Dr. Dominic Lindner, Autor bei agile Companies

Big data 21. March 2021

What is data mart and data lineage?

In the age of digitization and big data, a lot revolves around one thing: data. Terms such as data mart and data lineage regularly catch the eye. It is not always clear exactly what the technical terms are, which is why this article is intended to provide a brief overview. What is a data mart? Data marts are a kind of collection point for user-defined data. In doing so, data is extracted from large data stocks and made accessible in isolation for certain user groups. They thus form a sub-segment of a data warehouse and can help to make certain data accessible to the user more quickly and with less effort. This not only saves time but also costs. Data Mart vs Data Warehouse Both data marts and data warehouses are used to store and manage data records until they are used. Data warehouses are specialized in organizing the entire…

Big data 21. March 2021

What is a data lake?

Big data analyzes usually require a large amount of data in order to capture and collect all information in its raw state. This data storage resembles a real sea in size, which is why the technical term “data lake” has been established for it. You can find out exactly what this is all about in this article. definition As a large data store, the data lake manages the entire mass of data in its original form, i.e. in its raw format. He makes use of the collection of information from a wide variety of sources. It makes no difference to the data lake whether the data has a structure or not. This large data store also does not require any prior validation or reformatting of the data. However, a data lake cannot manage number or text-based data. In addition, it can also save information from the media area, such as…

Bachelor thesis / master thesis 21. March 2021

Mixed method approach in the thesis

You don’t know exactly how you want to proceed with your thesis and you are considering whether it should be quantitative or qualitative? Then I have good news: just do both! Reading tip: Qualitative and quantitative research Mixed Method combines the advantages of both types The mixed method approach means that you use various quantitative and qualitative research methods (Kuckhartz 2014). The advantages are that a research question can be illuminated by several research methods. The advantage of the thesis is that you can shed light on a question in two ways and make findings that were not possible on purely qualitative or quantitative research (Roch 2017). Different variants of the mixed method approach There are different versions of the mixed method approach. To do this, look at the following illustration. The mixed method approaches usually have a dominant research method. This can be qualitative or quantitative. It is seldom…

Agile organization 21. March 2021

Agility in the company – 5 tips: How to convince your management

With a view to current study such as from Hays shows a survey of over 1000 executives that 69% of the respondents consider agility more and more important. Important goals, sorted by name, are: Flexibility (55%)Speed (51%)Networking (46%)Adjustment (43%)Self-organization (43%) What the survey also shows, however, is that the implementation of agile methods, for example, is only used hesitantly. Only 11% of the respondents (all industries and departments) use Scrum and only 19% use design thinking. According to the survey, the current blockers (and therefore important requirements) are: Clear responsibilities and “power” for the agile roles (31%)Realignment of processes and organization (28%)Hardly any trust or pressure from management (26%) The “agility officer” in the company I often experience that there is an employee (e.g. agile coach) in the company who is supposed to introduce agility without any “power”. He reports regularly to management and usually complains about little or no…

Big data 21. March 2021

Case study: building a data lake for the use of big data

Big data is an important topic. That already shows a study by Bitkom . In 2018, the association surveyed over 600 companies on trending topics and found the following results: 57 percent are planning investments in big data or are already being implementedThe five top topics are big data (57%), Industry 4.0 (39%), 3D printing (38%), robotics (36%) and VR (25%)But: New concepts and possibilities such as artificial intelligence and blockchain have only rarely been used so far Reading tip: What is big data Implementation of big data only hesitantly According to the study, the potential of big data is only being used hesitantly. According to the study, the reasons for this are the requirements for data protection (63%) and the technical implementation (54%) as well as a lack of specialists (42%). Reading tip: What is a data scientist I am currently working on the technical implementation. In order to…

Careers in IT 21. March 2021

Getting ahead professionally: recruiting events as a feedback loop

Looking at a current study by Trendence (2018) shows that the current Generation Y is particularly interested in recruiting events. From several thousand interviewed young professionals and students: almost 60% have already attended a recruiting event30% are considering attending a recruiting event10% are unsure or reject such events Use recruiting events as feedback Of course, the advantages of such recruiting events are that you stand out from the crowd, get to know the employer better and maybe even secure points of sympathy for yourself. However, I see another useful advantage. Even if you are active in the job, you should attend recruiting events for two reasons: Reason 1: expand your personal network On the one hand, you often meet decision-makers and important company employees at the events. My tip: talk to employees in a relaxed atmosphere and then network (e.g. Xing). Such contacts are often worth their weight in gold.…

Careers in IT 21. March 2021

Software development at the center of responsibility – will we all soon be developers? #jobcrafting

When I asked a company what exactly a software developer does at a school information day in 2006 before my studies, the company representative jokingly said to me: “He types 0 and 1 into a PC, and it keeps doing it faster and faster.” We both had to laugh afterwards, but it wasn’t that far from reality at the time. The job of the software developer was characterized by sitting at the PC and typing programming code according to specifications. To this day, the job description of software developers has changed completely. As early as 2016, numerous magazines such as Computerwoche asked: What do software developers have to be able to do? . If you look at the current description of the Job description of the Federal Employment Agency there is more than just the pure development according to specifications: analyze,conceptualize,to plan,develop andoperate information technology applications The activities of a…

Digital change 21. March 2021

Trends and agility in organizations – from one extreme to the next?

You know it: There is constant change in your organization. From high agility back to a rigid structure back to agility? But why can it be that managers in organizations change course so often and feel from one extreme to the other? The management pendulum I believe it acts like a pendulum. Companies often react less proactively but rather reactively due to certain key figures such as layoffs or a drop in sales. At this point, companies are on one side of the extreme, e.g. many processes and hierarchies. Now the company is moving to the next extreme due to the decision of the management and realizing that there is now too much chaos in the organization. So we’re reintroducing a couple of processes. In the second step, the pendulum does not swing that far, but it swings in the other direction again. It loses momentum. This process lasts until…

Agile organization 21. March 2021

Can a consulting company also be agile internally?

I worked for a medium-sized consulting company myself for a few years and we mostly worked at the customer’s site. As a consulting team, we supported a large DAX company with absolutely flexible and agile digitization. Every request of the customer was implemented by us in an absolutely flexible and individual way. So we were, as it was on our website: an agile companion in the digital transformation. Reading tip: Agile IT service providers “Please coordinate agility with customers” The disadvantage was that we were tied 1: 1 to the interests and guidelines of the customer with regard to working hours, home office and place of work. But I often see promises on the websites of consulting companies: company events, home office, flextime and modern workspaces. But then I hear from my IT consultants friends: We have flexitime, modern workspaces and home office but that is not possible because we…

Careers in IT 21. March 2021

Become a senior: advance professionally and professionally!

After the first few years of work, there is often a desire to advance further. You work hard and want to show the boss that you have potential: Get out of the standard business and take on more responsibility. “I work hard but can’t get any further!” I often hear from my readers that they work very hard and receive a lot of praise, but do not get the desired promotion or professional recognition, e.g. senior consultant or staff position. The problem is, you’re just like that character in the hamster wheel. You work harder and harder and run faster and faster. But that is exactly what will usually never get you any further. This is also shown by a recent study by McKinsey: Fair promotion only exists in theory . T-Shaped Professional and the lighthouse theme At the beginning of your job you will usually become a generalist and…