Coca Cola is looking for a Business Intelligence Delivery Manager (Enabling Functions) in Atlanta, GA: “This IT leadership function will provide business intelligence & analytics technology project management and thought leadership in the design and delivery of business information & insights capabilities for the Enabling Functions of the organization. This role will be expected to understand analytics technology and functional data in order to actively engage in discussions with the business about information exploitation opportunities. The role will then
transform opportunities into Projects and coordinate within IT to gather all the necessary information to estimate project costs, timelines and resources required. These projects will either be stand alone reporting projects or will be driven as operational BI requirements driven from Enabling Functions Business Solutions.”

The post continues, “This role will be expected to contribute in the active creation and validation of reporting requirements with the business. The emphasis in requirements gathering will be to drive the business in focusing on identifying specific information needs (metrics) that will be actionable and can be tied to a process. It will be expected that all new data requirements are shared with MDM to ensure data alignment and standardization.”

Learn more and apply here.

photo credit: Coca Cola

Knotice is searching for a Senior .Net Software Engineer in Seattle, WA. The post states, “Knotice (pronounced ‘notice’) is a well-established, fast-paced, rapidly growing software company whose product is a digital marketing platform that delivers targeted dynamic content via web, email and mobile. We have many large, recognizable clients nationwide. We are seeking talented software engineers help us scale our existing consumer facing platform using cloud and NOSQL technologies.”

Responsibilities of the position include, “Research, prototype and implement leading edge, web-scale technologies. Design and develop a real-time provisioning platform for scaling in the cloud. Implement a NOSQL data store with integration points to existing data warehouses, and application databases.” Qualifications include, “Experience developing public web applications that scale to millions of visitors each day. Multi-Tenant, enterprise, SaaS architecture development experience. Experience with Software Development Life Cycle methodologies such as Agile and Scrum. Deep understanding of design patterns and architectural patterns. Experience with following technologies: Visual Studio 2010; TFS; SQL Server 2008; Memcached; NOSQL platforms like: Cassandra, Couch, MongoDB; Cloud frameworks like: Azure and AWS.”

Learn more and apply here.

photo credit: Knotice

Kaggle has launched a new competition called the Wikipedia Participation Challenge. According to the challenge website, “This competition challenges data-mining experts to build a predictive model that predicts the number of edits an editor will make in the five months after the end date of the training dataset. The dataset is randomly sampled from the English Wikipedia dataset from the period January 2001 – August 2010.”

It continues, “The objective of this competition is to quantitively understand what factors determine editing behavior. We hope to be able to answer questions, using these predictive models, why people stop editing or increase their pace of editing. Contestants are expected to build a predictive model that can be reused by the Wikimedia Foundation to forecast long term trends in the number of edits that we can expect.”

Kaggle describes the reasons for launching the competition: “Between 2005 and 2007, newbies started having real trouble successfully joining the Wikimedia community. Before 2005 in the English Wikipedia, nearly 40% of new editors would still be active a year after their first edit. After 2007, only about 12-15% of new editors were still active a year after their first edit. Post-2007, lots of people were still trying to become Wikipedia editors. What had changed, though, is that they were increasingly failing to integrate into the Wikipedia community, and failing increasingly quickly. The Wikimedia community had become too hard to penetrate… We want a quantitative answer to what factors predict future editing behavior, in order to ensure that the content of Wikipedia continues to grow both quantitively and qualitatively.”

Learn more and participate here. The competition is open until September 20, 2011.

photo credit: Kaggle

According to a recent article, “The use of analytic tools to predict student performance is exploding in higher education, and experts say the tools show even more promise for K-12 schools, in everything from teacher placement to dropout prevention. Use of such statistical techniques is hindered in precollegiate schools, however, by a lack of researchers trained to help districts make sense of the data, according to education watchers.”

