Loraine Lawson

Big Data: Not Just for Big Business Anymore You hear it all the time: There simply aren’t enough trained data scientists to support the demand for Big Data analytics. But here’s an interesting fact from TDWI’s best practices report on “Managing Big Data”: The data scientists aren’t really managing it now. Actually, there’s an incredible […]

Big Data: Eight Facts and Eight Fictions Only 8 to 10 percent of organizations have actually spent any money or time building Big Data applications or systems, according to a recent article in Datanami. But does that mean we’re all being conned about the growth of Big Data? Probably not. Even though that 8 to […]

I know the Terminator mythology dictates that Skynet is a military system, but personally, I think we might want to keep tabs on IBM. Everyone knows about Watson, which topped PC Magazine’s “Five Real Computer Systems That Could Become Skynet” list back in 2011. And we know IBM is putting Watson to work in new, […]

Five Pitfalls That Can Derail Your Big Data Project A mere 16 percent of companies support full integration between CRM and other business systems, according to a recent survey by Scribe Software. The integration vendor annually conducts a State of Customer Data Integration survey. This year, it received 900-plus responses. If full integration strikes you […]

Big Data: Eight Facts and Eight Fictions I love it when technology people start to focus on a new area, because they always seem to offer a fresh view, even when the topic is well dissected. I think that’s one reason why tech is known for lowering costs in all industries, except one: health care. […]

Drivers and Challenges of Enterprise Integration Revealed Integration is a pressing issue for cloud solutions, but IT and business leaders are less concerned about it than in the past, according to an August cloud adoption study. Saugatuck, a research and consultancy firm, asked IT leaders to rank their concerns about enterprise cloud. In the past, […]

Tracing the Evolution of Business Intelligence Through the Rise of Embedded Analytics By now, most of us are familiar with data quality “best practices.” Involve the business user. Correct the source. Establish data governance. It sounds great—but it often falls flat in the real world. Why? It’s too difficult, states Lyndsay Wise, president and founder […]

Seven Ways to Make Big Data an Actionable Opportunity When I first started writing about Big Data, I was very curious about use cases. But CIOs, it seemed, were not. For many, Big Data provided an answer to problems they’d long struggled to solve. So, Big Data wasn’t a hard sale for most IT organizations. […]

Big Data: Eight Facts and Eight Fictions “It’s a data-mergency,” quipped user Waldoj in response to a GitHub post by White House e-gov team member Haley Van Dyck announcing that pull requests and other issues for the GitHub Project Open Data would not be processed until the federal shutdown ends. GitHub participants responded with questions […]

Overstepping the Line Between Big Data and Big Brother? We keep hearing about data’s value. Data is the new oil, we’re told, valuable not just for business insight, but for actually driving new revenue growth in its own right. But you know what Biggie said: Mo’ money, mo’ problems. The more businesses try to monetize […]

Five Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Cloud Platform Solution One of the main reasons cloud computing is taking off is that it’s just so darn easy. It’s cheap, it’s quick, and you don’t need to go through a lengthy battle to do it. You’ve heard it a hundred times — it only takes a […]

Drivers and Challenges of Enterprise Integration Revealed When I began covering integration and data, it really bothered me that there were so many integration problems. I mean, if I can get online and access information from a server in Hong Kong, why is enterprise IT such a mess? I wonder how many business users feel […]