Fresh Links Sundae encapsulates information I have come across during the past week. Often they are from the people whose work I admire or resonate with me. I hope you will find these ideas thought-provoking at the minimum. Even better, I hope these ideas will, over time, help my fellow IT pros make better decisions, be awesome, and kick ass!

Data preparation and curation is the task that often consumes the majority portion of the data mining effort. Ben Lorica outlines some of the data preparation lessons discussed in the recent Strata + Hadoop World at New York. Lessons from next-generation data wrangling tools (O’Reilly Radar)

Many organizations have high awareness of the need to build analytics capability but understand very little on the how-to. Lana Klein discusses five approaches for getting through the analytics maze. Analytics: Five Rules to Cut Through the Hype (KDnuggets)

While IT may be a prominent service provider within an organization, there are other functions that also provide services to the enterprise. Darroll Buytenhuys talks about how organizations can leverage IT’s service management experience to benefit other shared services teams. Enterprise Service Management – Enabling Value Delivery Outside IT (The ITSM Review)

According to Dennis Drogseth, ITSM will become a critical, enabling element as the role of IT transforming to become a more front-office and customer focus. He discusses the trends he saw in 2014 that will grow in importance in 2015. The Changing Game of IT Service Management (EMA Blogs)

While data mining receives a great deal of attention today, many businesses still operate with rudimentary decision capability that is very apparent through their interactions with the customers. Michael Maoz suggests that, until IT and lines of business are working together, data mining’s impact will continue to be limited. Why data mining resembles handing a child a scalpel (Gartner Blogs)

Some people believe that, because project requirements are often too fluid, formal project planning may not be as critical as actually doing project work. Glen Alleman reminds us what capabilities-based planning is and what it is intended to do. Capabilities Based Planning (Herding Cats)

Many organizations set goals for process improvement at the beginning of the year. However, many of those resolutions fail to follow through as the months go by. Ryan Ogilvie makes suggestions on how to stay motivated and achieve the results you were hoping for. Goal Setting and New Year’s Resolutions – 6 of one Half Dozen of the other (Service Management Journey)

Today’s organizations face attack in the cyberspace by highly organized groups with deep pockets and high levels of know-how. Eddie Schwartz outlines four steps where organizations must take immediately to defend their information assets in today’s landscape. Lessons from the Sony breach: Four things that need to happen now (ISACA Now)