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TDWI Blog

Three starting points for big data initiatives

The Big Data Maturity Model and Assessment is set to launch on November 20th.  Krish Krishnan and I have been working on this for a while, and we’re very excited about it. 

As I mentioned in my previous blog post (see previous post, below),  there are two parts to the Big Data Maturity Model and assessment tool.  TDWI members will be getting an email about the assessment on November 20th.  We urge you to take the assessment and see where you land relative to your peers regarding your big data efforts.  Additionally, it’s important to note that we view this assessment as evolutionary.  We know that many companies are in the early stages of their big data journey. Therefore, this assessment is meant to be evolutionary. You can come back and take it more than once. In addition, we will be adding best practices as we learn more about what companies are doing to succeed in their big data efforts.

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Posted by Fern Halper, Ph.D. on November 18, 20130 comments


Four Big Data Challenges

We are getting ready to launch the TDWI Big Data Maturity Model and assessment tool in the next few weeks. We’re very excited about it, as it has taken a number of months and a lot of work to develop. There are two parts to the Big Data Maturity Model and assessment tool. The first is the actual TDWI Big Data Maturity Model Guide. This is a guide that walks you through the actual stages of maturity for big data initiatives and provides examples and characteristics of companies at different stages of maturity. In each of these stages, we look across various dimensions that are necessary for maturity. These include organizational issues, infrastructure, data management, analytics, and governance.

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Posted by Fern Halper, Ph.D. on October 29, 20130 comments


Managing Big Data: An Overview in 30 Tweets

By Philip Russom
Research Director for Data Management, TDWI

To help you better understand new practices for managing big data and why you should care, I’d like to share with you the series of 30 tweets I recently issued on the topic. I think you’ll find the tweets interesting, because they provide an overview of big data management and its best practices in a form that’s compact, yet amazingly comprehensive.

Every tweet I wrote was a short sound bite or stat bite drawn from my recent TDWI report “Managing Big Data.” Many of the tweets focus on a statistic cited in the report, while other tweets are definitions stated in the report.

I left in the arcane acronyms, abbreviations, and incomplete sentences typical of tweets, because I think that all of you already know them or can figure them out. Even so, I deleted a few tiny URLs, hashtags, and repetitive phrases. I issued the tweets in groups, on related topics; so I’ve added some headings to this blog to show that organization. Otherwise, these are raw tweets.

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Posted by Philip Russom, Ph.D. on October 11, 20130 comments


Analytics and Reporting Are Two Different Practices

Treat them differently, if you want to get the most out of each.

By Philip Russom, TDWI Research Director for Data Management

I regularly get somewhat off-base questions from users who are in the thick of implementing or growing their analytic programs, and therefore get a bit carried away. Here’s a question I’ve heard a lot recently: “Our analytic applications generate so many insights that I should decommission my enterprise reporting platform, right?” And here’s a related question: “Should we implement Hadoop to replace our data warehouse and/or reporting platform?” More

Posted by Philip Russom, Ph.D. on September 26, 20130 comments


Big Data Two-Step

We just concluded the TDWI Big Data Analytics Solution Summit in Austin, Texas (September 15–17). It was a great success; many thanks go to our speakers, sponsors, TDWI colleagues who managed the event, and to everyone who attended. A special thanks to Krish Krishnan, who co-chaired the conference. We are already planning the 2014 Big Data Analytics Solution Summits to be held in the spring and fall, so keep an eye out for details on these events if you are interested in attending. More

Posted by David Stodder on September 24, 20130 comments


Deathtrap: Overlearning in Predictive Analytics

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I am in the process of gathering survey data for the TDWI Best Practices Report about predictive analytics. Right now, I'm in the data analysis phase. It turns out (not surprisingly) that one of the biggest barriers to adoption of predictive analytics is understanding how the technology works. Education is definitely needed as more advanced forms of analytics move out to less experienced users.

With regard to education, coincidentally I had the pleasure of speaking to Eric Siegel recently about his book, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die (www.thepredictionbook.com). Eric Siegel is well known in analytics circles. For those who haven’t read the book, it is a good read. It is business focused with some great examples of how predictive analytics is being used today.

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Posted by Fern Halper, Ph.D. on September 11, 20130 comments