“When you’ve got a mass of data, how do you analyze that data and get to a point where you can get the gemstones, the diamonds out of it?” Mike Young, Chief Information Officer with Centrica, knows what it’s like to wade through a sea of petabytes and terabytes to find value. Centrica is an […]
Data Management vs. Data Strategy
In a DATAVERSITY® interview, Donna Burbank, the Managing Director at Global Data Strategy, said, “The difference between Data Management vs. Data Strategy is almost in the definition of the two words. Think about your money. If you’re just managing it, you’re sort of just getting by, but if you’re thinking strategically, you’re really thinking of […]
Implementing Data Strategy Across the Data Lifecycle
Organizations wishing to implement a Data Strategy—a set of decisions that form a pattern, charting a high-level course of action—face significant challenges in unifying their message across the data lifecycle. Only 30% of companies have a clear organizational Data Strategy, leaving their different departments to figure out how to manage company data assets. Moreover, two […]
A Brief History of Data Silos
The original purpose of a data silo was to keep secrets. People have been keeping secrets for a long, long time. Prior to the written word, keeping a secret meant not sharing specific information with anyone else, verbally. And then came the written word. Secrets could be shared accidentally, or even stolen. Life became more […]
The Data Warehouse, the Data Lake, and the Future of Analytics
Data lakes were created in response to the need for Big Data analytics that has been largely unmet by data warehousing. The pendulum swing toward data lake technology provides some remarkable new capabilities, but can be problematic if the swing goes too far in the other direction. Far from being at the end of this […]
NoSQL Databases: The Versatile Solution for Continuous Intelligence
Most businesses tend to rely on relational database management systems (RDBMS) to provide business insight, including continuous intelligence. Cloud relational databases have improved computing power they bring to the table, to handle more massive amounts of data. However, relational databases, even ones in the cloud, face two issues. They have a harder time with the […]
Graph Database vs. Document Database: Different Levels of Abstraction
“Remember that every science is based upon an abstraction. An abstraction is taking a point of view or looking at things under a certain aspect or from a particular angle. All sciences are differentiated by their abstraction.” (Fulton Sheen) Graph and document databases (aka document stores), also demonstrate this principle. A few years, graph databases […]
A Brief History of Analytics
Historically speaking, a simple definition of analytics is “the study of analysis.” A more useful, more modern description would suggest “data analytics” is an important tool for gaining business insights and providing tailored responses to customers. Data analytics, sometimes abbreviated to “analytics,” has become increasingly important for organizations of all sizes. The practice of data […]
Taking the Right Steps to Implement Data Governance and Data Stewardship
Data as an asset comes up a lot in conversations these days. Data Governance enters the picture because of the huge role Data Strategy plays in supporting the business strategy – and the need for that to happen without compromising data security, according to Mary Levins, Data Governance Principal at Sierra Creek Consulting. Among the […]
Next Generation Business Intelligence: Customer-Driven Success
In the customer-driven era, business success depends on how quickly a business can respond to a customer demand. The more that businesses become reliant on real-time outcomes, the more they will seek next-generation (next-gen) BI deployments. Traditional Business Intelligence (BI) platforms were high-cost and time-intensive applications. The current trend in BI is to move toward […]