Loraine Lawson

Six Big Business Intelligence Mistakes If you want to succeed with analytics, you’ll need to create a data-driven culture, according to just about everybody on the Internet. It’s probably the most repeated adage you’ll see on pieces about achieving value with analytics or Big Data or both. That seems easier said than done, though. For […]

The Hadoop Challenge for Business Intelligence and Analytics Users Who can resist a piece that purports to explain how an Internet giant handles its own technology? Not me. So ReadWrite pretty much had me hooked at the headline, “How to Make Data Services Scale like Google.” The big reveal is a distributed approach to data […]

How the Internet of Things Will Change Our Lives I’m stilling thinking about IDC’s recent prediction that the Internet of Things could become a $7.1 trillion industry by 2020. It’s easy to be skeptical about that number, but is that fair? What the heck does a $7 trillion industry look like, anyway? For one thing, […]

Six Reasons Businesses Need to Pay Attention to Unstructured Data If you don’t have to implement master data management (MDM), then don’t. That’s the surprising advice given by Forrester MDM and data expert, Michele Goetz. I’ll be honest, I can’t recall anyone having said that previously. In fact, the general assumption, from vendors to analysts […]

Six Big Business Intelligence Mistakes Have business intelligence and analytics “jumped the shark” with CIOs? Gartner analyst Andrew White thinks so. In a recent post, White said he thinks the popularity of BI and analytics is “about to play out its course.” It’s a bold statement, but perhaps not as daring as it may at […]

Big numbers about the Internet of Things (IoT) are being bandied about this week. Here’s a list of the recent predictions about the value of the IoT sales by 2020: $7.1 trillion (IDC) $1.9 trillion (Gartner) — both, courtesy of ZDNet Something called $1423.09 billion —which may or may not be an actual number, but […]

Big Data Certification and Training Options on the Rise A lot of buzz surrounds how to become a digital business right now, but precious little about what the term actually means. Several pieces use some variation of this explanation from Gartner Fellow Ken McGee: “Digital business is not synonymous with IT. It is about revenue, […]

2014 Big Data Outlook: Opportunities and Challenges Sometimes, writing about data integration feels a little like watching Charlie Brown try to kick the football while Lucy’s holding it.  It looks like the same problems keep happening over and over again: shadow IT, data silos, rogue spreadsheets. If you feel the same way, check out this […]

IBM launched a new cloud-based service program this week to help companies jump-start Big Data analytics, called IBM Cloud Business Solutions. The first batch includes 12 subscription-based managed services, which basically means it couples consulting services with pre-built IBM assets, including advanced analytics and cloud infrastructure. Eventually, IBM will have 20 cloud-based business solutions available. […]

Four Steps to Ensure Your Big Data Investment Pays Off Previously, I shared how some executives are skeptical about Big Data analytics and its ability to match their own business intuition. This made me wonder: How do some leaders find that Big Data analytics actually enlightens their business behavior? To help you find the path, […]

Four Steps to Ensure Your Big Data Investment Pays Off Ironically, one of the most common barriers to companies adopting analytics isn’t the business case, but executives’ faith in their own memory. Roei Ganzarski, CEO of the predictive analytics firm BoldIQ, told Information Week that he daily encounters leaders who reject the idea of using […]

Drivers and Challenges of Enterprise Integration Revealed During a recent TechTarget podcast, THINKstrategies founder Jeff Kaplan shared a funny little encounter he had at a conference. Let’s see if this sounds familiar to any of you. He asked some veteran IT workers why they were attending a SaaS-related event. They smiled and responded: “They’ve come […]