Data analytics

Overheard - Master data management

“Master data management? We didn’t even know the words existed three months ago.” Jonathan G.R. Spaetzel, as quoted in Master data management adoption ‘broad but shallow’ across industries

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is master data management.

Overheard - The IT department decides what data you get to see?

“We had the data, but we did not have the information.” Forrester analyst Boris Evelson, quoting a bank CIO

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is predictive analytics. It’s the crystal ball part of business intelligence.

Pam Baker has a two-part overview on the issues facing Business Intelligence. Now that we’re in this economic mess, everyone is looking around saying “With all this data we’re collecting, why didn’t we see this coming?”

Ummm…maybe it’s because 20% of the CIOs and IT managers that Forrester polled last August said they are running six or more BI tools running on disparate systems?  Yikes!

And even worse — 75% of them said most of their reports and dashboards are created by their IT departments?  DOUBLE and TRIPLE yikes!  (See one of my favorite Paul Graham quotes.)

I’m thinking this economic downturn might be a good time to be a startup BI company — a vendor who can help business analysts connect the dots, see relationships more clearly and identify areas for growth. Definitely a vendor who makes the application simple enough that the end user can create his own reports or dashboards.  One who can bring the mythical self-service BI to life.

Maybe even a vendor who offers services on-demand, like Birst or Cloud9 Analytics. If I were a VC, it’d be something I’d be watching.

Overheard: Facebook is loving Hadoop

Over time, we have added classic data warehouse features like partitioning, sampling and indexing to this environment. This in-house data warehousing layer over Hadoop is called Hive and we are looking forward to releasing an open source version of this project in the near future. Joydeep Sen Sarma, Hadoop

Overheard: Forget CPM — the new buzzword is “performance management”

Performance management is the new battleground. And we’ve been saying that for six years, at least. There’s sort of a category collapse going on where CPM and BI, reporting, and analytics are kind of starting to merge. The lines are getting very grey and I think customers are broadly viewing all this stuff now as performance management. Rob Ashe, Working Under the IBM Umbrella

So…IBM buys Cognos, Oracle buys Hyperion and SAP buys Business Objects. Hmmm.