"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" - Mark Twain
Five years ago today (September 1, 2019), my family and I stepped off the plane from Seattle to Heathrow, having spent the previous month frantically packing our belongings, saying goodbye to friends, and preparing to pick up our life in the UK, almost thirteen years after we left in 2006. But it was only when I returned last month for a visit that I felt the time had come to say goodbye to the…
As we pass the first anniversary of the start of the most recent tech hype tsunami (farewell NFTs, we hardly knew ye), it s starting to become a little clearer how many enterprises might start their journey with Generative AI and it s in areas that are the traditional domain of the CIO, rather than the ... Read more The post The rumble in the AI jungle: Will the CDO or CIO emerge victorious in the…
A side-effect of all the time I spend breathing the rarified alpine air of the CDO community is that my SQL skills have become rather rusty. So I’ve been intrigued by the idea of using the code-generation capabilities of tools like ChatGPT and Bard to write SQL for me. But how good is the current crop of LLMs at creating SQL code that not only works, but generates the insight you’re actually…
You arrive, slightly frazzled, a few minutes after the agreed time for lunch. At the door, you thrust the obligatory bottle of wine into your mother-in-law's hand and say that you're sorry you're late; the traffic was terrible. "Which way did you come?" pipes up your father-in-law from the hallway, and you immediately realise that you have made a grave error. As you stand, dazed, nodding along…
If you’re a CDO (in either name or responsibility), chances are you’ve had to write a data strategy. If you haven’t, you may feel that everything would go much more smoothly if you were able to pull it out of your bag and wave it in the face of every naysaying executive stakeholder who dares to question your work, with a righteous cry of, “it’s in the data strategy!” Sadly, naysayers are not so…
The demise of cookies has been long foretold. Ever since they were invented in 1994, questions have been raised over their privacy implications and potential misuse; yet they have persisted, unloved but indispensable. However, it seems like the death knell has at last sounded for third-party cookies, with both Apple and Google finally taking concrete ... Read more The post Not dead yet: The long…
The 2010s were a big decade for Chief Data Officers: from a standing start ten years ago, CDO has risen to become an indispensable C-suite role, with almost two thirds of Fortune 500 organizations hiring one. But the role of CDO, especially outside the US, is still poorly defined, and CDOs are frequently not set up for success within their organizations. Is the job a poisoned chalice? The post…
Amidst all the craziness of the global coronavirus pandemic, it s easy to forget that the world keeps turning, and that mundane things like new privacy laws coming into force are still happening. The impact of COVID-19 on global privacy practices is the stuff of a future post, but in the meantime, let s distract ourselves with ... Read more The post GDPR, the sequel: Get ready for CCPA appeared…
As we ve established earlier in this post series, Data Science is a process, with quite a lot of repetitive elements. Many Data Science projects involve a familiar set of tasks to identify, clean and prepare data, before finding the best model for the scenario at hand. And despite the mystique around the whole profession, many ... Read more The post Demystifying Data Science, Part V: AutoML…
There was quite a lot of coverage earlier this month when Google announced that they would be phasing out support for third-party cookies in Chrome within the next two years. The stock price of firms like Criteo, which rely heavily on third-party cookie data for their core business, dipped sharply. The general consensus has been ... Read more The post Google’s Ban on Third-party Cookies Could…