Loraine Lawson

Last year, we spent around $994 million on data quality. That’s a 5 percent increase over 2011, according to The Information Difference, and the total doesn’t include revenue made by consultants and systems integrators who do not work for data quality vendors. Of that, $825 million went to software sales and maintenance. Data quality makes […]

The Army isn’t playing around when it comes to silos. The military branch is committed to only using common data standards from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, even if it means soldiers can no longer use a popular — and proprietary — commercial data-analytics solution. Since the Army is the largest player […]

One of the popular, and a bit surprising, use cases for Hadoop is to speed up batch processing jobs. More companies, particularly retailers, use Hadoop basically as an ETL (extract, transform and load) tool, because their datasets had become so big, running them took more time than they had. In other words, that old IT […]

One of my long-time friends mocks my love of meteorology. He ranks it right above tea leaves and palm readings as a “science” and he isn’t shy about telling me so when I’m warning him about a pending storm front. I can see why he’d say that, although I do think meteorology has improved tremendously […]

So many 50-cent words surround integration that it’s easy to forget that it mostly boils down to two approaches: ETL Data virtualization In a recent Inside Analysis post, Barry Devlin swipes away all the hype to explain data integration’s simple coming of age story, beginning with the first integration problem: The data warehouse. This is […]

“Is Big Data Better Outside of IT?” asked an Information Management article by Forrester’s Michele Goetz last month. I thought it was an odd question at the time — probably because I spent about three years of my life writing about IT/business alignment. “Big data is creating a bigger divide between the business and IT,” […]

Here’s an interesting data point in the debate over Hadoop clusters versus data warehouses: The cost per terabyte can be in the six figures in a data warehouse, but only a few hundred dollars in Hadoop, according to Jack Norris, vice president of marketing at Hadoop distribution vendor MapR Technologies. “So, a big ROI,” he […]

Five Ways to Know if Your Challenge Is Big Data or Lots of Data The trend now is to view data as a business asset. This means the business should “own” aspects of data, such as data governance, data quality and data exploration. What I don’t hear a lot about though, is who pays for […]

Time and time again, surveys show at least a third of SaaS or cloud users claim integration is more complex than they’d expected. And yet, we keep hearing about how APIs and integration-as-a-service can simplify integration in the cloud. What gives? Why is integration in the cloud so gosh-darn hard? Julie Hunt (@juliebhunt) took a […]

Making Sense of Big Data in the Real Business World One of the most frustrating Internet crimes is child sex trafficking, and in many ways, it’s a data problem. I remember reading an in-depth report on this issue years ago. Police had all these photos of children being abused — in fact, one little girl […]

You may not think of health care as a B2B market, but when it comes to data integration and meaningful use, more health care facilities are turning to B2B technology. There are several reasons why B2B makes space for health care, including: Standards The need for security Requirements to share data between business partners (hospitals […]

Drivers and Challenges of Enterprise Integration Revealed Why would a CIO ever support a data integration team, develop a data integration architecture or even pay for a data integration platform? Haven’t developers just “handled” that stuff for years? For many small and mid-size organizations, it’s a fair question. After all, data integration is often a […]