Companies used to see their “Data” as a single entity, defined and contained in the enterprise. These companies are now challenged – and rewarded – to understand that potentially relevant “data’ is everywhere and must be mined to find usable building blocks for new intelligence requirements. This ubiquitous information that is mainly called ‘Big Data’ [...]

Thoughts on enterprise data quality Few things get better with time.  Without careful attention your data certainly won’t be one of them. For most organizations, a love/hate relationship exists with their data.  We love that we can draw together information from various systems and use it to see a picture of how effective we’re being. [...]

I’m plagiarizing Shakespeare here. Si, if you didn’t know, the Elizabethan word “strained” means constrained or enforced. And indeed the quality of data is rarely well enforced, partly because it is difficult to enforce. But also there are thorny data quality issues that are well worth discussing. So rather than digging into the merits and [...]

Business users possess the knowledge of how data is used for certain business processes — such business users are invaluable for examining business data: first, to determine its value in context, and second, to understand how it contributes to intelligence being gathered for the enterprise. Until data is understood in relationships to various systems and [...]

The heart of an IOA is what we have chosen to call the middleware components. This set of software components connects the BI applications to the various BI data sources in a reliable way, delivering data to the applications in a timely manner. This is not a trivial task to achieve, requiring more than just [...]