It continues, “Predictive analytics include an array of statistical methods, such as data mining and modeling, used to identify the factors that predict the likelihood of a specific result. They’ve long been a standard in the business world—both credit scores and car-insurance premiums are calculated with predictive analytic tools. Yet they have been slower to take hold in education. ‘School districts are great at looking annually at things, doing summative assessments and looking back, but very few are looking forward,’ said Bill Erlendson, the assistant superintendent for the 32,000-student San José Unified School District in California. ‘Considering our economy survives on predictive analytics, it’s amazing to me that predictive analytics don’t drive public education.’”

The article goes on, “Experts in predictive analytics in higher education and business say education may have a long way to go to develop the data infrastructure and staff capacity to make the tools useful on a broad scale. ‘Good quantitative researchers are as hard to find in academia as Farsi linguists are for the military; we do not train enough researchers to work with these methods,’ said Phil Ice, the vice president of research and development for the 90,000-student online American Public University System, in Manassas, Va. ‘There are plenty of numbers people, but they work in the corporate sector, and they don’t know how to apply it to the education sector. You have to understand the pedagogy, the social issues around education, and you have to understand the numbers.’”

Read more here.

photo credit: michael-kay

A new article reports “Overlaying the power grid with a communications and control network will provide utilities with terrific new business capabilities. The Smart Grid figures to enable utilities to more effectively offset service theft, to monitor for and blunt the impact of outages, to better foresee and accommodate spikes in user demand with the rollout of demand-management applications and incentives and to more fully leverage a broader range of distributed sources of power.” But such a system will also present major data management challenges.

The article continues, “Data is certainly not a new concern for utilities, as they have for some years dealt in tremendous volumes of real-time and historical, static and dynamic operational data. The Smart Grid definitely raises the ante, however. In the next-generation grid, arrays of data might ultimately be coming in to utilities from a rapidly expanding range of distributed generators of power
(including small-scale storage facilities such as electric- vehicle batteries), from neighboring utilities and regional transmission organizations (RTOs), from across a massive advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) … even from every electrical outlet in use across business and residential users. That means billions of data points to be instantaneously processed, coordinated, manipulated and interpreted if utilities are to take full advantage of the resource.”

Read more here.

photo credit: rottnapples

ProQuest is looking for a Manager of IT Operations in their Serials Solutions division in Seattle, WA. According to the post, “You will be an integral part of a highly focused IT/Operations team designing, maintaining, supporting, and developing multi-tiered applications that enable librarians, academic researchers, and vendors to efficiently manage, provide, and use their e-resources. As a member of the Technology Leadership team, you will provide strategic input into the direction of technology services. You will directly influence the technical direction in areas of infrastructure, applications, budget, data assets, production
technology, user support and training, disaster recovery, and business continuity planning.”

Required experience includes, “Deep and expansive knowledge of system administration, databases and database administration, network operations, data security, quality assurance, help desk support, telephone systems, data centers, and other key components of technology infrastructure. Demonstrated ability to hire, manage, mentor, and develop staff members. Deep understanding of technology project management and ability to create roadmaps, lead, and deliver on multiple complex projects of strategic significance. Deep understanding of technology-related disaster planning and business continuity. Experience with Linux, Windows, and OS and system virtualization technologies. Broad experience with database technologies, including MS SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and NoSQL technologies. Experience managing and maintaining legacy systems while concurrently developing new systems, platforms, and technologies.”

Learn more and apply here.

photo credit: ProQuest

MMC is looking for a Data Governance Project Manager for a long-term project with the State of Texas in Austin. Responsibilities of the position include, “High-visibility intensive relationship building with stakeholders at all levels throughout the five-agency HHS Enterprise. Research of the Enterprise Data Warehouse history, mission, vision, and artifacts. Research of the HHS agencies, the stakeholders, their issues, and their objectives. Oversight of vendors including managing timelines and accountability for the validation of deliverables. Interest in and application of data analysis techniques. Performing thorough business
analysis pertaining to data governance.”

Further responsibilities include, “Facilitation and control of workgroups and workshops, ensuring that agendas are adhered to and deliverables are generated. Understanding data management issues and ability to relate that understanding to the HHS information technology organizations. Responsible for project documentation, including storage and archival of vendor deliverables and artifacts. Development of presentation materials (MS/Visio Diagrams and PowerPoint Presentation materials) and delivery of those presentations to project sponsors and stakeholders as requested. Establishing and maintaining good interpersonal relationships between the team and with the stakeholders.”

