Loraine Lawson

Five Ways to Use Data to Be More Relevant to Customers We look so often at the business and government end of Big Data, it’s easy to forget that the same capabilities are also transforming life for the rest of us. A recent Wall Street Journal article examines how cloud-based services and APIs (application programming […]

The Hadoop Challenge for Business Intelligence and Analytics Users I’ve seen some hefty price tags associated with poor data quality, but I have to say, last year’s figure from the Ministry of Defence may take the prize. The UK agency was told “it was at risk of squandering a £1 billion in investments in IT […]

Four Best Practices for Accelerating Time-to-Value of Master Data Management I keep reading how troublesome cloud to on-premise integration is, but a recent article makes me think that maybe it’s not really that big of a problem. TechTarget shared the experience of Geezeo, Inc., a software service provider for banks and credit unions. Back in […]

Top Predictions for Big Data in 2014 Rudyard Kipling once said, “If history were told in the forms of stories, it would never be forgotten.” Could the same be true for your data? Mike Cavaretta argues that it is true. Cavaretta is a veteran data scientist, as well as a manager at the Ford Motor […]

Top Predictions for Big Data in 2014 Big data frightens me sometimes. Seeing this headline from Information Week, “IBM: We’ll Stand Up To NSA,” gave me heart palpitations. It sounds noble and all, but really, when a large corporation is willing to stand up to the NSA over data about you or your company … […]

Top Five Reasons Big Data Is Advancing Personalized Medicine I’ve seen integration success stories in the medical records field. And we’ve all seen hybrid cloud integration stories. But this is the first time I’ve seen a hybrid cloud integration story that targeted dental practices. The Australian site ARN has a rather unusual story of Microsoft […]

Four Best Practices for Accelerating Time-to-Value of Master Data Management You would think Big Data would be important to any financial services firm, but it turns out, data integration and management are more pressing problems, particularly for buy-side companies, according to a recent FierceFinanceIT article. Buy-side companies typically sell investment services such as private life […]

Three Big Problems Big Data Will Create in 2014 Big Data is a bit of a problem for businesses. The fact is that data is growing enormously, both in its volume and importance. Also, we’ll soon see a big push on usable open data and its value. So, many organizations must move on Big Data. […]

Big Data: Not Just for Big Business Anymore In my previous post, I shared the ongoing debate about the most effective way to approach Big Data so that it will yield meaningful, useful and, hopefully, profitable findings. The top two options are approaching data as an explorer versus Tom Davenport’s contention that you need to […]

Top Predictions for Big Data in 2014 Everybody wants to explain technology in terms that business leaders can understand. Generally, that’s a good thing, but it can have a downside. When you oversimplify the technology, it can help sell in the short term, but in the long run, it leads to unpleasant surprises, scope creep […]

Four Ways to Solve Cloud Integration, for Better or Worse This week, Informatica released an update to its cloud integration platform, Informatica Cloud Spring 2014. The big news here: Visual design that makes it easy for users to design integrations between their favorite SaaS apps. The cloud-to-cloud apps can run 100 percent in the cloud, […]

Top Predictions for Big Data in 2014 Remember last year, when we were all talking about the coming “data tsunami?” Heck, even CNBC wrote about it. The data tsunami metaphor has always struck me as odd, particularly after 2011’s very real tsunami devastated parts of Japan. I gathered that it meant big, but it was […]