Credit to stux-12364 for the jigsaw image.
When you install SSDT, you can find that the SSIS Toolbox components are all missing.
I am writing this blog for myself BECAUSE I ALWAYS FORGET WHERE IT IS and I am SO ANGRY with myself right now.
Here is what to do:
And SSIS Toolbox is baaack!
I’m delighted to be attending SAP Ariba Live as a Cloud Influencer on 4th to 6th June in Barcelona. In case you missed it, it looks an extremely exciting conference with amazing conference. I’m going because it aligns with my interests in a number of key ways and I’m going to point you to a few of my must-dos for the conference. The theme of ethics, diversity and leadership is present in many sessions, which is something I’m passionate about! Also, there are many great conference sessions, and I’m excited about learning a lot of new things.
SAP Ariba have invited Amal Clooney to give the keynote and I cannot wait to hear how she believes businesses can make things better for human rights through ethics and leadership. Make sure you’re in the audience when human rights lawyer, professor, and international law expert Amal Clooney gives the keynote address, sharing her perspective on how businesses can promote human rights. I believe that businesses can do so much more than think about profits and I believe in the triple-bottom-line for my own company and I do think about the full cost of doing business, including ethics, environment and social responsibility. There is a good mix of male and female speakers and that’s a sign that the conference is welcoming. Having run conferences myself, I believe that a good mixed audience brings about a better atmosphere since people try harder, and it gives the conference a good ‘feel’.
Following on from that point, there is also a Diversity and Leadership Forum on the topic of ‘Creating Balanced Leadership’ and I’m looking forward to it immensely. I’m glad that it has a mix of male and female panelists because people often assume that diversity just means women, but it does not. Diversity means everybody; we all have diversity in common. I am looking forward to learning a lot during this session.
I am definitely attending a session with Yves Mulkers, whom I admire greatly. I was lucky enough to meet Yves very briefly in Belgium a few years ago. I’ve been learning from Yves for a long time on social media, and I think he has a lot of good things to say on many topics.
There is an interesting session entitled ‘Mind Your Bias and Shift from Advocacy to Action‘ with Etosha Thurman, Head of Global Business Network at SAP Ariba. I think that this sounds a thought-provoking session and I’m looking forward to it. I think it sounds a good investment of time since it will provide insights on building and maintaining better teams.
I’m interested to learn more about how artificial intelligence can drive service and procurement business processes with conversational Artificial Intelligence solutions such as chatbots and voice assistants. This is a very forward-thinking topic and I am keen to learn about how SAP Ariba solutions and chatbots can help manage procurement processes.
On the way back home from Belgium this evening, I was reading a book about Adlerian psychology, and I was focusing on a part that discussed how we can’t let our pasts dictate our future. Then, going through the SAP Ariba agenda, I find this topic: Don’t Let the Past Dictate Your Future: Transform the Procurement Mind-Set and I’m sure it was meant just for me! I am interested in digital transformation and I think that this is a key session.
There are many other great sessions to choose from, but these topics are personal highlights for me. If you’re attending SAP Ariba Live, which sessions will you attend? Leave a note in the comments! On Thursday 6th June, the focus is on The Agile and Intelligent Enterprise, and I’m interested in understanding more how businesses can adapt to master and be successful in an era of massive disruption with changes in society, politics, economy, environment, and technology. Organizations must be agile to adapt and take advantage of technologies to future proof the business and become an intelligent enterprise, and I think that there will be lots of great learning and conversation on this topic. There are different types of breakouts for different learning and engagement styles, so you can have a browse here.
See you there! I’m excited to meet other Cloud Influencer such as Ronald van Loom. Here is the full list below!
Nearly three years ago, I complained bitterly about the demise of Windows Datamarket, which aimed to provide free, stock datasets for any and every purpose. I was a huge fan of the date dimension and the geography dimension, since they really helped me to get started with data warehousing.
So I’m glad to say that the concept is back, revamped and rebuilt for the data scientists today. Azure Open Datasets will be useful to anyone who wants data for any reason: perhaps for learning, for demos, for improving machine learning accuracy, perhaps.
The purpose of Azure Open Datasets is to save data scientists time and increase productivity by saving the time normally spent on both data discovery and
preparation.
