There’s been a great deal of noise about Big Data. You could say that the PR volume has been almost deafening. We don’t often think of IT as a fashion industry, and indeed in many of its sectors it is not. But right now Big Data is high fashion by any reasonable definition. Indeed, I [...]

The idea of the real-time business has been floating around for a few years now. The prominence of such an idea arises from the fact that technology keeps on getting faster and faster, businesses take advantage of the speed and more and more they seem to slip into running a kind of “real-time” operation. But [...]

I ran into someone recently who claimed, without a trace of irony in their voice, that their company was running two MDM projects. I could think of no obvious way of responding to that, so out of politeness, I changed the subject. Master Data Management initiatives have, it has to be said, become quite popular [...]

Big Data is the hype term du jour. You see it mentioned in IT articles everywhere; it even makes an occasional appearance in the national press. Such exposure in the media naturally impacts people working in IT, who are mesmerized by the various reports of the challenges and opportunities of “Big Data,” although many of [...]

In the days of punch-card computing, data validation received greater focus than it does now. The notion of GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) was afforded much greater respect than it is now. The validation of data was meticulous and bad data was a rare phenomenon. But it isn’t rare now. So why is that? First [...]