Category: Blogs

By Mike Lisagor, Adapted from the book, How to Win in the Government Market (w/Mark Amtower)

Letting go of attachments to things that no longer have value is difficult. In the personal realm, this includes dysfunctional relationships, unhealthy habits and, in my case, the compulsive need to make bad puns. When you’re a marketing, sales, capture, or line manager, or an executive, letting go takes on an even broader context because it affects not only your feelings but also your organization’s success and co-workers’ performance.

An effective manager realizes that allowing someone to remain in a job that doesn’t fit harms that person, the other staff, and the business. Many leaders are averse to conflict and prefer to maintain a negative status quo rather than directly confront a performance issue. But problems rarely go away without some intervention. You sometimes need to let go of staff members so they can find other job opportunities better suited to their skills.

Another symptom of refusing to let go is an inability to delegate tasks which can cripple an organization, demoralize employees and, eventually, stall the manager’s career. Managers who were promoted from technical positions sometimes prefer to hide in the comfort zone of their previous responsibilities. While remaining buried in minutiae, important decisions go unattended. Letting go of technical details takes courage but is the sign of a mature leader.

People also get emotionally invested in certain design approaches, management solutions, technology projects and government new business opportunities. It can be difficult to separate enthusiasm, a positive trait, from an inability or unwillingness to objectively evaluate alternatives.

When deciding whether to proceed with a plan or not, I like to use a decision matrix that requires the major stakeholders to assess the viability of an idea or project by scoring each alternative against a set of critical success factors. If used properly, this approach can remove at least some of the raw emotions from the equation. What’s left is a more objective view of whether the return on investment justifies the costs of workforce, IT infrastructure and financial resources.

People often avoid letting go because they fear uncertainty. But, enlightened managers aren’t afraid to take calculated risks. They accept that the status quo is not a friend to be trusted for too long. As the song goes, “Breaking up is hard to do.” But by doing so, a new world of opportunities awaits.

Mike Lisagor is a member of the Board at WhirlWind

Data integration offers a wealth of opportunities that allow organizations to implement new innovative services, simplify delivery of public services, reduce fraud and human error, and create massive operational efficiencies. But data integration does not come without challenges.

Without the right skillset, technology or strategy, the way you handle your data could be hindering your BI plans, analytics objectives, and innovation goals. The result, a stagnant organization, which fails to deliver new products and services.

But what can your organization do to avoid this fate? Well, you need to overcome these data integration challenges.

Data Integration Challenges:

  1. Your data isn’t where it needs to be
  2. Your data is there, but it’s late
  3. Your data isn’t formatted correctly
  4. You have poor quality data
  5. There are duplicates throughout your pipeline
  6. There is no clear common understanding of your data across the organization

Before we delve into the core issues, let’s first define exactly what we mean by a ‘data integration challenge’.

What is a data integration challenge?

A data integration challenge is something stopping you from achieving control over the processes and output of your data integration. It’s the obstacle preventing a single, unified view of your disparate data.

And what’s data integration? Data integration is the creation of usable data with consistent quality, from diverse data sets. It involves retrieving data from different sources and merging it to create a single, unified view. This unification makes it easier to catalyse insights and deliver faster, more meaningful organizational productivity and improved data products.

Getting on top of data integration challenges is important when processing data at scale and when working to mature your organization’s data strategy.

The Top Data Integration Challenges

Now that you have a broad overview of what the data integration challenge is, let’s look more specifically at a few commonplace examples.

Here are six data integration challenges your organization might face and some ideas on how to solve them.

1. Your data isn’t where you need it to be

You want your data in a centralized location, but you struggle with centralization. Sounds familiar?

This data integration challenge is commonly a result of depending on human power alone. Relying on developers to curate data from disparate sources and perform data wrangling takes time. This is time that your organization could use to spend on analysing data insights and driving valuable business practices. In order to speed up your innovation goals, it’s better to enlist the help of a smart data integration platform. This will do most of the heavy lifting. It’s a great way to say goodbye to some of your data integration issues.

2. Your data is there, but it’s late

Some processes require real-time or near real-time data collection. For example, if you’re a statistician, running a global trade site, you may choose to publish tailored, targeted metrics to each individual consumer based on their country and search history.

If the data isn’t collected in the timespan you expect, you can’t meet these demands. Unfortunately, relying upon your team to manually collect data in real time is impossible at best. The likelihood is, you don’t have the resources or employee power to undertake such a daunting task.

If you would like to push for real-time data ingestion and, consequently, innovative and reactive services, your only way forward is with an automated data integration tool. This technology will reliably curate real-time (or near real-time) data without having to sacrifice your resources.

