Recently, I’ve received several questions related to the recovery of deleted files.  What happens when a file is deleted on a Windows-based system, and what causes those files to be lost and therefore unrecoverable?  Further, what could I have done to prevent their loss?  To answer those questions, we first need to answer another very important question.

How does Windows save file data on a NTFS volume?

When you create a new file, like a picture from your vacation (vacation.jpg), and save it to your hard drive (formatted with the NTFS file system), Windows does a couple things.  It finds an open file record in the metadata area of the disk (called the Master File Table or MFT) and writes some information about the file, such as the file name and date.  If there are no open file records, Windows will expand the MFT and create a new file record.

Windows then finds some free data blocks on the volume to write the actual file data to.  Once the data blocks are identified, Windows links the new file record to the data blocks and writes the actual data to the disk.  The picture below illustrates the vacation.jpg file as written to the disk.

So what happens when a file is deleted (assuming it is not going into the Recycle Bin)?  Two very important things happen (from a data recovery perspective):

1. The file record is marked as deleted and available for reuse.
2. The data area is marked as free space and available for reuse.

The image above shows the areas of the disk that hold the data for the vacation.jpg file have now been marked as free space and are available for use for new files or to expand existing files.  The file record has also been marked as deleted and is available for reuse by the file system.

To recover deleted data, your data recovery company or software needs to be able to find deleted file records that have not been overwritten and the data blocks that relate to those files.  The DR company or software should also scan the unallocated space on the disk for data blocks that were in use, but whose file records have been overwritten.

An example of such a process is as follows:

1. Limit access to the disk (write blocker)
2. Scan volume metadata for file records marked as deleted
3. Recover deleted file records and their related data blocks into new files
4. Scan volume for raw data that is currently in unallocated or free areas of the drive
5. Recover raw data blocks into new files

What are some of the reasons deleted data cannot be recovered?

1. File record is overwritten and:
   1. No signature for the file data
   2. Data is fragmented
   3. Data is completely overwritten
   4. Data is partially overwritten

The figure below illustrates a file that has been deleted, its file record overwritten by a new file, and the data is fragmented on the drive.

Our example file (vacation.jpg) has been deleted and the file record overwritten with a new file (birthday.jpg).  The only recovery possible for the vacation.jpg file is to find and assemble the raw data blocks (assuming there isn’t another copy of the FR somewhere else on the volume).  The success rate for this type of recovery is very high as the data blocks (Blocks 1-4) in our example have not been overwritten by new data.

If the new file (birthday.jpg) had overwritten some of the data blocks like in the example below, then the file would only be partially recoverable (blocks 2 and 3 overwritten).

If all of the data blocks had been overwritten like the example below then the file would not be recoverable (blocks 1-4 overwritten).

So what can you do to make sure this doesn’t happen to you?

1. Backup/replicate your data.  I know it sounds cliché, but a simple backup/replication can save a ton of heartache.
2. If you accidentally delete a file, and don’t have a backup, stop using the system as soon as possible.  Browsing the Internet or continuing to work writes additional data to the disk and can cause the data blocks to be overwritten.
3. Restore a backup to a different drive to make sure that the backup contains the data you need and that the files are in working order.
4. If you want to attempt the recovery yourself, make a copy of the drive if possible and work on the copy.  If it is not possible to make a copy, make sure the drive is slaved as a secondary disk to the system.  Do not install recovery software on the drive you want to recover from.
5. Seek professional assistance.  Good data recovery companies offer a free consultation, so you can discuss your specific needs with a data loss expert.

There are two ways to look at the phrase “Information is an asset.”  One is metaphorically, which is the most common.  “Information is an asset, so we need to exploit it to do better stuff.”  That’s OK, but it falls short from a business sense. You can use the metaphor to launch enterprise information management (EIM) efforts, but something is always missing.

That something is the financial recognition of the asset’s value. Off hand, hardly anyone will say information has no value. But measuring what the value is creates a whole new discussion.

We have concepts around the value of information that range across all phases of the information life cycle. A recent article talks about information have no value at all until some insight is reached.  Dr. Michael Wu stated “The value of any data is only as valuable as the information and insights we can extract from it. It is the information and insights that will help us make better decisions and give us a competitive edge.” TechCrunch, November 2012.

This prompted quite the response. I and many others flat out disagree with this.  If I am a CEO, and take this literally, then I may as well shut off all information systems, since there is no “value” at all.  But we know better.  There is value in my operational and managerial data, my emails, and my documents.  If not value, then there is risk  (which, in sci fi talk, can be considered “anti-value.”)

The rubber meets the road when you talk technique. How do you value information?  Is there a formula? There may be.

