Loren Abdulezer, the CEO of Evolving Technologies Corporation was interviewed by Ken Rayment of the Better Process News. An audio recording of the interview can be found on the podcast link. For your convenience, we have enclosed a transcript along with some some illustrative visuals.
Technology pervades everything just about everything we do and touch. Technology is many things to many people. For some it is a catalyst for change. For others it is the vessel to channel innovations. Some people view technology as the pivot point to outdo their peers in a fiercely competitive environment. It is the bane of existence for those who have yet to tame technology's potency and intricacies.
Like it or not, technology and the world that it brings with it is here to stay and endure.
The one constant about technology is that it continually evolves; so it should not surprise you that our company name is Evolving Technologies Corporation. To put it plainly, this web site is all about our passion, technology, and how to put it to use.
Enough with the platitudes. It's the specifics that really matters.
What do you do if your data has gaps or missing pieces of information? or how do you smooth out the conflicting information in your data without altering your original data? In our article on constructing a "data overpass" we show you how to deal with such situations.
You may have noticed that some technologies are easy to grasp, easy to start with, but don't scale particularly well. It can be a simple process to write formulas in a spreadsheet, and replicate them. It's definitely not fun managing a large and complex spreadsheet that suffers from too many loose ends, a morass of formulas, and provides no easy way to verify correctness of formulas or results of computations. No doubt for many, scalability in spreadsheets is the challenge de jour. The problems with scalability doesn't stop there. It has an evil sister called Total Cost of Ownership. Large and complex spreadsheets are notoriously expensive to maintain, are are costlier still, when they are inadequately prepared to support good decision analysis. Fortunately, there are effective techniques and practices, and augmenting technologies to deal with these challenges. On our site, you'll lean about the Layering Approach design pattern which decouples the source data, the computations, and the presentation layers. Techniques like this helps to keep the process of maintaining your data and analytical tools, sane and manageable.
Sometimes the key in assessing situations, especially when the data you are working with is complex or voluminous, is to visualize the data, be it by sub-setting or intelligently partitioning the data, summarizing it according to various categorizations (we like to think of this as "digital origami"). Other times, tremendous insight can be derived if you could easily tweak a few parameters by turning a knob or moving a slider in your spreadsheet or analytical models. Such visualizations are often called dashboards. We have a lot to say about this. You may have already seen our web site www.XcelsiusJournal.com. If you haven't do check it out. You'll quickly discover, tools like this are a lot more than fancy visualizations. Behind the scenes of the point and click dials, sliders, and dynamic menus, are full fledged interactive mathematical models. They retain their full interactivity (see Figure 1) when are converted to a PowerPoint slide, PDF/Acrobat, or Flash file that you can email to a colleague or post on a web site.
Figure 1: This sample dashboard is not a screenshot. It is fully interactive (try clicking the various controls).
