Loraine Lawson

I could be wrong, but it’s my impression that SAP doesn’t spring to people’s minds when you talk about innovative tech companies. Apple, always. Google, frequently. Facebook, less and less. But SAP? Not so much. There’s nothing wrong with that. SAP’s bread and butter is in the financial aspects of enterprises, a notoriously conservative bunch […]

If your company doesn’t deal with integration on an on-going basis, I suspect it can be hard to find your way in the integration market. After all, it’s no small task. Friday, I talked about how you can learn a lot from free reports available online. But even focusing on reports by major IT research […]

Top Five Questions to Answer Before Starting on Big Data Occasionally, I receive emails asking for advice about a particular integration problem or solution. It’s both flattering and frightening, because it means I’m doing a pretty good job of covering this topic, but honestly, I only know enough to be dangerous and maybe scold my […]

Drivers and Challenges of Enterprise Integration Revealed Hand-coding data integration hurts families. That’s what I learned yesterday, when my rather disgruntled spouse came home late from a day of data entry. My toddler skipped his nap, then inflicted his outrage on the household. The grass was about four inches high in the backyard and it […]

Generally, data people talk about two well-trodden paths to improving data quality: Getting rid of duplications or resolving conflicts via technology. Master data management tools are the primary way to handle this kind of data quality effort. Databases can also do some data cleaning or data scrubbing, as can data management tools also during integration. […]

More companies are looking at how they can use external datasets to supplement their own systems, including master data. This isn’t a new concept, of course. Companies have long bought access to data from companies such as Bloomberg, Lexis Nexus, Standard & Poor’s and various industry-specific data. These types of data services have established reputations. […]

Eight Ways to Put Hadoop to Work in Any IT Department Talk about data governance and one of the maxims you’ll hear is that governance should really belong to the business — not IT. That’s an understandable rally cry for governance, except for one thing: It can go too far, says Henry Olson, director of […]

Five Pitfalls to Avoid with Hadoop I’ve been sifting through a lot of content about Big Data recently, and most of it can be summed up as “A cautionary tale about the perils of Big Data” along the following motifs: Big Data can be biased Big Data will be misused People will get Big Data […]

There are basically two schools of thought about how to make Big Data useful in enterprises. Be specific and focused in defining what you want to achieve. Approach Big Data like an explorer. Thomas C. Redman and Bill Sweeney are proposing something that combines both those approaches, which, ultimately, challenges how we’re thinking about Big […]

Twenty-eight percent of the time, traditional data integration tools are being used for integration with other businesses, according to Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst Ted Friedman. It’s a major emerging trend, thanks largely to Big Data. In fact, Gartner is predicting that within four years, by 2017, over one-third of all new integration flows […]

Self-service business intelligence is a bit of a unicorn, according to a recent piece by Wayne Eckerson, a principal consultant at BI Leader Consulting. Eckerson shares some recent statistics about self-service BI, and the numbers are not encouraging: 64 percent rate their self-service BI initiatives as  “average” or lower. 29 percent rate it as “fair” […]

Big Data Is Creating Big Jobs: 4.4 Million By 2015 EMC consultant David Dietrich says a “dirty little secret” of Big Data is that even when you’re dealing with the industry’s top minds, data preparation still takes up a huge amount of any Big Data project. “Data Prep can easily absorb 80% of the time […]