Doug Laney of Gartner Group has put some serious mental cycles on this topic. Doug is getting some traction with CxO level executives.  This is not coincidental. Doug and I have worked together now and then over the years and this topic has always been an item on his “I would love to have time to do more research” list.

At the beginning, we both talked in notional terms, and presented very rough ideas as to what this might look like.   However, Doug has taken it to a higher level and it is worth any information professional’s time to check out his ideas. I am really glad to see serious treatment of the subject and to see Doug getting recognition for his research.

Doug’s labels the formal treatment of information as “Infonomics.”  To be precise, he states Infonomics is:

the economics of information and principles of information asset management. 

I can live with this definition, but it misses the practical, or “implementable” aspect of this discussion. So let’s add a term – Information Accounting, which is:

the formal accounting and measuring aspect of information asset management 

There is a nice stream of discussion on this topic on a LinkedIn group, managed by Doug Laney (and occasionally, me): http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=4069646&trk=anet_ug_hm

The next blog will look at techniques and concepts to consider when actually valuing information.

Big data with zero relevance to your business needs is essentially the same as no data at all.

Recently, I came across an interesting article that introduced the word “evidence” into the discussion of data relevance. It’s an interesting choice because most people normally think of “evidence” in terms of forensic analysis for the purpose of building a case of some sort – against some alleged perpetrator, for some ambitious business scheme, and so on.

Evidence is any data that you can factor into a case – in other words, into a structured narrative that argues for or against some imperative. The imperative is a decision point: do this or don’t do that. It’s what lawyers do for a living. It’s what entrepreneurs do. It’s what any politician, project manager, or interested party does to build support for some course of action.

Can big data be a reliable source of evidence for whatever business case you’re building? Well, it’s not as straightforward as that. As I pointed out in this blog, data scientists, who are the primary developers of big data applications, focus on using statistical models to frame structured narratives—i.e., scenarios—that explain patterns called out in model-driven insights.

For the data scientist, visual patterns serve the core narrative-building functions of framing the opportunity, problem and solution. If you are a data scientist, many of the data-based patterns you call out concern regularities in human decision-making behavior. Past behavioral patterns in some target audience, factored as evidence into your model-based narrative, can bolster your case for or against some course of action that seeks to influence those behaviors. Churn analysis, for example, is one of the most common scenarios in decision science that usually rests on past churn behaviors among various customer segments.

The above-mentioned article discusses the possibility of auto-generating persuasive narratives by using machine-learning models to extract human-like insights from big data. I’m not as sanguine on this possibility as the author is. As they themselves point out, “the data is purely instrumental to the communication you want to support.” As far as I can see, they’re not proposing some radically disruptive new form of artificial intelligence that can reproduce the creative, cognitive, empathic, and social smarts needed to craft a case that can win the hearts and minds of real human beings.

In order to imagine that you can auto-generate a business case from raw data, you would have to boldly assume that the “evidence” in that data is self-evident, as if the “evidentiary” attribute were a form of metadata that can be easily extracted.

That’s a mistaken assumption. The evidence of any collection of facts is in the judgments of the people building and evaluating the larger case. These two processes – constructing  and deconstructing narratives – cannot be automated. You need data scientists to build big-data applications and visualizations intrinsic to data-driven narratives. You need business analysts who are subject-matter experts to collaborate closely with them in that endeavor, because it’s their responsibility to craft a case in its full business context.

Just as important, only the business analyst knows how the business case is likely to be evaluated by the ultimate decision makers.

My favorite part of the event, and any of our events really, is meeting all the people in person I’ve worked with throughout the year producing our webinars, both speakers and attendees. Many people who have attended our webinars and have visited our site came to our DATAVERSITY booth with content requests. Love it! We are more than happy to put our researchers and writers to the task. It is my firm philosophy that we cannot go wrong with requested materials. Some requests for education materials:

• What is an Information Product?
• How do you manage outsourcing your data?
  • With so many development work being outsourced, how do you manage the data they are producing
• More Information on Data Discovery Products such as Tableau

Another exciting result of the conference is talking to several people who will be working with DATAVERSITY on various projects. John Ladley, President of IMCue Solutions, and Gwen Thomas, Founder of the Data Governance Institute, will be blogging for us. John will blog about various topics including Data Governance and Master Data Management. Gwen will be blogging about what’s happening in the world of Chief Data Officers. There are also a couple of other potential exciting new bloggers in the works as well. More to come on that!

We’re excited about the reception we’ve received from you, our subscribers, on our initial Research Paper releases. At the conference we were able to sit down with a couple Industry Experts to generate a few more papers. Coming end May, beginning of June we will release our Data Governance Research Paper written in partnership with Bob Seiner, sponsored by ASG and the Data Governance Professionals Organization (DGPO). Dan McCreary and Ann Kelly, our partners in our NoSQL Now! Conference, will help us generate a Research Paper on Database technologies. David Loshin, President of Knowledge Integrity, will be working with us on a fall Research Paper on Information Architecture to be published in October, Sponsored by Denodo.

