Now that laws such as GDPR and CCPA are permanent fixtures on the global business landscape (and amendments to CCPA coming soon) — and customers are highly aware of how their data is being used — most businesses have made data privacy an integral part of their standard procedures. Organizations have devoted extensive resources to developing and executing their readiness plans and operationalizing these changes. And yet, even among those that have a data privacy governance framework in place, one challenge still remains: how to verify that privacy policies and procedures are being followed on a month-to-month basis.

Obviously, the…

Article by: Lionel Bodin & Alexis Greenwood

“Based on your recent experience, how likely are you to recommend Acme to a friend on a scale from 0 to 10?”

This is the million-dollar question — literally! A customer’s answer to this question contributes to a company’s overall transactional net promoter score (tNPS), a metric that reveals the likelihood that customers will recommend that company’s product or service to others. In other words, do they like you? Really like you?

A positive tNPS score equates to a high percentage of customers who are promoters — those willing to buy more product…

As a developer, I always appreciate having the chance to do work that can make a real difference in the world — that can help save lives, prevent hardship, or help the environment. In my current role, I have the chance to contribute a project that meets all three of these ideals by using computer vision and machine learning to help utility companies prevent wildfires.

In 2020 alone, California wildfires burned more than 4 million acres of land, destroyed more than 10,000 structures, and caused over $10 billion in damages. …

Snowflake has emerged at the forefront of a new era in enterprise data warehousing. Among its most game-changing features is its decoupling of compute resources from storage. This enables speed, scalability, and operational efficiency we data engineers could only dream of in the era of on-prem analytics. With on-demand compute in the cloud, the sky is the limit.

Snowflake solves a great many old data engineering problems, but others remain. The “T” in ELT brings its own set of issues. In particular, scheduling, alerting, and resource provisioning for heavy-duty data transformations are not easily accomplished with SQL alone. The cloud…

Article by: Mick Wagner

As adoption of data-intensive applications escalates, many organizations are opting to migrate from their legacy on-premise data platforms to Snowflake’s cloud-based data warehouse solution, and with good reason. Among other benefits, Snowflake separates storage and compute resources, allowing businesses to use and pay for the resources they actually use and to scale each independently, thus optimizing use of their budgetary dollars. Done right, a migration to Snowflake can save money and accelerate progress toward becoming a data-driven organization. …

Article by: Scott Nelson, Director at Logic20/20

Google is the greatest boon to software development since disks replaced those paper bunch tapes … but solutions for individual topics found online often skip the implications when applied at scale. This blog post will not add new information to the collective knowledge of using fragments in JMeter to test APIs; it will put some important concepts in the perspective of applying them to real-world enterprise solutions.

First things are not always first

Ideally, this article would start with the first tip. I know I generally prefer my information that way, i.e., direct and to the point. If you…

Article by: Lionel Bodin

By now the benefits of automation are well known, and thanks to the availability of cost-efficient, user-friendly automation software, more organizations are reaping the rewards. Gartner predicts that 90 percent of large businesses will adopt automation in some form between now and 2022, “as they look to digitally empower critical business processes through resilience and scalability, while recalibrating human labor and manual effort.”

As this trend accelerates, the future of automation has begun to take shape, and that future is intelligent. Many organizations are bumping up against the limitations of traditional automation and recognizing the need…

Article by: Nicholas Kelly

There’s a problem in healthcare — and it was here before the coronavirus outbreak.

In Medical Economics’ 2019 survey, 73 percent of physicians said they experienced burnout symptoms that made them want to quit practicing medicine. The largest contributors to this feeling have little to do with treating patients. “Too much paperwork” was the №1 response (37 percent), with electronic health records (EHR’s) ranking №3 at 17 percent.

Clinicians are clearly struggling under the weight of administrative burdens, and it’s not just them. Chiefs of staff, HR and compliance directors, you name it — disparate systems…