Loraine Lawson

Six Big Business Intelligence Mistakes I’ve always felt a little fuzzy about the difference between analytics, business intelligence and business analytics. It seems there’s good reason for that: You’ll discover quite a bit of variance in how they’re defined, as a recent InformIT post shows. The piece is actually a chapter from “Business Analytics Principles, […]

Tensions Between IT and Business Leadership Force New Approach to Delivering Technology “IT power grab: Should you be a Machiavellian manager?” challenges a recent Computer World headline. Based on a recent e-book by analyst Tina Nunno, “The Wolf in CIO’s Clothing: A Machiavellian Strategy for Successful IT Leadership,” the article questions the current “IT as […]

How to Implement Information Governance Across the Enterprise You may not think about information governance as a cost-saving measure, but it turns out, it can potentially save you millions. That’s because most companies are so worried about regulatory compliance, they overshoot on data retention, according to a recent CIO.com column by Actiance Vice President Doug […]

2014 Big Data Outlook: Opportunities and Challenges My friend and I have a running joke. We’ve decided we liked 35 so much, we’re going to stick with it for a decade or so. Okay, it’s not particularly clever, but to us, it was worth a quick laugh. It probably wouldn’t be so funny if I […]

Six Big Business Intelligence Mistakes Last week, Informatica conducted briefings on its new offering, the Intelligent Data Platform. I’ve read a good number of stories on Informatica’s plans, which include a cloud-based, self-serve integration tool for business users and something called a “Shared Data Lake,” which is more of a user-friendly interface for exploring data. […]

Top Five Reasons Big Data Is Advancing Personalized Medicine Shahid N. Shah, an expert on EMR/EHR systems, says health care organizations are spinning their wheels with interoperability when they should be learning something from the past 50 years of enterprise technology integration. Sigh. I had hoped health care would be able to learn from the […]

The Real Life of a Data Scientist Eliminating shadow spreadsheets is IT’s own game of Whack-a-Mole: You knock out one, only to find more pop up elsewhere. Often, the solution is a comprehensive overhaul of data management practices that, frankly, go against business users’ fear of tinkering on enterprise systems. A recent TechRepublic column proposes […]

Network Evolution Key to Driving Cloud Expansion Integration remains a major concern for those hesitant to adopt SaaS, but a recent vendor survey shows a new top barrier: data privacy. SnapLogic, which provides a cloud-based integration solution, engaged in a joint survey with TechValidate, a third-party research organization. We’ve seen a lot of vendor surveys […]

Five Ways to Use Data to Be More Relevant to Customers In this age of data and science, it’s easy to underestimate the role of storytelling in human history. But the importance of storytelling is demonstrated by science, according to Louis Cozolino, a psychologist and professor of psychology at Pepperdine University. In his book, “The […]

Six Big Business Intelligence Mistakes Several MDM experts say the advice in Tuesday’s post, “Marketers Can Improve Customer Data via MDM,” was seriously flawed and incomplete. When I logged into Twitter on Wednesday, I had a list of responses that weren’t too impressed with the four-step path to MDM identified by Sandra Gudat in Multichannel […]

Four Steps to Ensure Your Big Data Investment Pays Off The big buzz right now is about the contents of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) report, “Big Data: A Technological Perspective.” The report looks at the technical aspects of Big Data technology and assesses how these capabilities might affect privacy […]

Seven Data Obstacles You Need to Overcome to Drive Cross-Channel Marketing Research shows that marketing is taking a bigger share of technology spending. Still, it didn’t seem quite real until I saw this column about data quality and master data management (MDM) on a site targeting chief marketers. Of course, chief marketers have a lot […]