Thought Leadership and Innovation
This circle purpose is:
"Create new competencies for tomorrow's business and establish thought leadership at a worldwide level".
This derives from the global purpose of "... elevating the Data Engineering game".
As described in the principles and pillars page, Elite Data Engineering is core for us, thus we would like to also bring our vision, expertise, and contribution to the worldwide community. To achieve this, it's crucial to remain vigilant and continuously evaluate new technologies and trends, ensuring that our practices and customer experiences remain at the forefront.
Join the circle activities
Ready to make an impact?
Join Thought Leadership and Innovation and shape our future through:
- Participation in research activities
- Authoring insightful articles
- Taking the stage as a speaker at international conferences
- Organizing events
- Contributing to Open Source Software
Your journey starts by reaching out to the respective role holders. Let's elevate our collective potential!
Participation in research activities
The circle carries out research through the following activities:
- proposing and then tutoring master or phd thesis (through Thought Leadership and Innovation/Thesis & Internship Coordinator, Thought Leadership and Innovation/Thesis & Internship Tutor and Thought Leadership and Innovation/Researcher)
- testing emerging technologies and practices (Thought Leadership and Innovation/Capo scout) with the final goal of having them adopted by our customers
If any need for research emerges in your BU feel free to contact Thought Leadership and Innovation/Researcher to evaluate the possibility of any activity.
Content creation
The circle manages the creation of content that aims to expand and improve the thought leadership of Agile Lab with regard to topics that are part of the strategy.
The Thought Leadership and Innovation/Tech Publisher (covering diverse domains like Articles and Talks) will identify the suitable topics, channels, and events for our content generation investment.
While the publisher role is integral to this circle, our goal is to involve as many Agilers as possible as content creators and speakers. Consequently, the publishers will actively seek freelance contributors for both written content and participation in events.
This means that any Agiler, after being approved by the publisher, will be able to spend company time to prepare content.
The budget for 2024 is as follows:
- 2 man days per article written
- 4 man days per speech (which includes preparation and participation to the event)
- 1500 € costs covered for event participation (travel, food, hotel)
Writing
Thought Leadership and Innovation/Tech Publisher is the owner of the strategy (i.e. choose which topics should be covered) and the publishing timing, but it should still follow guidelines defined by Marketing to optimize the reach of our content.
Speaking
Becoming a speaker is easier than you think, start with applying to a "call for presentation" at a conference you'd like to participate. When you are admitted/selected, contact Thought Leadership and Innovation/Tech Publisher who will validate your sponsorship and help you to create a memorable talk.
The only limitation to the participation as a speaker at conferences is the speaker budget
available in this circle. This means you have the opportunity to participate as a speaker with speaker budget
funding any conference participation even multiple times, until the budget runs out. Thought Leadership and Innovation/Tech Publisher will balance requests if many people apply based on conference relevance and speakers (i.e. we're not sending 1 people to 5 conferences if that means running out of budget and precluding the opportunity to other people). This speaker budget
does not interfere with your training budget benefit.
When you're participating at a conference as a speaker, take the chance to help organizers, moderating round tables, for example.
Organizing events
Helping community managers and event organizers can help guide the event and make it more successful. As of 2024 we're not actively investing in organizing any public event as part of this circle strategy but anyone, can ask help (evaluated by the lead link) to organize and help organizing:
- local events
- side events during a conference
Open Source contributions
We sponsor two kind of open source contributions:
- contributions to community projects that are outside of Agile Lab governance (domain of Thought Leadership and Innovation/OSS Committer - community projects)
- contributions to open source projects developed by Agile Lab (domain of Thought Leadership and Innovation/OSS project lead)
Community Projects
We use open source software in our daily work. As well as knowing the open source codebase we're using, we should make it better too when possible! As a general guideline, scratch your own itch is the main reason why people contribute to open source. We want to embrace this mentality and try to extend it to our customers. Everytime you have to implement something that is very generic, or everytime you find an open source project that does 99% of what you need but is missing that 1%, evaluate to make it open source. This is easier said than done, but at least make this your "mental model". If such opportunity arises, contact Thought Leadership and Innovation/OSS Committer - community projects.
Even if we would like to build from scratch all the nice ideas we have in mind, we need to be pragmatic and invest well our limited resources. Therefore, we should try to understand first if we can catch two birds with one stone: with the help of your Sales/Account discuss with the customer at hand the opportunity to open-source or contribute part of the work you're doing. If this path does not work, will be the Thought Leadership and Innovation/OSS Committer - community projects in charge to choose if we should invest budget in the initiative or not.
Agile Lab Open Source projects
Over the years, Agile Lab developed open source projects they can be found on Github. All Agile Lab open source projects - except noted otherwise - are developed under Apache 2 license and accept external contributions to the best of Agile Lab capabilities to review and integrate them.
These projects fall in these categories:
- production-ready libraries/frameworks that Agile Lab developed internally and uses or has used as part of solutions provided to its customers. Some of these projects have been or are being funded by Agile Lab customers that have used or have been using them
- examples of extensions of the Witboost product that represent the state of the art and a starting point for customers to customize their witboost experience
- Specifications, like Data Product specification or Governance Decision Record that are proposals of standard descriptor or practices
- Research projects and Proof of Concepts: projects that are exploration of a problem to evaluate the feasibility of solutions we had in mind
- Internal tools: small projects that proved useful internally and can be useful to anyone (like Holaspirit Honkit plugin or Scrupulous config)
All projects follow this lifecycle:
- Active: Agile Lab is actively investing in those projects
- Looking for sponsor: Agile Lab thinks the project is valuable but decided to prioritize other investment. If any entity wants to fund the project, contact us
- Archived: The project reached its natural end of life and no investment will be pursued for the time being
After this necessary introduction, Agile Lab open source projects follow usual project practices, therefore there is an allocated budget and a team staffed in order to develop them. The main stakeholder of the Open Source projects is the Lead Link of Thought Leadership and Innovation. It is part of Thought Leadership and Innovation/OSS project lead accountabilities to advertise, evangelize and pursue the adoption the project at hand.