Loraine Lawson

In-Memory: Speeding Up Value by Using Operational Intelligence By now, you’ve heard all the hoopla over IBM’s new brain-like chip. There’s little doubt that this is significant chip innovation, but what interests me is what this new development means for data. Most of the news has focused on the similarities between SyNapse’s TrueNorth and the […]

Six Reasons Businesses Need to Pay Attention to Unstructured Data Innovation always has a learning curve, and the Internet of Things (IoT) will be no different. It’s just a matter of figuring out where the problems are. A recent IDTechEx report explored these problems as business opportunities. You can buy up to five copies of […]

Five Ways to Use Data to Be More Relevant to Customers Going mobile with your data? Don’t think you can forget data quality. In fact, data quality takes on a new importance when you’re dealing with enterprise mobility, warns David Akka, head of Magic Software’s UK branch. “In an enterprise mobility project, we typically have […]

Four Steps to Ensure Your Big Data Investment Pays Off Gartner solidified its argument against data lakes last week, raising concerns about data quality, governance and security, and even questioning whether dumping data into one repository would really resolve the data silo problem. As I shared in a previous post on data lakes, Gartner analyst […]

Five Ways to Use Data to Be More Relevant to Customers Master data management (MDM) solutions are used for much more than customer and product master data. According to a recent Information Difference report, MDM is also used for asset, location, supplier, finance and personnel data. “Indeed it has become quite common for MDM efforts […]

Four Steps to Ensure Your Big Data Investment Pays Off One of the challenges with Big Data is how to find value hidden in all that volume. Experts generally recommend approaching it as an explorer rather than simply querying the data to find specific answers. As an astrophysicist, Dr. Kirk Borne knows a thing or […]

Five Ways to Use Data to Be More Relevant to Customers The industry is so focused right now on Big Data and the Internet of Things that it’s hard to write about anything else. But it’s important to remember that some organizations are still struggling with more basic data problems. Government Technology recently published a […]

2014 Big Data Outlook: Opportunities and Challenges Apache’s open source Storm may be the big buzz in Big Data streaming analytics, but according to a recent Forrester report, the commercial vendors are the ones who have “got the goods.” While Storm is used by a number of high-profile companies, including the Weather Channel, Spotify and […]

Five Ways to Use Data to Be More Relevant to Customers Civic technologist Matt Stempeck makes an unusual proposal in a recent Harvard Business Review post (registration required): Businesses, especially in the tech sector, should consider donating data over dollars. Stempeck draws the idea from the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters, a 1999 […]

Worry about integration is a major mistake when it comes to connecting cloud applications and data, according to two columns by separate consultancies. The “cloud planner or architect who focuses on ‘cloud integration’ has already made the first mistake,” writes Tom Nolle, president of technology consultancy CIMI Corporation, in a recent TechTarget column. “To create […]

If you want to tinker with Big Data, you don’t have to build your own sandbox. A number of vendors, including Hadoop distributors Cloudera and Hortonworks, offer Big Data sandboxes for programmers who want to practice without the infrastructure investment. This month, a new sandbox has joined the party, and this one comes with a […]

Six Big Business Intelligence Mistakes Given the high profile of Big Data, mobile and data analytics, marketing should be a huge fan of data integration. “More data, more profit,” should be marketing’s motto. However, if you happen to be working with the most backward marketing division in the world, you might want to send them […]