Quick, name something that is growing as fast as the tidal volumes of data today, specially unstructured data? One good answer would be the fast-growing interest in Hadoop, that open source software framework seemingly bred for taming the data monster. Estimates from Gartner and IDC put the number of Hadoop production systems today in the 1,000 range. Chicken feed, you say, and that is true relative to the millions of proprietary data management and storage solutions out there. Read More

There are many difficult aspects to ‘doing’ big data. Data must be stored in such a way as to make it easy to access and analyze. We need to analyze the data, which is much more difficult than most people would think. Once we’ve analyzed that data, we need to convert that analysis into a meaningful form for the organization to consume. Read More

I have to say I got a chuckle out of some of the sound bites Deb Bulkeley cited in her recent post about the Big Data Conference at Ohio State. This one in particular perked me up: “Get ready for the big data backlash.” Really? Read More

As big data journeys intensify, data stewardship has understandably become a key component to success - a component that needs to go well beyond the office of the CIO.  In fact, the best strategies promote data stewardship across the entire enterprise with all information users playing a vital role. Read More