Credit: Microsoft https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/open-datasets/overview-what-are-open-datasets
Azure Open Datasets is available in preview, so why not take a look? Datasets are cohosted with cloud compute in Azure making access and manipulation easier. They are contained in Notebooks, which is even better!
To learn more, join my Build session on Wednesday 8th May at 2pm in the Sheraton Grand Ballroom D. I’ll show you how it works.
Please head over and give it a try. I’m happy to see the concept is back.
I’ve been using Azure Machine Learning for some time, and I’m excited about the new possibilities with the new updates to Azure Machine Learning to make it easier for AI novices to build, train and deploy machine learning models. I believe in the power of AI, and I believe that everyone should get a chance to use it.
Microsoft are helping businesses to have easy access to AI, from conception to modelling through to business value creation and sustainability by making it production-ready. Azure Machine Learning helps data scientists and developers build and train AI models faster, then easily deploy those models to the cloud or the edge. By simplifying AI, it makes it easier to derisk to get started with it.
Microsoft have announced a new automated machine learning user interface which is zero-cde, meaning that you create your models visually by dragging and dropping. I’m also pleased to be delivering a Build session on Wednesday at 2pm, where I get to show off the new machine learning notebooks for code-first model development.
Right now, these capabilities are available in preview, so why not head over and have a play?
There are also new capabilities to help you to transition your models to production, at scale. New MLOps, or DevOps for Machine Learning capabilities, simplifies the end-to-end lifecycle from model creation to deployment. In order to help make AI easier for the business to manage, it’s also possible to monitor it with Azure DevOps integration. If you want to know more about MLOps, check out this video with Seth Juarez (Twitter), who is fantastic at explaining things and the video is well worth checking out.
At Build, it was also announced that there is now high-speed inferencing from cloud to edge. This enables low-latency and lowcost inferencing with the general availability of hardware-accelerated models that run on FGPAs in Azure. This capability is also available in preview in Data Box edge. ONNX Runtime support for NVIDIA TensorRT and Intel nGraph enables high-speed inferencing on NVIDIA and Intel chipsets.
To summarise, Microsoft are helping businesses to have easy access to AI, from conception to modelling through to business value creation and sustainability by making it production-ready. Azure Machine Learning helps data scientists and developers build and train AI models faster, then easily deploy those models to the cloud or the edge.
The updates in Azure Machine Learning are all currently available.
The European DatSci & AI Awards in collaboration with the BDVA & CeADAR are now accepting entries!
I’m delighted to announce that I am on the Judging Panel this year, along with people that I admire.
The Awards recognizes the gold standard for Data Science & AI in Industry, Education and Social Responsibility and connects the Data Science community across Europe.
The competition is open teams and individuals within the Data Science and AI community from across Europe.
Entry deadline for the competition is on the 24th May 2019.The competition is free to enter, so check out the criteria here and feel free to share. If you are interested in learning more sign up to the DatSci mailing list.
Important dates for this year’s Awards:
Business Analytics MSc Scholarship Available:
A central initiative of the European DatSci & AI Awards is paying it forward to the next generation of Data Science Talent, each year proceeds of ticket sales fund a Scholarship for full-time fees for a Level 9 MSc Business Analytics Student at UCD Smurfit School, Dublin. Check out details here.
Good luck!
The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs by Cynthia Montgomery
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The value of this book lay in its ability to distill important, insightful points in a digestible format.
In The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs, Montgomery helps you to think about applying and understanding the market forces in your industry. Montgomery also discusses the importance of creating value and defining purpose with her Strategy Wheel. Here is an example Strategy Wheel:
The heart of all this is the purpose; why does your company exist? The book is about taking ownership of the process, and ensuring that your system of value creation is critically linked to your purpose. If organizations want to be more effective, efficient, and have more impactful, then the strategist needs to line things up in that direction. If it isn’t working in favour of your purpose and value, then cut it. The book is about identifying that strategy is about having a compelling purpose for why the organization exists, and ensuring that your organization is squared up to meet it, and push it forward.
From time to time, I see people not owning their behaviour. I also see them not owning their industry and understanding everything about it. The book had good case studies, where you could see people straying outside their red lines. Case Studies are all very well since we can look at them with cold objectivity. With our own business, it becomes less clear and it starts to engage our lizard brain, which is harder to master.
