Loraine Lawson

Earlier this month, Dell Boomi announced its new master data management solution — a cloud offering that actually moves your data into the cloud and manages it there. This raised a lot of questions for me, but first and foremost, I wanted to know: What did the company mean when it said “MDM”? That may […]

Big Data Makes Organizations Smarter, but Open Data Makes Them Richer “Data rushes in like a ferocious torrent.Wisdom can only be found in calm.Seek shelter in the rock of One Good Question.” – The Zen of Data We conceive of data as a science, and how technology allows us to interact with data very much […]

Big Data Makes Organizations Smarter, but Open Data Makes Them Richer The verdict is in, according to recent research: Data-driven companies are more profitable than their competitors. The question is: How? It’s not as if their competitors aren’t using data. Organizations have always used data to make decisions, as data quality expert Jim Harris pointed […]

Top Five Questions to Answer Before Starting on Big Data It’s not hard to find Big Data success stories these days. From “Five Ways Big Data Is Going to Blow Your Mind and Change Your World” to “10 Real-World Big Data Deployments That Will Change Our Lives,” it’s clear that companies are putting Big Data […]

My husband and I took dance lessons for a year once. We never mastered any particular style, but we did learn just enough to make us dangerous on the dance floor, no matter what the band plays. That’s because, for any given dance, there are three or four basic steps that form the foundation. Learn […]

Big Data Is Creating Big Jobs: 4.4 Million By 2015 Alibaba — the giant of e-commerce — recently named Chief Data Officer Jonathan Lu Xaoxi as the company’s new CEO. As far as I know, this is the first time a chief data officer has been promoted to the head of the company. I can […]

Top 10 Network Tips to Prep for March Madness It’s March Madness, and here in Kentucky, people accept that as a literal command.  I don’t know about where you live, but I’ve no doubt right now, all across my state, people are more concerned with finishing their NCAA playoff brackets than anything else. Today, NPR […]

Seven Ways to Get Started With Big Data Most Big Data success stories tend to be a bit high-falutin, meaning they always seem to be about some unusual situation or some unusually tech-driven, large company. Yes, it’s nice to know how Google and Yahoo put Big Data to work, and it’s great that windmill companies […]

Integration continues to be a major challenge for both cloud adopters and cloud vendors. A recent KPMG survey found that of approximately 350 executives, nearly a third found cloud to be harder and more expensive than they anticipated, in large part because of integration problems. There are four basic options for solving cloud integration. Keep […]

Top Five Questions to Answer Before Starting on Big Data “We need open data to change the world,” reads a recent headline on the Harvard Business Review blog, by Lucy Bernholz. Bernholz is a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, where she co-leads a research project focused on philanthropy, technology […]

Making Sense of Big Data in the Real Business World For many companies involved with the earth in some way, there are data people, and then there are GEO data people. One deals with the traditional IT kind of data. The other is devoted to GIS data, and they’re often a world into themselves. It’s […]

Strategic Integration: 10 Business-Building Tips You know how everything in fashion makes a comeback a generation later? Integration technology is sort of like that, but the turnaround is much, much faster. For instance, it’s been 30 years and we’re just now seeing skinny ties and skinny jeans make a comeback from the 80s. But it’s […]