Loraine Lawson

Tracing the Evolution of Business Intelligence Through the Rise of Embedded Analytics When it comes to the cost of a BI deployment, it’s not the software that will get you; it’s the miscellany–the miscellaneous integration work, in particular. Forrester analyst Boris Evelson, who focuses on application development and delivery, recently explored how to estimate the […]

Business leaders often rely on data as facts, yielding to them as a foundation (or sometimes a rationale) for decisions. Big Data is supposed to empower us to make informed decisions, right? That’s part of the whole “data-driven enterprise” movement: making business decisions based on the data. But here’s the thing: Big Data is often […]

Five Pitfalls That Can Derail Your Big Data Project Last week, I wrote about the three paradigm shifts required for Big Data, as outlined in a recent Foreign Affairs article. One of the required shifts: understanding that Big Data is inherently messy data. To me, that begs the question: How does Big Data change data […]

Traditionally, B2B integration has been its own little technology world, separate from data integration and other more enterprise-focused tools. Cloud and the economy are changing that, according to Gartner’s recent Magic Quadrant for On-Premises Application Integration Suites. Gartner notes that in recent years, there’s been a push in IT to manage application-to-application and business-to-business integration […]

It’s always interesting to me to see technology issues addressed in non-IT publications. So, naturally, I was intrigued when I saw Foreign Affairs publish “The Rise of Big Data: How It’s Changing the Way We Think About the World.” Four Steps to a Big Data Strategy It’s written by Kenneth Cukier, data editor of The […]

Silos are here to stay. Four Steps to a Big Data Strategy I know when I’ve been beaten, and I’m raising the white flag on this one: Silos are just the way things are, and all the signs suggest we might as well accept that. Data has just gotten too darn big to store in […]

The Hadoop Summit happened this week in San Jose, and with 90 sessions over two days, I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about it over the next few weeks. Eight Ways to Put Hadoop to Work in Any IT Department The big unveiling, of course, was YARN, which stands for Yet Another Resource Negotiator. It […]

When I try to explain Big Data significance to non-techies, I use a simple analogy: “You know all that stuff that Hollywood shows cops using technology for – like pinpointing one person on a busy street from a cell phone number? We used to laugh about how ridiculous that is. Now? It’s not so ridiculous.” […]

There’s still a significant drag on incorporating social collaboration tools in the business, and much of it is coming from IT. Microsoft, which has at least 1.2 billion reasons for promoting the use of social networking within enterprises, sponsored a social collaboration survey of nearly 10,000 individuals in companies with a minimum of 100 employees. […]

How far behind are you if you still don’t have an enterprise-wide information strategy? Not very far behind at all, it seems: Recent research found that less than 10 percent of today’s enterprises have a “true” information strategy, according to a Gartner news release. “When asked about the new kinds of information they anticipate as […]

One of the best ideas I’ve heard for saving money on integration is to use pre-built connectors or interfaces and offer those to business users at a fixed price. These pre-built connectors don’t have to come out-of-the-box: They can be custom-built by your integration team. It’s one of the lean integration approaches John Schmidt used […]

Here’s Infochimps CEO Jim Kaskade’s rule of thumb on Big Data projects: 100 percent go over schedule, 100 percent go over budget, and half fail. That’s an alarming statement, but it’s based on an InfoChimps survey of both customer and non-customer organizations. During a recent IT Business Edge Q&A with Kaskade, he shared the three […]