Peter Aiken disagrees with the popular idea that it’s impossible to put a dollar value on Data Architecture. “It won't be the right number, but it will be at least a dollar value on it, and if there’s money involved, people should be paying attention to it.”Aiken is an author, an associate professor of Information Systems, a researcher, and the Founding Director of Data Blueprint. He spoke about Data Architecture…

Data Lakes are consolidated, centralized storage areas for raw, unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data, taken from multiple sources and lacking a predefined schema. Data Lakes have been created to save data that “may have value.” The value of data and the insights that can be gained from it are unknowns and can vary with the questions being asked and the research being done. It should be noted that without a…

Complex data models have now become the norm. A single stream of the data can travel through many hubs, and many different technologies. It may travel through the front end, the APIs, the Kafka pub/sub systems, Lambda functions, ETLs, data lakes, data warehouses, and more. Riding within this stream of data is the schema, and each schema also has its own technology-specific terminology and syntax, as well as its own…

A Data Manager develops and governs data-oriented systems designed to meet the needs of an organization or research team. Data Management includes accessing, validating, and storing data that is needed for research and day-to-day business operations. Currently, a wide array of organizations are using Big Data to gain insights into customer behavior and to provide Business Intelligence, making a Data Manager a necessity. Data Managers are needed in a variety…

Data has three main functions that provide value to the business: To help in business operations, to help the company stay in compliance and mitigate risk, and to make informed decisions using analytics. “Data can have an impact on your top line as well as your bottom line,” said Dr. Prashanth Southekal, CEO of DBP-Institute in a recent interview with DATAVERSITY®.  “Just capturing, storing, and processing data will not transform…

There’s plenty of research on employee productivity, which is key to building a profitable and successful business. Engaged employees are likely to put their heart into their jobs – not just go through the motions. Here are some findings that put this into perspective: Happy workers are 13 percent more productive, according to research by Oxford University.  Highly engaged employees are much more likely to have above-average productivity (38 percent),…