3. The data isn’t formatted correctly

Disparate or anomalous data that’s incoherent or in the wrong format isn’t actionable – its value is lost.  But manually formatting, validating, and correcting data is onerous and takes up a lot of your developers’ precious time.

Data transformation tools eliminate this problem by analysing the original base language, determining the correctly formatted language, and automatically making the change. This process takes the stress out of data integration and limits the number of errors, especially when your data team can flag and inspect code at any point in the transformation pipeline.

4. You have poor data quality

Poor quality data leads to lost productivity, missed insights and data not fit for purpose. That’s why data quality management is an essential part of driving new product innovation, staying compliant, and making more accurate decisions.

By proactively validating your data as soon as it’s ingested, you lower the amount of bad data entering your systems. In addition, you can also monitor your data pipelines for outliers and automatically spot errors before they become larger issues.

5. There are duplicates throughout the data pipeline

Organizations are increasingly aware of duplicate data in their systems, because of siloed legacy environments. While duplicates may appear harmless at first, they can cause serious problems long term, when data needs to be integrated. The more duplicates you have the more difficult to enrich or augment that data by incorporating values from other datasets. To help combat duplicates and eradicate data silos organizations should:

  • Create a culture of data sharing between technical and business teams
  • Standardize the validated data and ensure everyone understands it
  • Invest in technology that encourage team collaboration
  • Adhere to regulatory requirements that promote transparency, data privacy and security
  • Track data lineage

6. There is no clear common understanding of the data

We’ve already discussed the importance of communication between technical and business teams regarding data sharing. But establishing a common vocabulary of data definitions and permissions is equally as important.

You can achieve this common understanding through:

  • Data governance – this focuses on the policies and procedures surrounding your data strategy.
  • Data stewardship – a data steward is an individual who oversees and coordinates your strategy, implements policies, and aligns your IT department with your business strategists.

The amount of data organizations create is growing faster than ever before and is a latent source of value to every organization. But, unless these six core data integration challenges can be mastered, you won’t get the most value from your applications, functions, and processes. Get things right, and you can accelerate digital transformation using data as the cornerstone of your growth and development.

So, take a step back, review your business goals, and identify which of these challenges is preventing you from accomplishing your objectives. With the right culture, mindset, and tools and skills, your organization can conquer even the most complex data integration challenges.

Our next blog will examine the tools and technologies that can be employed to achieve successful data integration.

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Data Management in the New Year

AI Takes Center Stage

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an area of computer science that studies the possibility of ‘thinking’ machines and computers.  According to the National Artificial Intelligence Act of 2020, the term ‘artificial intelligence’ means a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations or decisions influencing real or virtual environments.”

No longer the experimental darling of prior years, machine learning will take center stage in the data management space in 2022.  It is expected to be the most important technology adopted, transforming key processes and business models to take advantage of ML.  With the necessary algorithms, compute power, hardware, and skillsets, AI can become the fundamental driver for revenue and growth. Here are a few new AI use cases in the data management space, that will flourish in 2022

Green AI 

The UN Climate Change Conference, COP26, in Nov’21, continued to emphasize outcomes that directly impact climate action and the Sustainable Development Goals. How can AI help with this endeavor? The airline industry has a call to action, and they are beginning to respond. For example,

Alaska Airlines is using an AI platform, Flyways, to produce the best ways to route aircraft; By analyzing volumes of weather data and suggesting paths that avoid turbulence to provide smoother flights or shorter paths. With just-in-time data analytics, operators are given suggestions on how and where to fly planes, with the platform getting better since it is a machine learning and a dynamically updating ecosystem. Predictive analytics not only support weather, air traffic, and other aspects impacting the flight it could choose to delay a flight to help avoid a weather system or gridlock in the landing pattern thus ultimately reducing flight time, fuel burn, and emissions – ultimately reducing the carbon footprint.

Customer Experience – AI in the call center  

Customer service data management is key to driving a better customer experience.  Executive Orders 12862, 13571,13707,13985, dating back to 1993, set the foundation for improving customer experience and service delivery – putting people at the center of everything the Government does. The use of AI to unlock data that is kept in the millions of daily customer-service conversations between the government and the public will yield a treasure trove of information for predictive analytics. This “speech mining™” provides new CRM use cases with the application of AI tools and techniques

Lean Data Management™

Driven by remote work and learning, data, compute, and workloads will move to the edge where it is more efficient to consume and manipulate.  Some industry analysts predict that 2022 will be the year that 75% of enterprise-generated data is processed outside the traditional data center. Data management must therefore follow.  Current edge computing platforms were not designed to handle vast amounts of data cost-effectively. However, if the data is cleaned, and only the relevant blocks pertinent to analytics is retained then this “lean data management” concept can produce useful models for ML algorithms.

