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Analytics and the Role of the CEO
As the adoption of business analytics continues to grow, greater clarity is being gained in understanding what goes into achieving results with it, and how much effort various functions need to contribute to it. In earlier posts I’ve expressed my perspective on howanalytics projects should be run, and what factors make them successful and productive. Working with analytics requires a lot of technical skill to source, extract and integrate the right data. After that, the right statistical techniques need to be applied, and strong business [...]
Does Automated Analytics need Manual Intervention?
As the adoption of predictive analytics in business continues to pick up, there is also a parallel thrust to harness the use of Big Data for analytics purposes. Working with Big Data, of course, means working with huge volumes of varied data. The statistical techniques that are used in analytics are not new, but their application across a much larger number of purposes and across more functions and sectors of industry has boomed only over the past few years. This has been made possible because [...]
Dipping in the Data Lake
Over the past couple of years the term data lake has increasingly come into prominence. It was first used by James Dixon, the Chief Technology Officer of Pentaho back in 2010, and more recently the concept has been hyped up a lot by a number of technology product vendors to promote their offerings in this space. It’s well known by now that although most enterprises collect and store a lot of data in warehouses a lot of data is not collected at all, and certainly [...]
Project Management Methodologies for Big Data Analytics
Many companies today are in the very early stages of adopting Big Data analytics. They are likely to go down a road ahead filled with experimentation and discovery. From many decades of IT history it is known that a significant number of large projects or new initiatives just end up in failure, or do not deliver all the results they promised. Business analytics is not the same as IT, of course, but there is a significant element of IT work in analytics. In addition, analytics [...]
6 Tips for Analytics Success
Many companies today, especially those in the medium and large enterprise categories, are investing in setting up analytics teams and projects. They put together data scientists, give them tools, and provide support and guidance of various kinds from the IT and business functions. Depending on the specifics of the organization’s design, culture and ways of operating the new function is assigned a leader and an owner. In addition to all of this, however, there are additional considerations that have to be taken into account in [...]
BI Specialist or Data Scientist?
The continued increase in business competition in every industry sector, and the resulting efforts to find new means and ways to stay ahead of the game has led, among other things, to an emerging increase in the demand for data scientists. But what exactly are they expected to do that can’t already be done by the existing business intelligence (BI) folk? Are data scientists going to replace conventional BI practitioners? The answer is easy: no, they will not, even though the kind of technology that [...]
Data Quality Management for Better Big Data Analytics
For businesses that have begun using it, business analytics has become a valuable means of uncovering insights that aid decision making in many areas. For business analytics to produce reliable results, it has to be available in the right volumes (for statistically valid results) and at the right time. It must also be of the right quality. There’s no doubt that most medium and large scale businesses capture and store significant amounts of data that is processed by their core business support systems as well [...]
Dealing with Data Democratization
Whatever the size of companies operating in current times, chances are that their IT departments are no longer the sole custodians of enterprise data. Business users everywhere have more and more access to various types of data and information from various sources. They need this data access in order to operate more efficiently and in order to be able to make decisions faster. They also want their data to be more portable, so that they can transfer it from one device to another easily, or [...]
Inside a Data Driven Organization
Isn’t just about every company in the world data driven already? In the business world, information technology (IT) is all about using technology to support and enable business functions, and most modern businesses already use IT in some way or the other. IT is used to provide the very core business platforms for e-commerce business, telecoms and SAAS-based businesses, but even those that are real world businesses use IT almost pervasively across the organization. Whatever the industry vertical, chances are that a modern business, whether [...]
From SQL to NoSQL: The Continued Evolution of Databases
As software application technology changed over the decades the evolution in languages and their capabilities resulted in a steady pervasion in computing. With it, of course, there has also been a matching evolution in database storage and retrieval methods. At first there were simple flat files, but this quickly proved to be inefficient in many ways. Then there were hierarchical databases with VSAM and ISAM files and while these suited the processing paradigms of those times (which was mainly batch oriented), they demanded added complexities [...]