If you work in the software industry, seeing technologies emerge and catch fire is a great spectator sport. Whether it's a programming language, a platform or something like e-commerce, each new wave ripples throughout the industry. Currently, Hadoop is having its time in the sun, and we are all trying
"Big data isn't useful for investment purposes." So said my friend Walt during one of our recent arguments discussions. By way of background, Walt is not an über-successful 70-year-old investor who earned his chops well before the advents of Twitter, Facebook and their ilk. Rather, he's a man of a similar age to
In my last post, we started to look at some of the issues with the concept of “big data governance,” especially when a large part of governance is intended to prevent the introduction of errors into data sets. Many big data analytics applications focus on the intake of numerous varied
How do employees feel about data today? It's an interesting question, and one that I address in my forthcoming book The Visual Organization: How Intelligent Companies Use Data Visualization To Make Better Decisions. As a student of data, management and technology, it's obvious to me that our relationship with data
In my last post, I noted two key issues where there is the desire to impose governance over large-scale data sets imported from outside the organization: the absence of control and the absence of semantics. Of course, we cannot just throw up our hands and say that the data is
Last time we explored consumption and usability as an alternative approach to data governance. In that framework, data stewards can measure the quality of the data and alert users about potential risks of using the results, but are prevented from changing the data. In this post we can look at
Earlier, I wrote about the Hadoop-centric view of big data that was evident in some recent research conducted by TDWI. If you haven't read the report yet, make sure you download "Managing Big Data," which gives a fantastic overview of "big data management" and how it's impacting organizations. Like any good piece
Every week, it seems, I overhear someone at my gym talking about another fad diet. Cabbage-this or berry-that is supposed to magically make the pounds disappear. Perhaps there are legitimate success stories with these diets. Still, it doesn't take a nutritionist or personal trainer to realize that, for the most part, losing
Recently, TDWI released "Managing Big Data," a report that explored trends in big data management (BDM). The author, Philip Russom, is an expert in the fields of data warehousing and data management, and for this report he surveyed more than 400 practitioners about their big data efforts. One thing immediately evident is
There's no shortage of hype and confusion surrounding big data. Plenty of companies are starting to dip their toes in the pool despite the relative paucity of documented case studies – at least compared to ERP, CRM and BI applications. Sometimes people ask me, "Can you give me one tip