Another exciting outcome of the conference was my chance to sit down with Andrea Dierna from Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. She and I have been talking for a couple years now on how we can partner together and we finally have the resources to implement our strategies. Starting immediately, we have swapped Editorial Calendars. Anytime we have a blogger or webinar speaker who has a book published with Morgan Kaufmann (MK), MK will provide us a discount code for DATAVERSITY subscribers. We’ve had a lot of requests for books lately, so very excited we can provide discounts to you through our partnership. We’ll also be producing some webinars with some of their authors. Many of their authors are Industry Experts who are very much tied in with Enterprise Data World having given many well received presentations at the conference over the years. The final phase will be for us to implement a bookstore so you can get all the recommended books in one location with the discount codes readily available.

Some very exciting news for our international folks, we’re going to start doing some webinars in multiple languages! Pablo Ribaldi, Solution Manager for Information Governance & Quality at the Church of Jesus Christ, will be delivering some webinars in Spanish. He’s going to start with a couple of webinars on Data Governance and Master Data Management. Mario Faria, Data Strategy Advisor of Boa Vista, who was also the first Cheif Data Officer in Brazil, will be delivering a webinar in Portuguese, How to Create a Successful Data Organization. We’re very excited about these!

And one of my favorite results of the conference is the “DATAVERSITY T-shirt around the World.” We gave away every last one of the T’s we brought with us. They are American Apparel 50/50 blend unisex T’s. We worked hard to invest in quality and they are so soft, even those who weren’t interested initially in another T walked away with one in their hands. We were asked if we’d be interested in posting pics of people in their DATAVERSITY T, and of course we said yes! We love the idea and love even more that it was requested! So if you have a T, tweet us your picture @Dataversity or post it to our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/Dataversity. Or bring us a printed copy to our next conference and we’ll start a collage board. And thanks Chris Bradley for getting it started!

Chris Bradley (@InfoRacer) sporting the DATAVERSITY T in Bath, England.

Have I mentioned lately we have the best subscribers? Thanks for being so interactive with all we do!!! And as always, if you have additional ideas, suggestions, or questions, don’t hesitate to shoot me an email.

Regards,

Shannon Kempe

Executive Editor

Governance programs can’t survive unless there is demonstrable long-term financial benefit for the business.

I’m just back from Enterprise Data World. If you missed it, start making plans for EDW 2014 in Austin. EDW is the gathering of the Data Management clans, and I love it because I never come away without some new ideas, and some old ideas clarified.

One EDW highlight for me this year was a session on sustainable governance presented by Kelle O’Neal of First San Francisco Partners. To my regret I had to leave at the halfway point, but not before my thoughts about the economics of governance had started to gel.  On the way out I chatted briefly with Asim Mohammad of Bank of America and he confirmed my thoughts about the cost/value issue and the gelling process continued as I traveled home.

The basic thought is very simple. No matter what organizational structure you adopt, or what processes you put in place, your governance environment won’t be self-sustaining unless all those who pay for it, or otherwise invest time and resources in it, can see the business value. For business value, read money. If governance depends on personalities or events to drive it, change will erode it. If it has a clear dollars and cents (substitute your favored currency) business case, it will survive.

So how do we figure out the value? Not the soft values, but the numbers? I’m thinking there’s a typical 2×2 matrix that will serve as a good model. Crudely, the choice is “do governance, or don’t do governance”. Each option has cost and value, and that gives the four quadrants of my matrix.

The “cost” of not doing governance is simple. It’s zero! To be clear, by “costs” I mean the investment of time, money and people. In those terms, doing nothing costs nothing. Many of the things often described as costs are, to my mind, negative entries in the value quadrant.

The “value” of not doing governance really amounts to penalties. The explicit penalties of regulatory failures, the measurable penalties of wasted resources and the (perhaps) less measurable penalties of wasted time in decision making and delivery of product to market.

The costs of governance are the costs of people, processes and resources. Supporting the processes and resources may require tool investments and will certainly require systems analysis and design.

The positive values of governance are primarily the benefits accruing from better value from information.

So far I’ve presented this as an “either / or” … But of course it isn’t. The costs are disbursed, and the values accrue, over time. Understanding your governance economics implies predicting and tracking the costs and values over time. I’m prepared to say that if you have nothing in place, there will definitely be a positive impact to getting started. I suspect (but don’t have proof) that there are escalating costs to manage more and more information, and diminishing returns from the process. That would imply that there is a “Zone” where there is a very positive return on governance, and that managing explicitly to stay within the zone is a key to long-term support for the governance program.

