The shift to the Web (Social) is ongoing and generations now would not know how to live their lives without it (amazing isn’t it how technology like cell phones are now indispensable) With people now placing their whole life stories on the web, there comes an unprecedented opportunity to better understand your customer and clients.

Be There When Lightning Strikes! EMC is introducing Project Lightning—EMC’s new server Flash caching technology. Pat Gelsinger, President and COO of EMC Information Infrastructure Products, will introduce this game-changing new product and discuss EMC’s future plans for Flash on February 6th in San Francisco, CA. Getting At Your Information… One of the keys to Business

In my last blog, The Business Case for Big Data: Part 1, I suggested that this year businesses prepare for the changes that Big Data will bring to their companies. Not doing so would be unfortunate as the repercussions would likely cause a business to fall behind their competitors. Today we take a look at

Happy New Year – a time for resolutions.  On January 5th the Sunday Review of the NY Times noted that a study by University of Scranton (PA) psychologists found that success of New Year’s resolutions dropped over time – something I think we all would expect: So, I would suggest that businesses make a resolution

Data Quality / Governance The data quality/data governance challenge is how to ensure that the business-critical decisions being made can be accomplished with high enough confidence that you can move from data governance to the realm of decision governance (i.e. all decisions are made with the best available information; we are acting on what and

When you look at the BI/DW landscape, a tremendous amount has changed in a relatively short period of time.  As discussed in previous postings, traditional tools and methods are struggling to keep pace with the needs of big data, and they have become somewhat of a liability for the future.  How much is the landscape

Unfortunate Naming Convention In some ways, big data is regrettably and dubiously named because it is about much more than just the volume of information. We all know that data VOLUME is increasing: McKinsey cites that almost all (15 of 17) industry sectors in the US already have more data PER COMPANY than the entire

It’s an extremely difficult time for businesses these days.  The economic downturn has forced us all to tighten our belts and control spending applying hyper-focus on only those critical aspects of our business where any investment can produce near-term, measurable return while simultaneously trying to cut costs.  And, across the board, businesses and IT organizations

Re-Cap: The Digital East Conference   I was fortunate to join a number of industry thought leaders as a panelist on the “Big Data” discussion at Digital East. The panel was made up of a mix of business delivery and technologist and a lively debate ensued about the topic. The panel was lead by Caribou

Big Data Finds A Panelist As an introduction, a number of industry thought leaders are going to be debating issues surrounding big data at Digital East (www.digitaleast.com) on a “Big Data Panel” and yours truly will be one of the panelists. It looks like it will be a spirited discussion on Sept. 28 at 4:30PM in

Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, and Analytics… As an introduction, a number of industry thought leaders are of the opinion that Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing refers to the viewing of past events (historical or backward looking), whereas Analytics is forward looking (predictive analytics comes to mind).  Either way, the need to understand the data requires

Big Data & Information Architecture The traditional approach to Enterprise Information Architecture [EIM] still holds true – A Data Warehouse must have an “agreed upon” terminology (metadata) and it must be used across the business information so work is accomplished effectively.  The old adage of “Single Source of Truth” has grown up to mean “Architected,

What is Big Data  “Big Data” is a word that is being used a lot these days – much like SOA (service oriented architecture), CEP (complex event processing), and other acronyms with a number of misconceptions and very few common definitions.  Let’s start with the definition of Big Data in this author’s  humble opinion. To