Enterprise Data Fabric (EDF)

model and integrate data at whatever level of granularity desired. It anticipates the need to connect data across the enterprise at speed and scale for dynamic decision-making. To this end, it uses multiple technologies that enable metadata-driven implementation and augmented orchestration design. EDF will help organizations make decisions faster and can create Cognitive Zones™ that also ultimately assist citizen data scientists.

Graph Data Bases 

A graph database is a data model that uses two basic building blocks: nodes, containing all the properties of the entity, and vertices. It utilizes the simple idea of using vertices to establish relationships between pairs of nodes.  It is, therefore, better suited for rapid decision making, and visualization of relationships.

When retrieving data is more important than storing it, the data is interconnected and there is a need for complex relationship analysis, graph databases will see much use. Examples of some use cases are fraud detection, anti-money laundering, population dynamics, virus spread during a pandemic, crime prevention, air traffic management etc.

The above discussion provides only a teaser post for my thoughts on Data Management in 2022, and some of the technologies that could impact this space.  If this has piqued your interest stay tuned for more articles in the future.

Apache Log4j is a Java-based logging utility library that is part of the Apache Logging Services, a project of the Apache Software Foundation. Since this software is prolific in internet-connected devices, from IoT products like TVs, cameras, and portable devices to servers running major vendor’s cloud operations, a vulnerability in Log4j, can be described as “catastrophic” and “nightmarish”, since not only resolution can be complex, but also because the affected version of Java has existed since 2013.

Cybersecurity experts from the FBI, CISA, and the NSA continue to warn, that since the vulnerabilities became public in early Dec. ’21, there has been increased activity by nefarious state actors, and ransomware groups actively scanning networks to potentially exploit the vulnerability in Log4Shell (Apache’s Log4j software library, versions 2.0-beta9 to 2.14.1). This remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability can be used to deploy Cobalt Strike beacons, crypto miners, and botnet malware. This became evident even in the Java edition of Minecraft, Microsoft’s popular video game when players could compromise other players’ systems by sending malicious code through chat messages.  The list of affected companies and software continues to grow. However, federal agencies faced a Dec. 24. 2021 deadline to remediate the vulnerability even though CISA has not encountered any confirmed breaches of Federal agencies via the vulnerability.

For Java 8 users Apache has released Log4j 2.17.0 that includes patches for the RCE vulnerability and denial-of-service vulnerabilities.  For Java7 users Log4j is at 2.12.2, to address the RCE vulnerability

In response to this threat, organizations should, at a minimum, take the following steps:

  • Immediately identify any systems vulnerable to a Log4Shell attack, by using the new CISA scanner utility mirroring a similar tool released by the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC).
  • Identify any systems using Log4J Java library and immediately ensure it is not being used in any production systems and patch with updated security corrections.
  • Identify internet-facing applications that allow data inputs and use log4J; they are vulnerable to attack. Assume compromise
  • Use logs to identify unusual traffic patterns e.g., JNDI LDAP/RMI outbound traffic, DMZ systems initiating outbound connections
  • Update Apache servers with the latest updates for Apache HTTP Server
  • Monitor the Apache Log4j Security Vulnerabilities webpage for mitigation guidance
  • Seek help from a trusted vendor/partner

Read the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)’s guidance on the Log4j vulnerability here and has added this vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog | CISA –  a list of vulnerabilities organized by severity.

In a connected world, vulnerabilities are inevitable.  Therefore, all organizations would do well to follow CISA guidelines and take proactive steps to reduce risks and breach impact.

As I sat in the judge’s panel, I could feel the electric excitement in the air. 11 youths, representing nine different businesses, were pitching their innovative ideas in the Teen Biz Challenge, held by the Office of the Mayor, Catherine E. Pugh, in Baltimore. The competition was inspired by the popular “Shark Tank” television series and the teens were competing for up to $6,500 in startup funds for their “big ideas”.

The teens came prepared, armed with creativity, talent and cool ideas for businesses, from the OmegaBrush, an innovative dental hygiene product presented by Mahmoud Shelby (18 years old), to Miracle Box, a subscription service for healthy food delivery presented by Sa’Niya Sherman (16 years old). Kamri Moses (14 years old) presented a mouthwatering array of smoothies and assorted beverages for his KR Smoothies business.