In an effort to leverage the knowledge of several of the top minds in the Data Management industry, DATAVERSITY™ has been conducting a series of interviews on some of the most relevant topics in the field today. Recently, we interviewed Mario Faria, the Data Strategy Advisor at Boa Vista.

Mario will be giving the closing keynote address at the Enterprise Data World 2013 Conference in San Diego, CA from April 28-May 2, 2013. The closing keynote is with Mario, Tony Shaw, and Micheline Casey; it is titled “Chief Data Officers, Data Scientists and Big Data Architects – New Roles for a New World of Data.”

The Speaker Spotlight Column (and its parallel venture the Sponsor Spotlight Column) is an ongoing project that focuses on highlighting several of the central issues represented at the many Data Management conferences produced by DATAVERSITY.

The primary emphasis of the interview was to question Mario Faria on his work and history within the industry, with particular importance on his address at the upcoming conference:

DATAVERSITY (DV): What company do you work for?

Mario Faria (MF): Boa Vista, a credit score company based in Brazil, which is partly owned by Equifax.

DV: What’s your position?

MF: Until I moved to USA in December, I was the Chief Data Officer and Lead Data Scientist. After January, I will be holding the position of Data Strategy Advisor.

DV: How long have you been working for your company?

MF: Since 2011.

DV: Where did you work prior to that?

MF: I have worked for Microsoft, Accenture and IBM, and was responsible for large and complex projects related to Business Intelligence, Digital Marketing, CRM, Supply Chain, Social Media and Web Development

DV: How did you get into this industry?

MF: I have been involved with data and analytics since right after college, as a systems analyst using SAS and SPSS. In the middle 90s, when the Internet started to be used very seriously by business applications, integrating the value chain and the first BI projects started to come up, then I took a deep dive down in the subject. Probably because of being involved with data for so long, I was one of the first chief Data Officers in the world.

DV: What is the most interesting thing about what you do?

MF: I see myself as a bridge between Business and Technology, by using my full skills to deliver sustainable results. I love 2 things about organizations/business units: to start a new one or to fix the ones that are not working.

DV: Which session are you speaking at during EDW 2013?

MF: I will be a speaker during the Thursday morning keynote session on the topic of “Chief Data Officers, Data Scientists and Big Data Architects – New Roles for a New World of Data.”

DV: What will you cover during this session?

MF: I will explore some of the positions and work roles that are becoming common today as the world becomes more and more data-driven.  And I will present how a data team should be structured to achieve its goals.

DV: What do you hope to accomplish during your session?

MF: I plan to demystify some of the confusion about the names and acronyms, and to give something the audience can take back to their job and start to use right way.

DV: Why is your topic timely to EDW 2013?

MF: Because every company I talk to tells me they are striving to find the right talent for their data and analytics needs. And at the same time, the hiring processes are conducted in such a lame manner that the best people feel like is a torture.

DV: What trends do you see in the industry at this time?

MF: First, more and more, we will see Big Data projects delivering very practical results to business.  The investments made in projects will start to pay off quite quickly and the failures will be great lessons learned to be used in the next initiatives.

DV: Where do you think Enterprise Data and Big Data are headed in 2013?

MF: Consolidation of the industry will start to happen quite fast. The Data/Big Data ecosystem is very fragmented with lots of technology and service providers popping up. We will see a tremendous consolidation, when the large companies started to acquire the smaller ones. Just a few of the new disruptors will survive and the majority will just be dead in the next 2 years.

DV: When you aren’t working, what are you likely spending your time doing?

MF: I love to read about history and I am an avid book consumer. Also, I love music especially classic rock and blues.

DV: What’s something interesting about you that most people don’t know?

MF: That I compete in triathlons and running competitions. That’s my mental and body therapy.

If you are interested in attending Mario’s session at EDW2013, please see the conference schedule at: http://edw2013.dataversity.net/agenda.cfm?confid=72&scheduleDay=PRINT

The session is on Thursday, May 2, at 10:50am.

About Enterprise Data World:

Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive educational event about data and information management. Over five days, EDW presents a diverse schedule of programming that addresses every level of proficiency, including keynotes, workshops, tutorials, case studies, and discussions.

In an effort to leverage the knowledge of several of the top minds in the Data Management industry, DATAVERSITY™ has been conducting a series of interviews on some of the most relevant topics in the field today. Recently, we interviewed Michael Scofield, an Assistant Professor at Loma Linda University.

Michael will be giving a presentation at the Enterprise Data World 2013 Conference in San Diego, CA from April 28-May 2, 2013. The presentation is titled “Graphic Techniques for Profiling & Understanding Production Data.”

