If you’re a retail business, your current reality may best be described as “challenging” — even as a flood of pent up post-pandemic consumer spending is unleashed. Thanks to Amazon, customers expect abundant product availability, personalized recommendations, competitive pricing, and fast delivery. Mega retailers like Target and Walmart are fighting back by offering expanded online shopping, in-store shopping services with curbside pickup, and local delivery options — some even same-day.

Michelle Gienow

June 25, 2021

Today marks the 99th anniversary of the birth of Edgar F. Codd, the author of “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks” and godfather of the relational database. Ted Codd did for the database what Xerox PARC did for personal computers: made them accessible to everyday humans. Long before the invention of computers, there were databases. As early as 2400 BC the ancient Sumerians were carving tablets recording medical prescriptions for different ailments. Lists of Roman citizens on parchment scrolls. Card catalogs. Rolodexes. Even after computers were invented, data was far from automated. Early database models used a “flat file” system – a simple consecutive list of records that required the computer to begin at the start of the list and search sequentially. A very slow way to search, add to, and maintain large volumes of records. Meanwhile, we had a moon to get to! Humanity needed a way to access and interact with data in a fast, efficient, and accurate way.

Michelle Gienow

August 19, 2020

Ever been cruising along on some work that’s going really well when your laptop suddenly bricks? Or maybe you’re about to join an important meeting when Zoom announces it has to update right now and takes itself offline to install and restart? We’ve all been there. Which means we have all experienced first hand the disruption, the frustration, and occasionally the keyboard-pounding rage of downtime. Now imagine 100000 x’ing that pain up to full-scale organization level where downtime happens for everyone, all at the same time. We’ve all seen the headlines: Airline Cancels Thousands of Flights Due to Network Outages or Cloud Region Failure Makes Retailer Websites Go Dark on Black Friday, Busiest Shopping Day of the Year. The technical definition of downtime is “a period of time when technology services are unavailable to users”. This elegant simplicity, however, completely misses both the potentially serious business impacts and the deeply human pain that results whenever downtime disrupts work. The online sports betting service whose customers simply switch their wagers to a competing platform (and then never come back) The business traveler parent who misses their kid’s birthday party because their flight got canceled, or the small artisan counting on Black Friday sales to take their business into the black.

Michelle Gienow

March 13, 2024