sdg - Solution Design Group

Communicate and Motivate

taramortenson — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:07:31 +0000

By: Mike Huang You’ve identified a key need, made your business case to the suits with the purse strings, and secured a budget. Building your team, you have sought out the best and brightest people throughout the organization, and maybe even recruited outside to find individuals to fill specific needs. If there are smarter people [...]

Applying Sentiment Analysis to Twitter

taramortenson — Thu, 16 May 2013 19:19:40 +0000

By: Greg Case Although social media has enabled consumers and businesses to connect like never before, it offers its own set of challenges. The sheer flood of information makes it difficult to perform informed decisions. For instance, how is the brand manager of Acme Corp supposed to handle the launch of the new “WonderWidget” line? [...]

Developers: How to Make your BA more Effective

jeffurban — Fri, 10 May 2013 20:06:55 +0000

By: Lori Most At a time when “speed to market” is at the top of every stakeholder’s list, we need to produce solid solutions in shorter and shorter timeframes. And, there’s no reason to hide it: you want to get your hands on the requirements ASAP. The business typically has a pre-defined go-live, and analysis [...]

An Introduction to MongoDB

taramortenson — Fri, 03 May 2013 01:27:35 +0000

By: Jeff Ortman A new type of database, the NoSQL database, has been receiving a lot of attention lately. NoSQL databases are non-relational and offer the promise of very high scalability and performance in addition to easier database refactoring and maintenance. This post focuses on one such NoSQL database: MongoDB. Some of the basic capabilities [...]

Parallel Processing with System.Threading.Tasks.Parallel.

taramortenson — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:50:28 +0000

By: Dan Schwie With multi-core processors fast becoming the norm, it’s important that those of us in the professional development community stay abreast of new tools and techniques for exploiting advances in hardware design. Multi-core hardware makes it easy for us as developers to harness the power of parallel processing. In this post, I’d like [...]

Balancing the Workload

taramortenson — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:16:16 +0000

By: Mike Huang In this day and age, maximizing employee productivity is paramount. But in the process of pushing toward new product releases, customer deliveries and milestones, your employees can easily find themselves overworked and burnt out. In the short term, this can lead to poor quality of deliverables (more defects in your products, or [...]

Spring Cleaning — Your Data

taramortenson — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 13:51:08 +0000

By: Cheryl Stepney Do you spring clean your home at this time every year, or do you maintain it all year round? My home is always clean and well organized due to constant attention, but little effort. This approach should be considered when you are dealing with the valuable corporate asset called DATA. You may have [...]

President’s Bowling Challenge

taramortenson — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 17:57:10 +0000

sdg employees attempted to out-bowl President Keith Martin at the President’s Bowling Challenge on Tuesday evening. We had 43 employees up for the challenge, and 6 were able to score above Keith. What was their reward? Keeping the tradition alive, they received a signed photograph from the President himself – because who wouldn’t want one [...]

Predictably Random

taramortenson — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:30:21 +0000

By: Greg Stier Introduction If you’ve been doing development for any decent length of time, you have most certainly run into this scenario or something similar. You are writing a piece of code that needs to simulate some part of the real world. Your simulation works really great except for one piece, it does not [...]

Rethinking WIIFM: What’s in it for me?

taramortenson — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:30:51 +0000

By: Steve Harper “Why should I work on your project?” This is a question that I have never been asked directly by a project team member. However, I have had members who I wish had asked me this question. Instead, they just don’t do the work the project team needs them to do. Often times [...]