The Speaker Spotlight Column (and its parallel venture the Sponsor Spotlight Column) is an ongoing project that focuses on highlighting several of the central issues represented at the many Data Management conferences produced by DATAVERSITY.

The primary emphasis of the interview was to question Michael Scofield on his work and history within the industry, with particular importance on his presentation at the upcoming conference:

DATAVERSITY (DV): Please tell us a little about yourself and your history in the industry e.g role at previous companies and/or universities (as opposed to job title), past experience and how you got started in the data profession and currently as a researcher?

Michael Scofield (MS): After getting my MBA degree at UCLA, I spent most of my career in the private sector doing decision-support, data architecture, and eventually evolving into data quality assessment.  At Loma Linda University now, I teach part-time in Health Information Management (a field which used to be called “medical records”, but now is automated).  I am also doing “institutional research” for another university.  In higher education, that role is quite specific, providing the leadership with an understanding of student behavior coming from the enrollment database.

DV: What’s the focus of the research you are currently engaged in?

MS: We are wanting to mine our data for what factors may contribute to student success, or be predictors of the same.  The Provost is also very interested in where the students will be coming from five years from now.  I will eventually branch out into analysis of the cost of various academic programs, and determining how successful the students are at getting rewarding careers after graduation.

DV: What is the biggest change going in data architecture at this time?

MS: I think data architecture, as a discipline, has been a “forgotten child” in the rush to build new applications faster, especially with the popular “agile development”.  I believe that “agile” runs quite contrary to the tradition and culture of thoughtful (but not paralyzing) analysis, and design of a stable logical data model which will serve the enterprise (or function) for a long time into the future.  Fast development reflects a shortened attention span in the executive suites all over America.   No so much outside the U.S.

DV: How does such a change affect your research?

MS: My immediate research is unrelated to data architecture.

DV: How do you think such a change will affect the industry over the next few years?

MS: Given my direct experience, and close observations (from a safe distance) of a number of for-profit companies which have had spectacular failures in custom-developed applications, I think that such failures will continue as long as CIO’s do not understand the nature of data as an asset, data architecture as an enterprise asset, and as long as CIO’s focus more on project completion without regard to quality and survivability of the applications being built.

DV: What are you going to discuss during your session at Enterprise Data World and what will the audience gain from attending your talk? (Please be specific about one or two issues you’ll be addressing, and the benefits the audience will obtain).

MS: My immediate topic at EDW is how graphic techniques can be employed to understand production data behavior, and spot quality problems in that data.  In particular, over linear dimensions (the most common being time) a definitional discontinuity may undermine the usefulness of data being fed into a data warehouse.  Understanding production data is much more than merely collecting physical structures and column definitions.  It requires understanding the completeness, reasonability, and reliability of production data generated by business activity.

DV: How is Big Data going to affect data architecture in future?

MS: That is difficult to discern.  Data architects may have to be more agile, and figure out how to integrate the architectures of multiple, disparate sources.

DV: What is something noteworthy about yourself that you would like to tell the conference attendees and our readers that they may not know?

MS: Something about me?  I am interested in too many topics for my own good.  I am an intellectual hedonist; just soaking up learning in history, science, and other topics.  My latest lecture for general audiences is about Eleanor Roosevelt, and her activities during World War Two.  Has nothing to do with data management, but it is enormous fun.

If you are interested in attending Michael’s presentation at EDW2013, please see the conference schedule at: http://edw2013.dataversity.net/agenda.cfm?confid=72&scheduleDay=PRINT

The presentation is on Wednesday, May 1, at 8.30am.

About Enterprise Data World:

Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive educational event about data and information management. Over five days, EDW presents a diverse schedule of programming that addresses every level of proficiency, including keynotes, workshops, tutorials, case studies, and discussions.

In an effort to leverage the knowledge of several of the top minds in the Data Management industry, DATAVERSITY™ has been conducting a series of interviews on some of the most relevant topics in the field today. Recently, we interviewed James G. Kobielus, the Senior Program Director of Product Marketing and Big Data Analytics Solutions (aka Big Data Evangelist) at IBM.

James will be giving a presentation at the Enterprise Data World 2013 Conference in San Diego, CA from April 28-May 2, 2013. The presentation is titled “Data Scientists: Grow and Sustain a Big Data Center of Excellence.”

The Speaker Spotlight Column (and its parallel venture the Sponsor Spotlight Column) is an ongoing project that focuses on highlighting several of the central issues represented at the many Data Management conferences produced by DATAVERSITY.

The primary emphasis of the interview was to question James G. Kobielus on his work and history within the industry, with particular importance on his presentation at the upcoming conference:

DATAVERSITY (DV): Please tell us a little about yourself and your history in the industry e.g role at company (as opposed to job title), past experience and how you got started in the data profession)?