I re-read the Strategy Wheel chapter a few times. The danger with canvasses such as the Business Canvas (or rebadged attempts at it) is that people really don’t always ask themselves about value creation. It is supposed to be a core component of the Business Canvas model but I don’t always see it applied. Perhaps because it is the hardest part? It is easy to tick boxes in a dilettante fashion, and not think more deeply from there. Thinking about strategy and value is hard, and Montgomery argues that you have to move deeper than ticking boxes, and I think that she is right. I prefer the Strategy Wheel since it means you have to focus on your purpose, and I will be using a version for it for my AI for the Executives Masterclass in London in May. Register Here
The book is heavily Porterian, which is not surprising since Montgomery is also at Harvard. It means that people without a business knowledge backgound could understand the impacts in a Porterian fashion, but not necessarily know his theory. I think that makes it applicable and relevant to a wider audience, and that’s a good thing.
The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business NeedsThe Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs
In the book ‘Bad Blood’ by John Carreyou, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Oracle’s Larry Ellison and the bitcoin bull and capital investor, Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion. Holmes achieved her life’s ambition of becoming a billionaire, with her worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. A major problem led to the largest corporate fraud since Enron: The technology didn’t work.
I read the book as a data professional, horrified by the lackadaisical approach to data governance, testing, and repeatable, testable science. Data was almost irrelevant, and it is clear from reading the book that the authorities, such as the FDA, hammered Theranos for their failure to put safeguards around their testing and data processes. So where does empathy come in?
Empathy is the art of remembering when others have helped make you feel heard, and empowered, and then paying that feeling forward to others.
On a deeper leadership level, it was clear that there was little emotional intelligence or empathy. It showed in a few things, such as a clear inability to empathise with the patients who relied on blood testing for their lives, as well as the military personnel who were one of the target audiences for this faulty machine.
One of my favourite quotes is Maya Angelou’s insightful comment:
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
As a leader, becoming empathetic is one of the most complex skills to master. From my reading of the Theranos situation in Bad Blood, it became clear that there was no atmosphere of empathetic leadership; in fact, quite the opposite. The people with the skills and data seemed afraid to speak to the Theranos leaders, and the book describes their feeling of terror when speaking with the leaders. It sounds like a hostile, sick place of work. If only they’d listened, perhaps Theranos might have had some of the successes that it was posited to have.
Earlier in my career, I used to have a complex reaction when people gave me unwarranted advice, or advice that I didn’t ask for. Sometimes I thought that they thought I was an idiot, or I didn’t know what I was talking about.
Now, as a leader, I realize that people felt that they could provide me with feedback; they weren’t afraid to talk to me. Now, I realize what a gift I’ve been given, and I appreciate it now. Thank you to everyone who shared their advice and wisdom with me. Possibly, I was not grateful at the time, but I see now that you felt you could talk to me.
Reading Bad Blood was a source of reflection for me, since it made me think about myself, and my responses to other people. If I had worked at Theranos, I would have been afraid to speak out, and I’d have probably just left.
What Holmes and Balwani missed out on was the gift of advice and thoughtful, constructive criticism for other people. People didn’t seem to be able to talk to them, so Holmes and Balwani never received their insights and help.
On reflection, sometimes I find myself in the situation where I could speak to someone with some insights, or even to warn them. But I can’t, because that person is simply too difficult to deal with, and I have to make a judgement call between making an effort to go through the pain of having to deal with them, and deal with the response of their lizard brain when they default to type, and don’t listen. So I leave it, step back, and leave them on their merry way to make mistakes. After a while, it’s just not worth my time and effort if I’ve bothered to try to engage.
I also realized that I cannot stomach a ‘make it until you fake it’ approach. I am not a dilettante, dabbling and making things sound good. I could see the dilettante, ‘fake it unti you make it’ approach resonate throughout the book and I realized how much it switches me off, and pushes me away. I am not looking for the good in people, I am looking for the real.
Credit: Pixabay https://pixabay.com/users/reneebigelow-2047917/
So I learned a lot from the book, about lack of empathy and emotional intelligence, but also about my response to people like that. I have been actively trying to grow my emotional intelligence and empathy, and here are some suggested reads. Click on the book for a link:
Enjoy! If you have any other recommendations, please leave them in the comments.
