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 […]
The Journey to Sustainability: How PIM Helps Brands Get Their Data in Order
In today’s economy, sustainability is no longer a buzzword but a business imperative. From clothing to dog food, cleaning supplies to packaging, buyers increasingly seek brands and manufacturers that prioritize transparent and environmentally responsible business practices. They want to know where the products they buy are sourced from, the carbon footprint of production, how recyclable […]
Beyond the “IT Guy” Stereotype: How Technology Leaders Drive Business Success
Traditionally, IT departments have been viewed as support functions primarily responsible for maintaining hardware, troubleshooting software issues, and ensuring basic connectivity. IT leaders are often treated like technical experts running a cost center, relegated to a dim back office and only emerging when summoned to address a problem. But that couldn’t be further from the […]
Women in Data: Meet Enterprise Data Architecture Manager Shannon Hughes
The latest installment in our Q&A series with women leaders in data features Shannon Hughes, enterprise data architecture manager at ExxonMobil’s Central Data Office. (Read our previous Q&A here.) Shannon Hughes became fascinated with data and technology as a kid, inspired by her dad – a technical data analyst for the U.S. Air Force. She now […]
It’s Not the Tools, It’s the Culture: How to Roll Out Data Democratization
You want to implement data democratization, so you deployed all the new tooling and data infrastructure. You have a data catalog to manage metadata and ensure data lineage and a data marketplace to enable data discovery and self-service analytics. You’ve invested in the latest technologies to enable full self-service operation. The data management architecture you […]
What Is a Data Fabric?
Data fabric is an innovative approach to data architecture, and simplifies data management. At its core, data fabric is built on the principle of unification. This standardization serves two purposes: It creates a single-entry point for data consumers, and it enables seamless access to information, regardless of where that data is stored, computed, or administered. These outcomes happen through data […]
Ask a Data Ethicist: What Should Be the Limits of Biometric Data Collection in the Workplace?
There’s a movement underway to capture an increasing amount of data about employees – from facial recognition or fingerprint systems used for tracking time and attendance, to systems that monitor your every keystroke. All of these invasive data collection technologies raise this question: What should be the limits of biometric data collection in the workplace? […]
Generative AI Is Accelerating Data Pipeline Management
Data pipelines are like insurance. You only know they exist when something goes wrong. ETL processes are constantly toiling away behind the scenes, doing heavy lifting to connect the sources of data from the real world with the warehouses and lakes that make the data useful. Products like DBT and AirTran demonstrate the repeatability and […]
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 […]