James G. Kobielus (JGK): I’m IBM’s Big Data Evangelist. I’m an industry veteran who spearheads IBM’s thought leadership activities in big data, data science, enterprise data warehousing, advanced analytics, Hadoop, business intelligence, data management, and next best action technologies. I work with IBM’s product management and marketing teams across the big data analytics portfolio. Prior to joining IBM, I was a leading industry analyst, with firms including Forrester Research, Current Analysis, and Burton Group. I have spoken at such leading industry events as IBM Information On Demand, IBM Big Data Integration and governance, Strata, Hadoop Summit, and Forrester Business Process Forum. I have published several business technology books and am a very popular provider of original commentary on blogs, podcasts, bylined business/technology press publications, and many social media.

DV: What’s the focus of the work do you currently do within your organization?

JGK: I focus on big data in all of its aspects: platforms, tools, applications, best practices, case studies, and so forth.

DV: What is the biggest change going on in your particular area of the industry at this time?

JGK: The inexorable transformation of all big data analytics into low-cost, always-on, elastically provisioned cloud-computing services.

DV: How does such a change affect your job?

JGK: Cloud is becoming a more central theme in my thought leadership activities as IBM’s big data evangelist.

DV: What are you going to discuss during your session at Enterprise Data World and what will the audience gain from attending your talk? (Please be specific about one or two issues you’ll be addressing, and the benefits the audience will obtain).

JGK: Game-changing analytics applications don’t spring spontaneously from bare earth. You must plant the seeds through continuing investments in applied data science and, of course, in the big data analytics platforms and tools that bring it all to fruition. But you’ll be tilling infertile soil if you don’t invest in sustaining a data science center of excellence (CoE) within your company. In this presentation, I will discuss what it takes to establish a CoE that foster data-science best practices in support of big data; provide depth on such key data science CoE objectives and programs as multi-disciplinary cross-training, quant/suit alignment, and business analyst skills enhancement; and outline the potential use of CoEs in cross-disciplinary team building, recruitment, and proof-of-concept demonstration.

DV: How has your job, and/or the work you’re doing at your organization, changed in the past 12 months? How do you expect it to change in the next 1-2 years?

JGK: In the past 12 months, I transitioned from being an industry analyst into being IBM’s big data evangelist. Over the next 1-2 years, I expect my role at IBM to deepen into a wider range of thought leadership activities related to industry-specific applications of big data analytics.

DV: More broadly speaking, what do you believe is the most significant change happening in Enterprise Data at this time?

JGK: The rapid phase-out of hard disk drives (HDD) in favor of solid state drives (SSD) in data storage architectures everywhere.

DV: How is Big Data going to affect your job (in your organization) in future?

JGK: It’s going to give me ample fresh fodder for thought leadership under IBM.

DV: What is something noteworthy about yourself that you would like to tell the conference attendees and our readers that they may not know?

JGK: I’m deeply into yoga.

If you are interested in attending James’ presentation at EDW2013, please see the conference schedule at: http://edw2013.dataversity.net/agenda.cfm?confid=72&scheduleDay=PRINT

The presentation is on Wednesday, May 1, at 11:30am.

About Enterprise Data World:

Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive educational event about data and information management. Over five days, EDW presents a diverse schedule of programming that addresses every level of proficiency, including keynotes, workshops, tutorials, case studies, and discussions.

In an effort to leverage the knowledge of several of the top minds in the Data Management industry, DATAVERSITY™ has been conducting a series of interviews on some of the most relevant topics in the field today. Recently, we interviewed Benjamin F. Wirtz, the CEO at Unifyo.

Benjamin will be giving a presentation at the Enterprise Data World 2013 Conference in San Diego, CA from April 28-May 2, 2013. The session is titled “Making the Case for Leaving Customer Data Decentralized.”

The Speaker Spotlight Column (and its parallel venture the Sponsor Spotlight Column) is an ongoing project that focuses on highlighting several of the central issues represented at the many Data Management conferences produced by DATAVERSITY.

The primary emphasis of the interview was to question Benjamin on his work and history within the industry, with particular importance on his session at the upcoming conference:

DATAVERSITY (DV): Please tell us a little about yourself and your history in the industry e.g role at company (as opposed to job title), past experience and how you got started in the data profession?

Benjamin Wirtz (BW):I was always thought that we way companies use and process customer data is broken. There is nothing wrong about wanting to have a great “Customer Relationship Management” system, but when doing IT consulting and research at University, I saw projects going into one of two directions. Most big companies ran incredibly expensive data integration projects with solution providers and consultants, who also restructured the company’s internal organisation – often with poor results because of the complexity of these projects. Smaller companies avoid these expensive and time consuming projects and rather adopt minimalistic systems due to resource restrictions, but then can’t compete in terms of customer context which is available to their employees. I observed changes in technology which would allow for much simpler and effective solutions – ultimately I founded the company behind Unifyo.

