by Angela Guess
Greg Satell reports in Forbes, “A data scientist, it’s been said, is a statistician who works in Silicon Valley, which is another way of saying that the term has attained true buzzword status. The potential to be unlocked is undeniable, but so far, there has been no shortage of disappointment and frustration… Simply put, we design systems to perform particular tasks and only later realize that we want them to do more than we originally realized. That’s when it becomes clear that our systems are hopelessly incompatible. In a nutshell, that’s what IBM’s announcement today is about. By creating a universal platform, which it calls the Data Science Experience, it hopes to help integrate data trapped in separate protocols residing on incompatible systems. This will not only enable more advanced analytics, it will help us to reimagine how we manage our organizations and compete in the marketplace.”
Satell goes on, “Most organizations today have a very similar problem to what CERN had in the 1980’s. They collect data on a variety of systems, commissioned by different departments, that don’t talk to each other very well. Some of these systems are decades old and were originally designed for a completely different computing environment. Consider a typical retail enterprise, which has separate operations for purchasing, point-of-sale, inventory, marketing and other functions. All of these are continually generating and storing data as they interact with the real world in real time. Ideally, these systems would be tightly integrated, so that data generated in one area could influence decisions in another.”
Photo credit: IBM