Business Intelligence Journal | Vol. 19, No. 2
TDWI Member Exclusive
June 16, 2014
Put the customer first. The customer is king. Keep the customer satisfied. Those
familiar adages ring especially true in this issue of the Business Intelligence Journal.
David Loshin discusses what a customer-centric approach to data entails, the
benefits it can provide your business, and how this is reflected in a new approach to
master data management.
Customers are increasingly concerned about not only what data organizations keep
but also how safe that data remains. Senior editor Hugh J. Watson examines how
the data breach Target suffered recently can serve as a wake-up call for enterprises
to keep data private and secure. He also describes a new study on privacy focusing
on three different ways to characterize privacy and online invasions of privacy. For
enterprises looking to get a handle on their big data security risks, Oren Hamami
continues the data protection theme by examining five key steps to take now.
Keeping data safe is just one challenge. Nenshad Bardoliwalla examines the impact
of the big data revolution on business analysts and why we need a new approach
beyond what current data preparation tools offer. Of course, what good is having all
that data if your database technology can’t keep up? Saibal Samaddar describes two
column-oriented DBMS designs to help you manage your growing data volumes
without hampering performance.
Finding the resources to satisfy an organization’s ever-growing need for BI skills
is the focus of two articles in this issue. Ryan Hart and Troy Hiltbrand explore
how creative crowdsourcing can help enterprises find analytic talent. The authors
show how friendly competition at three organizations brought out the best in their
employees. In our BI Experts’ Perspective column, Dave Schrader, Ron Swift, and
Coy Yonce discuss what advice they would offer college students about BI career
opportunities, how students should prepare for (and start) a BI career, and what
technical and “soft” skills a graduate needs to be successful.
Looking for advice yourself? Jean-Pierre Dijcks and Martin Gubar examine the
best way to implement a big data strategy and what tools you should consider. Coy
Yonce discusses how an enterprise can use analytics to evaluate the effectiveness of
its own analytics and create a more useful analytics solution. He calls it BI on BI.
As always, we welcome your comments. Please send them to
[email protected].
James E. Powell
Editorial Director
Business Intelligence Journal
IN THIS ISSUE
- Addressing the Privacy Issues of Big Data
Hugh J. Watson
- Bridging the Analytics Skill Gap with Crowdsourcing
Ryan Hart and Troy Hiltbrand
- Choosing a Database Architecture: An Essential Guide for
Data Warehousing Professionals
Saibal Samaddar
- Big Data Security: Understanding the Risks
Oren Hamami
- BI Q&A: Customer-Centric Focus Demands New Approach to MDM
Linda Briggs
- BI Experts’ Perspective: Business Intelligence as a Career Choice
Dave Schrader, Ron Swift, and Coy Yonce
- Accelerating Business-Centric Data Preparation in a Big Data World
Nenshad Bardoliwalla
- Leveraging Analytics to Gauge the Effectiveness of Your Analytics Platform
Coy Yonce
- Integrating SQL and Hadoop
Jean-Pierre Dijcks and Martin Gubar