Loraine Lawson

Five Ways Contact Centers Use Analytics to Make Smarter Business Decisions One warning I see repeated over and over is that analytics should move beyond simple queries to exploring what the data tells you. I imagine that’s a hard shift to make, particularly for business users who, in general, remain more comfortable with Excel than […]

Data professionals who want to boost their earning power should focus on gaining cloud, Hadoop or Tableau skills, and maybe re-evaluating the type of organizations they work for, according to a recent O’Reilly data salary survey. Likewise, CIOs who want to keep staff costs down would do well to stick with tried-and-true tools, such as […]

Five Ways to Use Data to Be More Relevant to Customers The Internet of Things (IoT) is attracting attention way beyond most technology trends, no doubt because of predictions that it could trigger an economic boom. Who doesn’t want that? That’s leading to some hard questions from technologists and humorous headlines from The Register, a […]

Five Ways Automation Speeds Up Big Data Deployments A recent GE/Accenture report reveals that companies in the industrial sector want to leverage Big Data for operations, but they’re stymied by integration challenges. The survey asked enterprises to name their top three challenges in implementing a Big Data analytics program. The most commonly cited problem in […]

Four Steps to Ensure Your Big Data Investment Pays Off Okay, sure, maybe Gartner has a point about this whole “data lake becoming a data swamp” problem. But a recent Information Age piece proposes that organizations can get around all that — and the need for data scientists — with a “data refinery layer.” Haven’t […]

Five Ways Automation Speeds Up Big Data Deployments It’s an exciting era for data, and I like to recognize that each Thanksgiving with a gratitude list for data and integration. It’s fun to look back on these lists. For instance, last year’s five data trends included pay raises for BI analysts and data architects, job […]

Five Ways to Use Data to Be More Relevant to Customers One of my friends is a political science professor, and he recently shared this “factoid” from a student’s paper: Judges should follow an “originalist” approach to judicial interpretation because the Constitution has “worked for us for over 400 years” so we shouldn’t change it […]

I’ve noticed a minor shift in how companies view integration in the cloud. It’s slowly changed from being a real barrier to adoption, to being a concern, to being … well, a top complaint. It seems companies aren’t afraid of it, they know it can happen, they can even get it done — but they […]

Five Ways Contact Centers Use Analytics to Make Smarter Business Decisions If you want to achieve an enterprise view of your data, your solution options basically fall into one of two camps: Move it and integrate. Leave it and virtualize. Metanautix’s co-founder, Theo Vassilakis, contends that both add unnecessary complexity to enterprise data analytics. “A […]

Five Ways Automation Speeds Up Big Data Deployments It’s pretty clear at this point that Hadoop will be more of an architecture add-on than a replacement for data warehouses. Especially since Teradata announced an expanded partnership with Hadoop distributor MapR this week. Teradata sells a data analytics platform, services and other solutions, but its roots […]

Five Tips for Taking Control of Cloud Chaos Not all organizations are moving to the external cloud. Some data and applications are going from public to private clouds, said Seth Robinson, senior director of technology analysis at CompTIA. As I wrote yesterday, CompTIA released its Fifth Annual Trends in the Cloud report, which queried 400 […]

The Top Skills Hiring Managers Want from Cloud Professionals Integration permeates all four stages of cloud adoption, from experimenters to companies that are “brutally transforming” their business and workflows through cloud, a recent report by CompTIA shows. In other words, it’s not so much a barrier to cloud adoption as it is a “hidden challenge,” […]