Welcome to October 2024’s edition of “Book of the Month.” This month, we’re enjoying some time in the fall sun and the local library diving into Laura Madsen’s “AI & The Data Revolution.” The central theme of this book is the management and impact of artificial intelligence (AI) disruption in the workplace. Madsen shares her […]
5 Cutting-Edge Innovations to Boost Your Cybersecurity Defenses
With everything on a business leader’s plate, cybersecurity can often feel like an afterthought. Between managing teams, pursuing new opportunities, and dealing with the bottom line, who has time to keep up with the latest hacker threats and security defenses? Especially if you don’t have your IT staff focused solely on locking down the castle […]
How to Make Generative AI Work for Natural Language Queries
As businesses increasingly rely on data-driven decision-making, the volume and complexity of data within enterprises have grown exponentially. However, processing this data and deriving actionable insights remains challenging due to the reliance on human analysts. The explosion in interest surrounding text-to-SQL (T2SQL) solutions and the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have presented […]
The AI Chasm: Bridging the Divide Between Research and Real-World Applications
Imagine a world where AI can accurately predict earthquakes, giving us precious time to save lives. Yet, the same technology struggles to understand essential voice commands through your home assistant during a noisy family dinner. This striking dichotomy between the potential of cutting-edge AI research and its often underwhelming real-world applications underscores a significant yet […]
Mind the Gap: Ask for Business Actions, Not Business Value
I’m not sure I know anyone in the data and analytics field whose platform doesn’t face budget scrutiny. Analytics is expensive. And when cost-cutting is the order of the day, analytics is a big target. Up shields. Time for another business value inventory. I’ve spoken with consultants who have completed analytics business value inventories at […]
Chief Officers: Do You Know What Your Data is Costing You?
CXOs this year have witnessed a rollercoaster economy amid plenty of turbulent events – from ongoing inflation affecting consumer spending to large stock market swings, major overseas conflicts, and the uncertainties of an election year. Not surprisingly, the economic forecast remains murky at best. According to a CNBC CFO survey, CFOs seem to agree that […]
The Hidden Pitfalls of Cloud-Based Managed MySQL Services
Cloud-based managed MySQL data services are being aggressively marketed to organizations with the promise of streamlining their database management. These “managed data services” are an alternative to more traditional “non-managed data services” – software solutions with embedded intelligent proxies and cluster management using native MySQL run on-premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid cloud. These […]
Data vs. AI Literacy: Why Both Are Key When Driving Innovation and Transformation
I have written before about the 5Ws of data and how important metadata – data about data – really is. This knowledge helps connect and contextualize data in ways that previously would take hours of knowledge and information mining. We have the tools now to automate this process and display it in a knowledge model of the data, […]
Data Management in an Industrial Environment
Industrial environments are rich data sources, from equipment pressure and temperature readings to real-time inventory levels. This ocean of data provides organizations with valuable insights when (and if) effectively harnessed. By transforming raw data generated across the floor 24/7 into actionable intelligence, industrial plants are equipped with data-informed insights necessary to create operational strategies that […]
The Hidden Language of Data: How Linguistic Analysis Is Transforming Data Interpretation
From Fortune 500 companies to local startups, everyone’s swimming in a sea of numbers, charts, and graphs. But here’s the thing: While structured data like sales figures and customer demographics have long been the backbone of analytics, there’s a growing realization that unstructured data is the real goldmine. Think about it. Every tweet, email, customer review, and social […]