Loraine Lawson

Four Best Practices for Accelerating Time-to-Value of Master Data Management Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Product Data Solutions, which released Nov. 6, is now available to the rest of us for free reading. It’s a Festivus miracle! In true Festivus form, this report includes the airing of grievances: In the very first […]

Top Five Reasons Big Data Is Advancing Personalized Medicine One of the major challenges with Big Data, I think, is figuring out your options. It is such a new space, so it’s a bit tricky to identify what type of tools you’ll even need, much less figure out which vendors actually offer them. A large […]

Seven Ways to Make Big Data an Actionable Opportunity No doubt you’ve heard about a shortage of data analytics specialists. The data’s getting a bit long in the tooth, but a 2011 McKinsey Global Institute study predicted a shortfall of about 150,000 people with the needed analytic skills to manage Big Data analytics. That may […]

Big Data: Not Just for Big Business Anymore Many of the early success stories with Big Data came from logistics companies. For example, UPS used sensor data to improve maintenance and fuel efficiency back in 2010. In 2011, CIO.com ran a story about U.S. Xpress, which used Big Data and sensors to save about $6 […]

Four Best Practices for Accelerating Time-to-Value of Master Data Management For many organizations, IT service management firms are the front-line soldiers when it comes to system integration work. Yet, I don’t often write about IT service management (ITSM), because honestly, I don’t see a lot of free discussion about them. After all, it is a […]

Big Data: Not Just for Big Business Anymore I’m starting to see more pieces about using master data management (MDM) with Big Data. If the very idea gives you a headache, you’re in good company — but stick with me. I’ve been juicing vegetables, and feel energetic enough to tackle some questions about the topic. […]

Drivers and Challenges of Enterprise Integration Revealed Now here’s an intriguing item you may have missed in last week’s pre-Thanksgiving rush: IBM patented a new technique for integration. The technique is a cloud play that will support collecting and integrating data both on-premise and from the cloud, according to several news reports about the patent. […]

Happy Thanksgiving! To commemorate this national holiday, I present my annual five data- and integration-related reasons to be grateful this year. Coming soon: Pay raises—Staffing firm Robert Half is predicting big salary raises for some technologists next year, with an average increase of 5.6 percent for IT workers. Out of the top 12, two are […]

Five Ways to Improve Survey Engagement and Customer Insights Salesforce1 is being called a lot of things and almost all of them by Salesforce.com executives. It’s a mobile first platform, an integration platform, a CRM platform, the beginning of the Internet of Customers and a platform that will “jumpstart innovation.” But some researchers are raising […]

Big Data: Not Just for Big Business Anymore One of the really challenging aspects of Big Data is that, often, you don’t know what you’re looking for until you’ve found it. It’s pretty darned hard to identify a clean ROI for exploration, so you’re basically asking business executives to trust that the data will yield […]

Big Data: Not Just for Big Business Anymore It’s one thing to read the hype about a technology project, but quite another to actually do it yourself. We’ve all learned that technology seldom works as well as we were told. That’s why I really wonder what it’s like to do a Big Data project from […]

Five Tips to Improve Your Data Analysis These days, cloud and integration technology still provide plenty of “firsts,” but I can’t help but notice that the claims are more thinly sliced. For instance, Syncsort recently announced Ironcluster, which it’s calling the “first and only ETL tool” on Amazon Web Services for Elastic MapReduce. The announcement […]