DV: What’s the focus of the work do you currently do within your organization?

BW: As the CEO of a small but quickly growing organisation, I’m still deeply involved in developing the product. Our current focus is on working closely with our customers to really understand their needs, instead of just making quick sales. We are really just starting with Unifyo but have solved some complex challenges for our customers already. It’s key for us to see more data integration and CRM challenges, see which companies can and can not yet benefit from Unifyo and improve the technology accordingly.

DV: What is the biggest change going on in your particular area of the industry at this time?

BW: With the move to cloud hosted apps and of course social media, there is an exploding number if silos which hold crucial business data. Customer data is a special challenge, because in places like Facebook and Twitter, it’s not even 100% accessible to companies, but they are depending on other companies to provide APIs. While in the old days companies were able to customise the applications they bought, they can’t do this any more with Software as a Service.

The result is a massive increase in data but a decline in data Accessibility – and of course this process is accelerating all the time.

Data integration projects, especially when combining company internal data with public and social media data, will become even more complex, and the traditional approaches of having a single source of truth (like the CRM) becomes infeasible.

DV: How does such a change affect your job?

BW: It’s a constantly changing environment, with new business services launching every week. It has presented a huge opportunity for us though – and it’s very satisfying to see how our simplified approach on leaving data decentralised but providing a unified profile which has all relevant customer context indexed is helping a lot of companies. There are a lot of companies doing amazing things at the moment, and it’s great to be part of this paradigm shift. The critical challenge is to stay agile and keep solutions adaptable for any forthcoming services which an organization might use or have data stored in.

DV: What are you going to discuss during your session at Enterprise Data World and what will the audience gain from attending your talk? (Please be specific about one or two issues you’ll be addressing, and the benefits the audience will obtain).

BW: We will share our lessons learned from having an increasing number of data sources (and silos) which contained customer data, and why we decided to go for an approach which leaves the original customer data decentralised (yet providing a unified interface to all relevant data).

We will give an outlook on the challenges to come and how the data integration challenges are doing to accelerate in the next years, especially in the Software as a Service space

DV: How has your job, and/or the work you’re doing at your organization, changed in the past 12 months?  How do you expect it to change in the next 1-2 years?

BW: We see an increasing number of companies being aware of the challenges ahead, so for us as an organisation that means an increasing number of companies approaching us rather than us having to reach out to potential customers. We expect the data integration space to tip over in the next years, with companies taking new innovative approaches to data integration than just trying to shove all their data into one database – the number of connectors to be built and the amount of resources required for this will imply not deliver a ROI anymore, starting with small companies and then moving to larger organisations until the end of the decade.

DV: More broadly speaking, what do you believe is the most significant change happening in Enterprise Data at this time?

BW: The change of control over data. A lot of control is given either to consumers, enabling them to change and update their own details or even have certain data deleted, which is great. On the other end, companies are handing control of their data over to outside providers – SaaS companies and services which enrich data or make working with data more convenient, like us. There are a lot of concerns regarding backups and access restrictions, but there are more and more companies which feel comfortable handing over control to an extend for efficiency and data quality gains.

DV: How is Big Data going to affect your job (in your organization) in future?

BW: It’s a big opportunity, but I disagree with the gold rush that’s happening around this buzzword. A lot of software vendors and technology providers started re-branding or re-launching their existing services with a “big data” badge on it.

If you are interested in attending Benjamin’s presentation at EDW2013, please see the conference schedule at: http://edw2013.dataversity.net/agenda.cfm?confid=72&scheduleDay=PRINT

The workshop is on Monday, April 29, at 5.00pm.

About Enterprise Data World:

Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive educational event about data and information management. Over five days, EDW presents a diverse schedule of programming that addresses every level of proficiency, including keynotes, workshops, tutorials, case studies, and discussions.

In an effort to leverage the knowledge of several of the top minds in the Data Management industry, DATAVERSITY™ has been conducting a series of interviews on some of the most relevant topics in the field today. Recently, we interviewed Cédric Carbone, the Chief Technical Officer at Talend.

Cédric will be giving a workshop at the Enterprise Data World 2013 Conference in San Diego, CA from April 28-May 2, 2013. The session is titled “The Big Challenge of Big Data and Hadoop Integration.”

The Speaker Spotlight Column (and its parallel venture the Sponsor Spotlight Column) is an ongoing project that focuses on highlighting several of the central issues represented at the many Data Management conferences produced by DATAVERSITY.

