Big Data milestones / shutterstock

Most IT observers prefer to talk about what’s coming, not what’s happened. But to make educated guesses about the future of the IT industry, it helps to understand its past. Here are three events that marked a quantitative and qualitative change in the growth trajectory of what we now call big data.[read more]

data management / shutterstock

Frequently, folks confuse the function and purpose of Master Data Management with Data Warehousing. I suspect the core of the problem is that when folks hear about the idea of “reference data” or a “golden record”, they have this mental picture of a single platform containing all of the data.[read more]

data visualization

Fifteen years ago, the presentation of data typically fell under the purview of analysts and IT professionals. Quarterly or annual meetings entailed rolling data up into now quaint diagrams, graphs, and charts. Today, data is everywhere. We have entered the era of Big Data and many things are changing.[read more]

Rick Smolen

SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando was packed with examples of how Big Data affects all our lives. SAP Executive Steve Lucas was the host of an Intel-sponsored Big Data special interest group meeting at the conference; Rick Smolen, a former Time Life journalist, also spoke at the event.[read more]

database / shutterstock

Your messaging needs to engage. You need to make sure that you are communicating with relevance. Your marketing database is what will help you create this relevance. Here are seven key considerations to rejuvenate your marketing database.[read more]

SEO is evolving.

No industry evolves as quickly as SEO. Marketing leaders want to understand how SEO is evolving strategically and what metrics will move the needle in search. Many of the strategies and tactics that once worked are evolving, and others are being replaced all together. Here's what you need to know to succeed today.[read more]

business analysis

If you’re a business user thinking about analytics, the options can be dizzying. Where do you begin? Here is a list of 5 business analysis techniques to get you started.[read more]

spreadsheet / shutterstock

Most business users have no IT experience. They can only rely on the business spreadsheet software to complete such computing. However, the traditional business spreadsheet software is weak in calculation, which will bring about errors in the calculation process.[read more]

Statistician's profile

As someone who trained as a statistician, I've always struggled with that title. I love the rigor and insight that Statistics brings to data analysis, but let's face it: Statistics — the name — has always had a bit of a branding problem. That's why I'm a fan of the term "data scientist."[read more]

Tactical analytics: stay on the right path

From social media sentiment analysis to dynamic product pricing, we’re adopting more and more super-fast micro-decision systems to do what’s good “right now, right there” without much consideration for the cumulative effect over a longer period and a broader scope.[read more]

A tale of two BIs

All modern Information Technologies which are capable of improving the enterprise competitiveness fall in the scope of BI, such as ERP, CRM, Reporting tools, Data Computing, Statistical Analysis, Data Mining, OLAP, and ETL, etc. They can be divided into two categories: Desktop BI and Solution BI.[read more]

Google+ and Big Data

Data analytics and design are being integrated together with the Google+ redesign, but will it be enough for us to add another social network into our lives? Google already has a lot of your data but now they want ALL of your data in whatever form they can get it.[read more]

Big Data encircling the planet

I can still remember the first time I saw a 1 GB flash drive—it blew my mind. This device, the size of my thumb, could hold the information of 711 3.5-inch floppy disks. But it’s a darn good thing that data is occupying less space these days, since we’re seeing it increase astronomically in volume.[read more]

business skillset / shutterstock

Employees with technical skills are critical to enable an analytics program, but the ability to communicate, relate and navigate throughout an organization—so called “softer skills”—are especially needed to propagate analysis and communicate the impact of data-driven decision-making.[read more]

missing data values / shutterstock

Missing data can be a pain; having missing data and not knowing where it is can be even more of a pain. Here is a quick tip for potentially handling missing values during an ETL process, or during any data processing step, and how to quickly spot them.[read more]

BI roadblocks?

People have been writing about the limitations of self-service BI for years. What does the failure of self-service BI mean for Big Data? Big problems. Unless self-service and pervasive BI become the norm, enterprises will never productively tap the business ROI from Big Data.[read more]