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Erik Gfesser

📍 Greater Chicago Area

New Book Review: "Ethics of Big Data"

New book review for Ethics of Big Data: Balancing Risk and Innovation, by Kord Davis and Doug Patterson, O'Reilly, 2012: Copy provided by Amazon. A very much needed, extremely well written essay on what the authors call the "forcing function" of Big Data – a push to

Liquibase in the Enterprise: Part 5

A year has gone by since I last posted about Liquibase, an open source database change management tool that I exclaimed is "one of the best software development tools I have used in recent years" in my first post of the series. All of these posts continue to

Commercialized Open Source (Repost from January 2009)

One nontrivial area of decision making that is of increasing import in recent years involves the choice between open source and commercial products. If you have not yet noticed, a fair number of open source software products have been acquired by commercial firms, and much open source has the backing

New Book Review: "Enterprise Analytics"

New book review for Enterprise Analytics: Optimize Performance, Process, and Decisions through Big Data, edited by Thomas H. Davenport, FT Press, 2012: Copy provided by Amazon. This book is a collection of eighteen essays on enterprise analytics by fourteen different authors, ten written or co-written by the editor, who also

Counterpoint: Defining Big Data

About a month ago, I had the opportunity to attend the Big Data in Finance Day Chicago event at Microsoft Technology Center Chicago. One of my many observations was that it is apparent the industry has not agreed on a definition of "Big Data".The best definition that

Google Analytics: 3 Years, 200 posts, 20k pageviews

Just recently, a trifecta of milestones for this blog was reached: the 3-year anniversary of setting up Google Analytics, a posting of my 200th post, and 20k pageviews by visitors. And in looking at the calendar, I realized that it was about time again that I post some observations along

Big Data in Finance Day Chicago (September 18, 2012)

Personal notes from Big Data in Finance Day Chicago that I recently attended at Microsoft Technology Center Chicago. In speaking with event organizer and Fountainhead owner Andrew "Shep" Sheppard (a self-described quant by day and meetup organizer by night), following the last session, he mentioned that the first

New Book Review: "The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook"

New book review for The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading with Trust, by Charles H. Green and Andrea P. Howe, 2011: Almost exactly four years ago today, I wrote the following about the predecessor to this text: "Truly, the content that Maister, Green, and Galford provide

New Book Review: "Scenarios"

New book review for Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation (Second Edition), by Kees van der Heijden, Wiley, 2005: This effort seemed to be among the most respected texts amongst the short list of scenario planning efforts in the current marketplace, but the opinions of other readers with regard to

Personal Reading List: 4Q2012

My personal reading list for October, November, and December 2012. Color Key: Special Notes, Currently Queued, Completed Reading. Updated throughout the Quarter. Core HTML5 Canvas: Graphics, Animation, and Game Development, by David Geary, Prentice Hall, 2012. By invitation from Amazon. Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques (Third Edition)