The pitch that received the highest level of funding came from a recent high school graduate and current freshman student at Stevenson University, Ciera Smith (18 years old). Ciera’s business, Naturally Me is a monthly subscription service for feminine hygiene products. Ciera Smith received $6,500 in the accelerator program and each business that pitched received at least $1,000 in funding.

All the teens that pitched were graduates of the 2018 Y.E.S. (Youth Entrepreneurship Startup) Summer Program. WhirlWind was a Gold Sponsor this year, and as I sat there in the judge’s panel, I thought the impressive presentations were a testament to the important work facilitated by the  D.R.E.A.M. (Developing Resources to Empower All Minds) Foundation.

At WhirlWind, we fleshed out what empowerment means to us and came to the core of helping people to understand and fulfill their potential. Showing up for the teens and serving as judge and mentor gave me a front seat view into the next generation’s incredible potential. It is also important for us to engage local talent and businesses, for they translate into a stronger economy and contribute to thriving communities. And for this, I am excited to do the work I do.<?p>

What comes to mind when you think of “helping people to understand and fulfill their potential?” What inspires you when it comes to empowering yourself and others?

Related Press Release: WhirlWind Technologies CEO as a Panel Judge for the Teen Biz Challenge

For our latest philanthropy project at the end of the year, we decided to include the entire company. This is a time of year that calls for gratitude, reflection and generosity to those less fortunate than us. We set up collection boxes at different locations, and gave our WhirlWind techies an option to donate toys for the Toys for Tots program. We collected and donated over 150 toys this year!

Toys for Tots is a program run by the US Marine Corps Reserve that distributes toys to children whose parents cannot afford to buy them gifts for Christmas. “When you donate to Marine Toys for Tots you are helping to bring the joy of Christmas and send a message of hope to America’s less fortunate children.” is their tagline and their impact is felt in homes all over America. Founded in 1947, the Toys for Tots program has delivered 548 million toys, supporting 251 million children to date.

And the difference is felt. Cindy, a gift recipient from California, shared a heart moving story of her memories.  “Toys for Tots was the only reason I received a gift for Christmas each year as a child. I remember my dad waiting in line the whole day in order for me and my siblings to have something to open on Christmas. I have such great memories thanks to this program. Thank you to everyone who donates to this great cause.”

The impact of working collectively to help others can not be overstated. As reiterated by a community organizer in Georgia, “…The Toys for Tots Program is a blessing for the community we serve. We have had families tell us that they would not have had anything under the tree if it was not for this program. There is so much work to do, but as long as we take a piece and someone else does the same, eventually we can reach as many needs as possible.”

Thank you to all the WhirlWind techies that contributed! With this project we want to emphasize we can all embrace WhirlWind’s purpose to empower others. Our core values include #Have the mindset of an entrepreneur (Empower) and #Take the Initiative (Commitment) and together we will work to empower as many people as possible!

The best gifts are sometimes the unexpected ones! What is your best (or most unexpected) gift to date?

“What is your favorite humanitarian effort?” I posed this question during our Monthly Leadership & Management meeting in August. I wanted to get a sense of what was important to our leaders at WhirlWind Technologies, and to vote on our next philanthropy project. The answers ranged from mental health advocacy to global relief,  but what seemed to resonate the most is the topic of youth and education and helping under served communities.

The timing of the discussion coincided with the beginning of the 2018 school year. By the end of the discussion, we voted to donate school supplies to children in need. We picked Oaklands Elementary School, in Laurel Maryland, because it is a Title I school. Title I is part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA)  which supports schools with large concentrations of low-income students in meeting its students’ educational goals.

Eight students in total were selected, a boy and a girl from 2nd grade, 3rd grade, 4th grade and 5th grade respectively. The classrooms we chose were also being taught by new teachers to the school, and we hoped equipping the students in their classrooms would also ease the teacher’s experience.

Being a mom with a school age child, this cause is close to my heart. I took my son to go shopping for supplies at Walmart. We printed the Prince George’s county school system list of suggested school supplies and spent the day selecting the book bags and supplies, while discussing our civic responsibility and the importance of lending a hand to people who are struggling in our community.

A little goes a long way too, as we heard back from Candice Nicholson, the 2nd grade teacher “Since I work at a Title 1 school, kids always need supplies that their parents can’t afford. Well, WhirlWind saved the day, when I was able to give supplies to not one, but two students.”  

Meanwhile, Taylor Mcleod, the 3rd grade teacher spoke from a new teacher’s perspective, “This is my first year of teaching. I had no idea how hard teaching is. I didn’t know that all parents don’t buy their kids school supplies. That made me sad because I can’t afford school supplies for all the students in my class. Thank you WhirlWind, for taking some of that stress away from this first year teacher.”

