If you’ve never heard of dark data, you’re not alone. Setting aside the ominous name, dark data isn’t something that is inherently bad – although, in practice, it usually does end up this way. Dark data is usually unstructured data, though it can also be semi-structured or structured data that a business collects and stores but […]
Building an Effective Data Strategy for Edge Deployments
Data analytics and integration are the key components of building a data strategy. For organizations to have an effective data strategy, it requires the definition of measurable metrics and proper consideration of all data sources. An effective data strategy also needs to define how data can be moved from various sources to a location where […]
The FAAR Framework for Consuming Insights from Data and Analytics
Faced with overwhelming amounts of data, organizations across the world are looking at leveraging data and analytics (D&A) to derive insights to increase revenue, reduce costs, and mitigate risks. McKinsey found that insight-driven companies report EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) increases of up to 25% [1]. According to Forrester, organizations that use data and insights […]
AI-Driven Predictive Analytics: Turning the Table on Fraudsters
Fraud techniques, including phishing, vishing, deepfakes, and other scams are becoming increasingly sophisticated – making it easier than ever to perpetuate fraud at scale. This is placing businesses in danger of financial losses, and trust and reputational damage. Now, there’s an alarming trend among organized crime rings that have the potential to defraud enterprises of […]
Three Key Commandments of Effective Dashboards
A dashboard is a visual snapshot of business performance using KPIs (key performance indicators) to help users make smarter, data-driven decisions. An effective dashboard simplifies the visual representation of complex data and helps stakeholders understand, analyze, and present key insights at a glance. At the core, the objective of a dashboard is to make complex […]
Four Perspectives on the Art of Data Analytics
As data science professionals, we are often viewed as people who draw conclusions based only on data and minimize other factors. This perception usually becomes contentious when the insights and evidence from the data are inconsistent with somebody else’s “hypothesis.” Or we are confused and maybe frustrated when “qualitative” analysis trumps quantitative analysis. The next time […]
Data Catalog, Semantic Layer, and Data Warehouse: The Three Key Pillars of Enterprise Analytics
Analytics at the core is using data to derive insights for measuring and improving business performance [1]. To enable effective management, governance, and utilization of data and analytics, an increasing number of enterprises today are looking at deploying the data catalog, semantic layer, and data warehouse. But what exactly are these data and analytics tools […]
Data Activation: The Key to Taking Data Reports to the Next Level
Let’s talk about an inconvenient truth: For the typical business, data reporting has a tendency to fall short of producing the desired outcomes. Despite the significant resources that organizations often invest in producing data reports – and in the data collection, governance, and analytics processes that happen prior to reporting – the people who actually […]
15 Essential Data Mining Techniques
Data mining techniques can be applied across various business domains such as operations, finance, sales, marketing, and supply chain management, among others. When executed effectively, data mining provides a trove of valuable information, empowering you to gain a competitive advantage through enhanced strategic decision-making. At its core, data mining is a method employed for the […]
Four Ways SMBs Can Maximize the Value of Data
Businesses of all sizes are collecting more data, continuously, than ever before. But many – particularly small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) – have trouble understanding where their data sits, how to connect and act on it, how to manage it, and, most importantly, how to drive value from it. While there’s been a huge surge […]