Adoption of mobile apps in the enterprise shows no signs of slowing, based on research from Good Technology. Its Mobility Index for the fourth quarter of 2013 indicates 54 percent growth in the use of mobile applications. This increase outpaces…
The technologies collectively known as SMAC – social, mobile, analytics and cloud – are impacting business in ways almost too numerous to count. One clear trend is their ability to give small and medium size businesses (SMBs) access to some…
The promise of predictive analytics seems straightforward and powerful: semi-automated, flexible tools that allow us to predict customer and supply-chain trends better and quicker, leveraging Big Data for more cost-effective implementation of strategies. And yet, one of the principles of…
There has been a lot of focus on the first big value-add insight one gets from Big Data analytics, but not a lot on why you should keep on going after that. To keep deriving value from Big Data, I…
Anecdotal evidence and analyst firm surveys suggest a big surge in demand for Hadoop experts. In fact, the demand far outstrips the supply. So what should IT do if the requisite experts aren’t available? First, let’s consider the reason for…
At a recent conference, Dave Turek of IBM asserted that the future computing architecture would have data rather than computation “at the center.” What he is saying, I believe, is that enterprise IT-related differentiation and competitive advantage now derives from…
As I was at a vendor conference recently that brought this to mind, I will write on something that is less about the vendor and more about what I view as major opportunities for software technology going forward. In this…
Increasing numbers of IT shops are considering, and in some cases doing, “Hadoop in the enterprise.” That is, they are more or less implementing the file systems and data-access mechanisms (Hadoop, MapReduce) of a cloud provider, and using them to…
The good news: At a recent IBM conference on Big Data, users confirmed a growing body of evidence from sources such as Sloan Management Review, showing that success in Big Data does deliver bottom-line, competitive-advantage benefits. The bad news: There…
A recent Sloan Management Review continuation of their studies of successful Big Data practitioners highlights an often-misunderstood strategy of these “best-practice” users. Specifically, Analytical Innovators (as SMR calls them) value reducing costs less than several other foci: Gaining customer knowledge…