Learn more and apply here.

photo credit: MMC

A new survey shows that “NoSQL is being rapidly accepted by corporate enterprise developers in North America with 56% reporting at least some use of the schemaless database and 63% citing plans to use in the next two years according to Evans Data’s recently released North American Development Survey. NoSQL is considerably stronger in the enterprise segment than within the general
developer population where 43% expect to use NoSQL.”

The article continues, “The survey of over 400 developers conducted in May, 2011 is part of Evans Data’s Global Development Survey series. This showed use of NoSQL is rising in EMEA, where 39% of developers report plans to use, and APAC where more than a quarter of the general developer population report using NoSQL today and 68% have future plans. ‘The advent of Big Data is driving adoption of NoSQL, and this is especially true in the corporate enterprise,’ said Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data Corp. ‘While it may have got its start on the web with innovations like Big Table and MapReduce, it’s the enterprise that can most benefit from NoSQL and developers realize this across all geographical regions.’”

Read more here.

photo credit: kenteegardin

A recent article reports, “MeriTalk, a government analysis organization, on behalf of NetApp, a provider of storage and data management solutions, surveyed 157 federal IT decision-makers in April and May to determine how well agencies were using metrics to measure data center consolidation savings and increasing efficiencies as they consolidate. The respondents included 65 percent from the federal civilian agencies, 26 percent from the Defense Department and intelligence community, and 9 percent from systems integrators. According to the findings, only 42 percent of federal IT decision-makers said their departments have an incentive to achieve data center savings, including savings that will be realized by budgets outside IT.”

IT continues, “fewer than 50 percent of the respondents said their agency tracks key data efficiency metrics and only 23 percent said their IT offices had systems in place to track full data center savings. Fewer than 50 percent of respondents said they track key storage efficiency metrics, such as capacity allocation and consumption, provisioning time and incident metrics, although they consume about 12 percent of typical data center budgets. In fact, only 23 percent admitted knowing the power usage effectiveness at their data centers, compared to 82 percent in the private sector. Also, whereas 94 percent of the private sector knows their average load across their data centers, just 31 percent of the federal respondents do.”

It concludes, “The survey organizers offered four suggestions to the federal sector to help correct the situation: (1) Standardize data center efficiency metrics. (2) Leverage private-sector best practices. (3) Provide IT leaders with visibility of non-IT costs. (4) Communicate incentives and clarify savings reinvestment plans.”

photo credit: dionhinchcliffe

The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the value of mining Big Data across industry. Citing the McKinsey Global Institute, the article states, “The definition MGI uses for big data is deliberately vague and not based on a specific number. It refers instead to sets of data which are too large for current conventional database tools to capture, store, manage and analyze. It also takes account of the differences between sectors in the type of data and software available.”

The article goes on, “The ability to process this vast flow of data in real time will become a business imperative. In a traditional environment, information is gathered, put in a database, which is stored on a disc, and then indexed. Queries are then run against the database. But traditional databases are simply not up to the task of storing and handling the sheer quantity of data. It requires new types of databases able to span tens, hundreds, even thousands of servers. Yahoo, for example, runs a database cluster that spans 40,000 servers. Advanced processing power is necessary in an environment where decisions are made in nanoseconds. At the very least, databases have to be stored in memory, demanding massive increases in server power and storage.”

It continues, “At its most extreme is a process called ‘complex event processing’, which instead uses the flow of raw data and matches the query against it, looking for patterns. Typical uses of CEP include high-frequency financial trading, but
other examples include sending a game player a special offer at exactly the right moment in a game, persuading them to make an in-game purchase. This is a point picked up by Kristian Segerstrale, co-founder of social games company Playfish, who says: ‘Getting the information is important, but even more important will be the ability to react in real time to data and structure experiments to learn empirically from user behavior.’”

photo credit: RickC

Read more here.