The primary emphasis of the interview was to question Cédric Carbone on his work and history within the industry, with particular importance on his session at the upcoming conference:

DATAVERSITY (DV): Please tell us a little about yourself and your history in the industry e.g role at company (as opposed to job title), past experience and how you got started in the data profession?

Cédric Carbone (CC): My name is Cédric Carbone and I’m Talend’s Chief Technical Officer since its inception in 2006, where I manage the Big Data, Data Integration, Data Quality, MDM and ESB product lines with an international team of more than 140 R&D engineers. I’m also a Board Member at the Eclipse Foundation and OW2 consortium.

DV: What’s the focus of the work do you currently do within your organization?

CC: The market wants a 360-degree integration that covers data, process and application integration without forgetting Data Quality which is increasingly becoming an integral part of the solution. Every customer needs a single tool to be able to cover all these needs. One of my main objectives at Talend is to secure the strong integration between our products through an efficient Unify Platform.

Another work focus is Big Data: it is significantly disrupting status quo in the data management market – incumbents are unsuccessfully trying to adapt legacy solutions to deal with this. I spend a lot of time to exchange with our prospects and customers to be sure we develop at Talend the solution that will fill all their Big Data use cases, focusing on profiling, data integration, parsing, data manipulation and data quality. I also have an interest in the merge of ESB and Big Data, to be able to have an easy access to all information stored in a customer’s Big Data cluster.

DV: What is the biggest change going on in your particular area of the industry at this time?

CC: Big Data forces a change in your way of thinking! Before the availability of Big Data technology, Business Intelligence teams put their minds together and asked data integration teams for a static DataMart: they knew exactly what they wanted to monitor and knew in advance which were the KPIs as well as the metrics to compute in the BI dashboards.

With Big Data, you collect huge amounts of data to find useful information and interesting connections between data, you didn’t have in mind before. You can then define more efficient KPIs and metrics that come from this new information. By collecting and analyzing all this material, companies gain insight into new business opportunities and threats.

DV: How does such a change affect your job?

CC: At Talend, we have decided to go with the market and democratize Big Data by producing our own solution: Talend Open Studio for Big Data. We are providing a powerful and versatile open source Big Data product that makes the job of working with Big Data technologies easy and helps drive and improve business performance.

DV: What are you going to discuss during your session at Enterprise Data World and what will the audience gain from attending your talk? (Please be specific about one or two issues you’ll be addressing, and the benefits the audience will obtain).

CC: In the session at Enterprise Data World, I will be discussing how data integration and data quality tooling can help you in your Big Data project put data inside your Hadoop cluster, parse your unstructured data, do complex data transformation easily, profile your data, cleanse your data and easily access your data stored in a Hadoop cluster thanks to REST or Web Services. All these steps can be done thanks to a graphical tool without writing a line of code and with no knowledge of Map/Reduce.

DV: How has your job, and/or the work you’re doing at your organization, changed in the past 12 months?  How do you expect it to change in the next 1-2 years?

CC: Twelve months ago, Big Data projects were only Proof Of Concepts. Now, we have real, live Big Data projects that are going into production with hundreds and even thousands of data nodes.

DV: More broadly speaking, what do you believe is the most significant change happening in Enterprise Data at this time?

CC: As we have previously talked about in this interview, I believe Big Data is the most significant change in Enterprise Data. To go further, it could also be a revolution that can convince companies to remodel their information system.

DV: How is Big Data going to affect your job (in your organization) in future?

CC: More than likely in my job, I should be seeing a growing interest in Big Data solutions and therefore developing products that will be going with the market’s demand. The area has also seen an increase in partnerships and specialized companies: this should be a growing trend in the future. We are also thinking that previous work areas will have less importance, so as a CTO, I will be working on that shift as it happens.

DV: What is something noteworthy about yourself that you would like to tell the conference attendees and our readers that they may not know?

CC: Data is not only my job, it has been a passion for many years: this is one of the reasons I joined Talend in 2006. Other noteworthy items readers might not know include that I’m an avid traveler: you might see me in an airplane going to Europe (France, Germany, UK…), the United States (mainly California, where we have two offices) and Asia (Beijing). As I’m also a college teacher, I lectured at several universities in the past on technical topics such as XML or Web Services. I have always loved teaching students my work passion!

If you are interested in attending Cédric’s workshops at EDW2013, please see the conference schedule at: http://edw2013.dataversity.net/agenda.cfm?confid=72&scheduleDay=PRINT

The workshop is on Tuesday, April 30, at 10.20am.

About Enterprise Data World:

Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive educational event about data and information management. Over five days, EDW presents a diverse schedule of programming that addresses every level of proficiency, including keynotes, workshops, tutorials, case studies, and discussions.