Loraine Lawson

2014 Big Data Outlook: Opportunities and Challenges Federal IT shops are struggling to rein in data duplication in their systems, according to a recent survey. MeriTalk surveyed 152 Federal IT decision makers, including CIOs, IT directors, storage and network managers, about their problems with data and ability to comply with the 2010 Federal Data Center […]

How the Internet of Things Will Change Our Lives The Internet of Things (IoT) is about as mature as a toddler. If you’ve ever spent even a few minutes with a toddler, you know that means thinking long and hard about what’s accessible and what’s not. For human toddlers, the problem is usually too much […]

2014 Big Data Outlook: Opportunities and Challenges The data experts might be confounded by the concept of data lakes, but apparently that isn’t stopping organizations from building them. A recent PWC feature article contends that data lakes are not only possible, but already exist in Hadoop-based repositories. The article highlights UC Irvine Medical Center’s data […]

2014 Big Data Outlook: Opportunities and Challenges Cambridge Semantics this week launched a new tool that allows business analysts to take over those little ETL jobs that consume so much of the IT backlog. It’s not a data integration platform — I want to be clear on that. Instead, it’s an add-on layer that will […]

Six Big Business Intelligence Mistakes It’s not that CIOs are naive, but they often can’t seem to see the forest for the trees. And many seem to be playing by old business rules that are dissipating under them. It seems change is afoot once again — this time, it’s with data. CIOs and IT have […]

2014 Big Data Outlook: Opportunities and Challenges High-profile Big Data success stories tend to focus on ridiculously large volumes and trendy data, such as social media data. In the real world, Big Data looks a lot different, according to data management consultant Gary Allemann. Allemann is the managing director at the South African consultancy Master […]

2014 Big Data Outlook: Opportunities and Challenges In an unexpected twist, Big Data is driving adoption of data archiving, according to Gartner. When people first started talking about Big Data technology, some said it would eliminate the need to worry so much about archiving or, at least, Hadoop clusters would take on that role. Ironically, […]

Six Big Business Intelligence Mistakes Integration with third parties is still a sticking point for companies adopting business intelligence tools, according to a recent report by the independent research firm Dresner Advisory Services. The firm takes a bit of an unusual approach to its annual “Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study,” which is available […]

Seven Data Obstacles You Need to Overcome to Drive Cross-Channel Marketing Sometimes, the business doesn’t care about data quality. It’s a hard thing to hear, but someone has to be honest with you about it, and Capgemini’s Big Data and Analytics expert Steve Jones is stepping up to do it. Actually, Jones is talking about […]

2014 Big Data Outlook: Opportunities and Challenges Today, we’re adding metadata to the list of issues that will need to be addressed before data lakes are a useful, realistic concept. Recently, I’ve been sharing the key concerns and barriers around data lakes. Data lakes, at least in theory, are what you get when you pull […]

Harnessing the Power of Big Data with Geospatial Mapping I don’t think anyone really thought that Hadoop and other Big Data technologies would liberate us from the basics of data, such as integration and governance. It was just so easy to ignore those issues in the heady first years of Big Data hype and pilot […]

2014 Big Data Outlook: Opportunities and Challenges Strange are the ways of the technology market gods. While technology itself follows a fairly predictable bell curve of hype, the terms seem to come and go in spurts. Several years ago, experts and vendors, such as those in this Forbes piece, would often talk about “data lakes” […]