Data orchestration means trying to bring order and speed to a complex Big Data ecosystem, a conglomeration of storage systems like Amazon S3, Apache HDFS, or OpenStack Swift and computation frameworks and applications such as Apache Spark and Hadoop MapReduce. The data stack is fragmented and performance-challenged by a proliferation of data silos. The technology aims to break through the “walled gardens” that today inhibit the ability for applications and…

“Existing conditions” is a term for conditions that don’t last very long. Amazon changed the face of retail. Google democratized access to information. Facebook and pretty much every social media site has changed the way we interact with each other. Change came to Carrs Tool Steels, too. The U.K. supplier of tool steel and high-strength aluminum alloy products to manufacturers has seen its customers’ purchasing habits change from bulk-buying of…

Today, it would be really hard to find a business totally free of cloud services. In spite of battling centralized “no-cloud” policies in some enterprises, individual departments, work groups, and units are increasingly subscribing to services for data storage and backup, media services, CRM, hosted analytics, and more. Even developers are using Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for testing and deploying applications. One fact is clear — cloud is here…

Creating a Data Strategy, like a Business Strategy, is an art. In a Harvard Business Review article, Joshua Gans, professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, notes two typical errors made with a Business Strategy: spending too much time searching for the one true strategy and getting paralyzed by uncertainty — hence, not doing any planning. The same could be said about Data Strategy. Spend too much…

To make Data Science part of business value creation, business users have to be part of the Data Science lifecycle. They need to be able to go back to Data Science teams and provide feedback so that the Data Science process reflects their requirements — and quickly. Models may need to be updated or functionalities automated, for instance. What businesses need is Data Science productionization. That’s the merger of creating…

A Data Governance Specialist is responsible for deploying and enforcing policies and procedures that ensure data is used and maintained properly. Some organizations confuse the title “Data Governance (DG) Specialist” with the title “Data Governance Manager.” The DG Specialist is not a member of upper level management and does not dictate policy. This person, however, must still have good communication skills, as they may be asked for feedback by managers,…