulating data in digital form from business operations for more than 40 years now. In parallel with this accumulation, tools for organizing, categorizing and analyzing this data–turning it into the kind of context-rich information that can drive decision making–have been growing in capability and sophistication. If you believe the vendor stories today, […]

I am always looking for ways to make the people I work with and for (and myself, of course) more productive. Often, that means looking for and eliminating wasted time. I remember one example of this from quite a long time ago. I discovered that project team members were scattered across many separate locations over […]

I’ve never been a fan of best-of-breed infrastructure approaches. Too many moving parts usually overcome the promised improvements from using the best part in every place. Nor am I a fan of technological monocultures. No vendor is the best at everything all the time. So for most of my career, I have tried to balance […]

Ever since I started out writing code in the 1960s, I’ve been interested in the processes used to demonstrate that the code always does what it is supposed to do, and nothing else. I even worked with methods that aimed to create correctness proofs for either designs or code based on designs. Even 40 years […]

We deal with a lot of data daily–collecting it from a bevy of sources in thousands of formats; standardizing it all into a common format and cleaning it up as much as possible; updating databases and archives; and so on. Not surprising for an information commerce business, but also not without its challenges. When you […]

As the depressed economy lurches along an uneven bottom, I have been trying to selectively upgrade key areas of our team with new talent to get ready for the eventual recovery. We are training our existing staff in technologies that will progressively reduce our operating costs, but I had been expecting to find experienced workers […]

Recently, one of our two major competitors experienced a rare but fairly major system outage that took it “off the air” for an extended period. This might seem like a good thing for us–and indeed we do pick up some additional traffic (and thus revenue) when this happens. But such events raise challenging short-term and […]

Almost exactly a decade ago, I ran a large-scale “innovation” program. Back then, innovation was a hot topic. Incubators were all the rage, and every management theorist and academic seemed to have a surefire way to make innovation work. None of the theory seemed very practical, so I went in an entirely different direction: I […]

For the second time in six months, one of my credit cards was canceled and a new card was issued by the bank because of a third-party breach that might have released my (and many other) account details into the wild. Note that this wasn’t anything the bank nor I did. This was a merchant […]

For most of the last year, we have been rebuilding our corporate network infrastructure to meet future performance and security requirements. Making use of features and capabilities barely imagined five years ago should let us meet our connectivity needs for the next several years. Now, however, we have a challenge. A great team of consultants […]

2009 will mark the 40th anniversary of my first IT-related paycheck. When I started, much of the technology was pretty new, and every kind of capacity was scarce. So code optimization was an essential part of the development and test cycle for virtually all the software we wrote. We had to focus on memory footprint, […]

This isn’t the first time I’ve been faced with the prospect of managing through a recession, but it’s never fun. The definitions of “rational” and “business case” morph into something quite different when times get hard. Nevertheless, there are ways to cope with the inevitable desire to pull back investments and either slow down or […]