Daniel Acevedo

Daniel Acevedo

Hi, I’m Daniel Acevedo—founder and principal author and consultant at IT and Management. I’m an IT strategist who enjoys making sense of messy systems, guiding teams toward clarity, and building bridges between technology and business. Over the years, I’ve worked in IT across industries, but what drives me is pretty simple: helping people solve problems […]

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Bringing Your AI Work Home — Setting Up for Local LLMs

In today’s world of AI innovation, having the power to run large language models (LLMs) locally is becoming increasingly valuable. Whether you’re a researcher, developer, or AI enthusiast, bringing your AI work home means taking control of your environment, data privacy, and workflow efficiency without relying on cloud services. With advancements in GPU technology and

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Building a Natural Language Processing Pipeline with Python: A Hands-On Workshop for Named Entity Recognition

If you’ve ever needed to label your data for downstream AI, you know how tedious and error-prone manual tagging can be. Fortunately, with the help of Python and NLP tools like spaCy, you can automate this process and even train a model that understands your domain. In this workshop, you’ll build a system that classifies

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Databricks vs Azure Synapse Analytics: Understanding the Differences for Smarter Data Platform Choices

As a data engineer navigating cloud platforms and analytics ecosystems, I’ve worked extensively with both Databricks and Azure Synapse Analytics. While they often appear side-by-side in Azure environments, they come from different design philosophies and cater to slightly different needs—even when they seem to do many of the same things. Both platforms allow you to

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Deterministic vs. Probabilistic Thinking: Tools for the Thoughtful Technologist

This is the first in a series on understanding systems through the lens of deterministic and probabilistic design. We’ll start with the core distinction, then look at real-world examples—like MDM matching and network optimization—before exploring the more fluid world of probabilistic models and AI systems. In designing systems—whether they’re used for reporting, automation, machine learning,

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The Hidden Cost of Overloaded Data Fields — And How Data Governance Saves the Day

When One Field Tries to Do Too Much Across many organizations, the same pattern repeats. A single data field—perhaps introduced during a system rollout or legacy data migration—is intended to serve a focused purpose. Over time, however, teams start using it to represent different ideas. Marketing redefines the field to support campaigns. Sales uses it

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Copy Activity vs Data flows in Azure Data Factory: A Practical Look at Two Competing Features

When building cloud data pipelines with Azure Data Factory (ADF), you’re often presented with two paths: use the tried-and-true Copy Activity, or lean into the newer, powerful Mapping Data flows. Both are native ADF features and technically serve the same purpose—moving and transforming data—but the similarities end there. In our case, we started with Data

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Using SQL UNPIVOT to Unlock Healthcare Provider Insights with Unpivoted Taxonomy Data

I have worked many years with the NPI dataset and fed a few of my experiences to AI and asked it to write this blog post for me. I think it did a good job. Imagine a conversation between an enterprise IT strategist, a healthcare IT consultant, and a healthcare administrator. The three sit around

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Creating Value in Vendor Negotiations – Insurance Underwriting Example

What I Used to Think About Negotiation Many people—including myself in earlier years—view negotiation as a zero-sum game: if I win, you lose. This mindset defines distributive negotiations, where parties focus on a single issue (typically price), each trying to claim as much value as possible from a fixed pie. But there’s a better way.

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Operations Management Science for Growth – a Framework

The factory floor was buzzing — but the numbers didn’t add up.A midsize manufacturer had ramped up production in anticipation of a seasonal spike, only to find themselves overstocked on one product line and chronically short on another. Overtime costs spiked. Storage overflowed. Shipping delays mounted. Managers were making decisions fast, but not always aligned

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Dealing with Duplicates: A Practical SQL-Based Deduplication System

Many organizations struggle with duplicate customer sites and accounts scattered across operational systems. These duplicates introduce confusion in invoicing, shipping, reporting, and analytics. The immediate need to resolve this data fragmentation often outpaces the availability of enterprise-wide tooling. This post outlines how we built a pragmatic, SQL-based deduplication framework to identify, cluster, and prepare duplicate

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Devs, What If You Could Ask Your Code: Are You Appropriate? – A Small but Powerful Design Pattern

When designing real-world applications, I’ve found that simplicity is more than elegance—it’s strategic. Simple code is easier to secure, easier to maintain, and more scalable in the long run. Edsger W. Dijkstra, a renowned computer scientist, famously said: “Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability”. The KISS principle (“Keep It Simple, Stupid”) is a widely embraced design heuristic in

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Three Projects Shaped My PMI-ACP Journey

To qualify for the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP®) credential, I documented my work on several agile projects. As I reflected on these experiences, I realized how well they illustrated many of the core principles embedded in the PMI-ACP framework. Agile isn’t simply a methodology—it’s a mindset that values individuals and interactions, customer collaboration, responding

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Successful Projects Benefit from both Technical and Business Acumen

In complex software projects, success rarely comes from technical execution alone. Equally critical are the business insights that align solutions with organizational goals, workflows, and constraints. These two dimensions—technical and business acumen—often reside in different roles. Engineers typically own the technical depth; project managers or business analysts tend to carry the business perspective. But when

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The Role of Environmental Threats in Company Strategy

Every company needs a strategy that will help them gain and sustain a competitive advantage. In order to define a particular strategy a company must perform an internal analysis – what are its strengths and weaknesses, and an external analysis – what are the environmental threats and opportunities outside the company. This post focuses on

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Innovation in Healthcare – Increasing Access

In Innovator’s Prescription, Clayton Christensen demonstrates how products and services evolve in a way that makes technology available to people. Granting access to technology to people who previously did not have access to it constitutes a disruption to traditional providers of products and services. Ultimately, to continue to succeed in business and to play a

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Making use of Data to Reduce No-shows in Healthcare

No where is a no-show as costly as it is in healthcare. Expensive resources sit idle. Most providers come up with innovative ways to fill the empty spots (calling people on a waiting list, overbooking in the first-place). Overbooking does alleviate the no-show problem but it creates other problems: long wait times and potentially lower

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