No matter how good you feel about the reliability of your company’s data operations, you can’t help wondering on occasion what the chances are that your firm will be one of the victims of the next data outage, malware scourge, or cyberattack. This is especially the case if your job entails ensuring the availability of your organization’s […]
What Is Active Metadata and Why Does It Matter?
Metadata is like the secret sauce of the internet. You type a word or phrase in a search engine, press enter, and the information you’re looking for appears (usually). An action that once seemed “indistinguishable from magic,” to quote the third of Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws, is now as commonplace as heating up leftovers in […]
Choosing a Data Quality Tool: What, Why, How
Data-driven organizations are in a race to collect the information that modern analytics techniques rely on to generate insights and guide business decisions. The ever-growing flow of data into business systems challenges companies to devise new techniques for ensuring the quality of the data as its quantity skyrockets. Data quality tool vendors are rising to […]
What Is Data Trust and Why Does It Matter?
A batch processing system fails on the eve of a company’s deadline for monthly reports, threatening the accuracy of its financials. One of the two systems powering the dashboard of a global supply chain company crashes, and a manager overbooks a transport ship because it displays inaccurate data, causing a costly delay in a customer’s […]
What Does It Mean to Be Data-Driven?
Businesses succeed or fail based on their ability to make sound decisions. Every aspect of an organization’s operation, from the simplest to the most complex, is the result of a series of decisions, each building on the next, from the chairs in the employee lunch room to the million-dollar marketing campaign that will make or […]
Navigating Data Readiness for Generative AI
Just about everyone in tech agrees that generative AI is poised to hit the business world like a tidal wave. There’s less agreement about when the transformation will occur, and how generative AI will be harnessed to boost profitability. A survey of chief data officers conducted in the second half of 2023 by Amazon Web Services (AWS) found that […]
What Is Data Reliability and Why Do You Need It?
“Can I trust this data?” In the dawning age of artificial intelligence (AI), this question becomes increasingly critical for individuals and organizations. Data reliability is the cornerstone of an organization’s data-driven decision-making. A recent survey from Precisely identified data-driven decision-making as the primary goal of 77% of data initiatives, yet only 46% of organizations have high or very […]
What Are Data Products and Why Do They Matter?
Data products are software in the form of specialty tools and apps that are designed to support data used as a service. They may be as simple and straightforward as a program that converts a dataset into a visualization, or as complex as a machine learning system based on large language models (LLM), such as ChatGPT. […]
Types of Machine Learning and Their Applications
Computers have become so ubiquitous that nearly every aspect of our lives revolves around their use, yet the machines haven’t lost their ability to amaze us. The latest jaw-dropping technology is the ability of computers to teach themselves new skills by analyzing huge amounts of data. The many types of machine learning promise to make […]