Top IT stories this week: Fat lazy integrators meet agile DevOps while Spotify sounds a single bum note on Hadoop

A round-up of Computing's seven most-read stories of the past seven days

In case you missed them, here are the seven most-read stories of the past seven days on Computing.

7. How Tesco took an agile approach to rebuilding its data warehouse
Andy Ruckley, Tesco's head of business intelligence (BI), had always regarded Tesco as a data-driven company, but after an in-depth review found that this was far from true and that a lot of the data architecture was over 15 years old. Here's how he went about putting that right.

6. How DevOps allows a 14-person team to manage one of the world's largest e-commerce sites
MercadoLibre is often referred to as "Latin America's Ebay". It operates in 14 countries and has 115 million users. Based on the OpenStack cloud platform it runs across three data centres on a total of 2,000 physical servers and 15,000 virtual machines. Astonishingly, this entire infrastructure is operated and managed by a team of just 14 people, two of whom explained to Computing just how they do it.

5. 'Your laptop is disposable, don't keep anything on it' - a sneak preview of the Netflix IT department
In an effort to encourage device agnosticism and cloud-based culture, Netflix head of IT Ashley Sprague plans an annual laptop refresh for all employees.

"It sounds crazy to some people but that helps keep the mindset of 'your laptop is disposable, so don't keep anything on it'. We have cloud services, so use them; that's your backup, your storage, your security and if your laptop is stolen, lost or hacked, then it's a clean slate," she explained. She also has some strong opinions on the validity of BYOD...

4. System integrator market is ‘huge, fat and lazy' - Specsavers CIO
It is quite rare to find a serving IT executive who's prepared to be openly critical of the IT marketplace, but Specsavers CIO Phil Pavitt is one such individual and he pulls no punches in this interview.

"The systems integrator market is huge, fat and lazy and I think people are starting to realise that and are asking tough questions - and they are not getting very good answers," he says.

3. Spotify: Hadoop is hot (but Hive is not)
In which Josh Baer, Hadoop product manager at Spotify, tells Computing of the many interesting ways in which the music streaming service manages technology and innovation, including dividing the IT workforce into tribes, squads, chapters and guilds.

As a company that "grew up on Hadoop", Spotify is certainly one to watch for those wishing to emulate its successes with the platform, and Baer is enthusiastic about its role in tuning Spotify's performance. There is just one minor bum note...

2. Every search you ever made on Google is now available to view, reveals blog
Anyone with a Gmail or Google account can now view every search they ever made on the search engine. Try it, it's quite spooky.

The question is why didn't Google tell us about this itself rather than leaving the task to an unofficial blog?

1. Government will regret 'demonising CIO role', says former HMRC CIO
It's Phil Pavitt again, this time talking about his time as HMRC CIO.

The role of central government CIO was axed in February 2013 with the CTO and newly appointed chef data and chief digital officers taking up the slack.

Pavitt believes this is a mistake.

"Who is going to run that stuff every day? Who is going to make sure that this huge government machine produces the goods every day? The CDO? Really? I don't think so...."