“Thank you, WhirlWind, for supporting the needs of our students,”  Jewel Preston, the Principal of the school, added. “ Companies like yours make my job easier.”

I am proud to be part of a company that takes its social responsibility seriously. Our vision includes empowering our community and future leaders. Our purpose is to help people to understand and fulfill their potential, and sometimes that involves removing barriers so they can succeed. In our latest project, we hope giving students the tools they need will free them to focus on the important task at hand: learning.

What’s your favorite philanthropy effort? What does giving mean to you?

I am passionate about empowerment, which is emerging as one of WhirlWind’s foremost core values. We are exploring the idea of empowering all of our stakeholders, by listening to their needs and identifying their opportunities and challenges.

So  I was excited when I got a call from a local Prince George’s County nonprofit called the D.R.E.A.M. (Developing Resources to Empower All Minds) Foundation to sponsor the 2018  Y.E.S. (Youth Entrepreneurship Startup) Program. The Y.E.S program is a five-week, all expenses paid summer camp for Baltimore City high school students, aimed at entrepreneurship  and financial literacy. WhirlWind became a Gold sponsor for the event, allowing the students to participate at no cost, including lunches, field trips and lectures from other entrepreneurs.

This summer, the Y.E.S. program hosted a total of 26 high school students. Y.E.S. participants learned key concepts of running and operating a business, from creating an idea, to competitor analysis, market trends, value proposition and scalability. The students met with 21 entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds, who shared their success stories and struggles. The students also visited National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to study black inventors and pioneers.

The graduates of the Y.E.S. Summer program in 2018 will participate in the Teen Biz Challenge held by the Office of the Mayor, Catherine E. Pugh, in Baltimore. The teenagers will present their ideas to a panel of judges, including myself. They will pitch their businesses for a final round of up to $5,000 in startup funds.

I connected with a lot of bright and promising students with lofty ideas, and that was really inspiring. We are in the process of crafting our Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) to empower 10,000 people in 10 years, working on it through one relationship at a time. Sponsoring the Y.E.S. program  is a step in the right direction. I look forward to more.

What does empowerment mean to you? In what ways can you demonstrate the core value of empowerment in your own roles (at WhirlWind and outside)?

Related Press Release: WhirlWind Technologies, LLC Headlines the Y.E.S. Program as a Gold Level Sponsor

“The three most dreaded words in the English language are ‘negative cash flow’.” -David Tang

The last section in the “Scaling up: How a Few Companies Make it…and the Rest Don’t” by Verne Harnish, detonates typical assumptions about the role of cash in a business. Harnish  notes that “Growth sucks cash” and he illustrates a company that was literally “growing broke.”

What was surprising about this section is that Harnish suggests that regular Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the financial health of a company are misleading. For example, companies often first tout   “Revenue,” which he terms “Revenue Vanity”. Another common KPI is “Profitability”, but Harnish asks “What is more important, profit or cash?” For a growing business, the resolute answer is “Cash.” A huge influx of cash allows the likes of Amazon to thrive,  even while breaking even or posting losses.

Companies are usually Profit-focused, but considering only the Revenue minus Expenses will provide a skewed view of the numbers. The saying is “Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity and cash flow is king.” The numbers can be manipulated to show “profit”, but only cash and debt balances are facts. Cash and debt balances, incidentally, are what banks look at to evaluate a company’s performance.

So how do you increase cash flow? Our plan is to implement Harnish’s suggestions:

  • Shorten cycle time – How fast does a dollar invested in the business (from finding an opportunity all the way to revenue) come back to the company? This is a KPI Harnish suggests called the “Cash Conversion Cycle.”  To this point, Every WhirlWind Techie has a direct impact on our cash flow. When a techie fails to submit his/her timesheet on time, that delays our invoicing and increases our Cash Conversion Cycle. When Project Managers don’t submit their monthly reports on time, that also delays our invoicing.
  • Eliminate mistakes – Make sure your hours are entered in the right bucket, invoices are submitted on time in the right format, and within the correct timeframe.
  • Change the business model – This entails changing how we charge clients to provide services or products. The simplest recommendation Harnish gives is simply asking clients to pay earlier in the cycle. We have other plans in the works to commoditize our services. Stay tuned to hear more.

Another initiative we want to roll out to all our Techies is Financial Literacy, spanning the personal and business aspects of Finance and empowering everyone in the company to contribute to the cash flow.

Do you have any ideas on increasing our cash flow? What can we start, stop, or continue doing to increase our cash flow? Your voice is important to us!

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