EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

As I review my series of #100linesOnBIDW blogs over the last couple of weeks, I found myself looking at the Data Management posting. I covered when to apply schemas, Big Data, and data governance. What I left out was technical implementation concepts for data management systems like row vs. column orientation; in-memory vs. spinning disk primary storage; and symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) vs. massively parallel processing (MPP). Processing and storage were the “developments” of 2012. I left 2013 for the “how to use” Data Management platforms.

If I told you in September that the Baltimore Ravens would win the Super Bowl in February and you did nothing with that information ( i.e. place a bet, announce your prognostication skill, etc. ), was my prediction worth anything? Much like “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, did it make a sound?”, you need action from a piece of analysis, prediction, etc. to make it worthwhile.

Albert Einstein once said:

Edward de Bono, a noted expert on creative thinking, once said:

When Aesop created the fable about the shepherd boy who cried wolf, the message was clear:

“Back in the day”, Pablo Picaso once said:

I have always loved the song “88 Lines about 44 Women” by the Nails.  And based on some recent success with a blogging topic relating to the songs of the 80s, I thought that I would continue that theme with “100 Lines about 25 Business Intelligence Topics”. Think of this list, or series of lists, as a wide ranging set of predictions, topics for discussion and observations relating to the business intelligence and data warehousing domain for the upcoming year.

Next week, EMA and 9sight will hold a webinar covering our Big Data research findings.  Among our insights will be that Big Data has evolved. Moving forward, Big Data isn’t:

Miami Dolphins, Sun Life Stadium and IBM Intelligence Operations Center

Last September, Forbes Magazine published its 2011 ranking of the NFL’s Most Valuable Teams. Forbes gives detailed financial information on why NFL franchise values are “only” growing by 1.4%. The article notes that operating costs for NFL franchises are rising. This increase is due to:

As Big Data initiatives mature into enterprise data sources supported by NoSQL products for analytics and operational systems, a clash of cultures is on the horizon (if not here already). Traditional IT implementations teams and their top-down programs rarely see eye to eye with the grass roots culture of NoSQL platform operators. But this divide is not merely between the camps of Big Data/NoSQL and traditional IT implementation teams. This is just the tip of the iceberg…. The divide becomes much more pronounced when you take the discussion to the executive suite. CMOs and CFOs, who “own” results of analytical and operational systems, are less concerned with data center standards and development methodologies as they time to value. CIOs and CTOs, responsible for implementing the connectivity and integration between NoSQL platforms and the rest of the traditional IT environment, are facing pressures to avoid chasing the latest technology fad(s).