There is no mistaking the ever greater demand for data — good and usable data for a variety of purposes. The demand is growing fast for data to sharpen focus on customers, help make internal processes run leaner, and to lend certainty to strategic decisions, to name a few. Yet too often the right data can’t be harnessed and remains untapped.
As Nate Silver points out often—and humorously—in his book The Signal and the Noise, the world is full of noisy data. Inside the untapped potential of Big Data and Business Intelligence is the signal. When the power of data is fully harnessed, it enables executives to transform productivity and act with certainty. My predictions for 2016 are about the trends that move businesses through the noise to truly leverage information as a strategic asset.
There was a lot of talk at the Tableau Conference last month about the challenge of getting the right data into Tableau. There’s a process bottleneck between IT and the business that prevents the easy flow of data in the organization. Data democratization is a powerful concept that ultimately enables companies to compete on analytics.
From EDW to Big Data
It’s hardly a new problem. The business intelligence industry has dreamed of the enterprise data warehouse, and now it dreams of big data and the gold it may become. Ultimately, it’s all to pursue the same goal: to use data as the strategic asset it should be. But something has always come in the way.
3 days, 10,000 attendees, multiple TED speakers… but this wasn’t a motivational sales conference. It was a conference for data geeks – the Tableau Conference. In this case, what happened in Vegas will NOT stay in Vegas. It needs to be shared.
What a testament to the evolution of the data-driven mindset. We’ve known for a while that democratization of data could drive business results, and that the future belongs to data-driven organizations. But the sheer number of people at the Tableau conference is confirmation that the theory of the data-driven enterprise has been embraced by the masses.
How Enterprise Search and Big Data Find Common Purpose
Forrester’s 2015 Wave on Search and Knowledge-based Discovery is out, offering a fresh perspective on the evolution of search-based applications. We are pleased that Forrester designated Attivio as a Leader in this category and that the evolution described suggests an important connection between next-generation search and the opportunities of Big Data.
A lot of enterprises have already invested a lot of money in Big Data. But how are these investments panning out? Not so well according to Gartner, who estimates a failure rate of close to 60 percent.
As I pointed out in Solving the Big Data Abandonment Problem, organizations face two significant stumbling blocks to Big Data ROI. The first is a lack of alignment between business and IT stakeholders on objectives, roles, and resources. Ideally, business provides the context; they know the right questions to ask. And IT delivers the technical infrastructure—the data and analytical tools.
How Search-Based Applications Are Changing Enterprise Search
Gartner’s 2015 Enterprise Search Magic Quadrant documents the arrival of a new generation of search-based applications – leaving behind the ‘single search box’ and the contextual, but unscalable search app. With its arrival in the Leader quadrant, Attivio signals the market’s shift to a unified search platform capable of supporting an unlimited number of context-aware applications – at enterprise scale. Why?
