The first step on the roadmap to build a data driven organization is to formulate a data strategy. But who within the company are best placed to build a good data strategy? This article focuses just on building the data... Continue Reading →
Let's start off with the fact that data architects are not data engineers. These roles are often confused. A data architect has a very distinct set of responsibilities that do not overlap with those of data engineers, mainly because data... Continue Reading →
Data engineers are engineers that handle data transformation and storage activities for any applications, while data warehouse engineers handle data transformation and storage activities associated with building a data warehouse. Data Warehousing Engineers They are responsible to build the data... Continue Reading →
Building a data warehouse is a complex process, and involves many distinct activities that can be broadly categorised into planning, designing and engineering. The key to success, however, is synchronised efforts across various activities to manage dependencies and optimize resource... Continue Reading →
Building a data warehouse involves large teams working simultaneously on various activities. Following is the list of activities that should be performed before building a data warehouse, with their recommended sequence. Create business cases The work of building a data warehouse... Continue Reading →
Enterprises invest heavily on building data assets, but if they are not used by the business users, the whole purpose is defeated. When business analysts need data, most of the times, they have no clue regarding whom to ask and... Continue Reading →
Large organizations collect data for various purposes. Data has always been a strategic asset of every organization, as they can leverage data for improving their business. Data can be leveraged to improve their products and services, to increase their sales,... Continue Reading →
Master Data Management is an enterprise function. It is a dedicated initiative to make master data within the organization accessible, secure, transparent and trustworthy. Master data pertains to information related to customers, products, vendors etc. Master data management is a... Continue Reading →
A data model represents the way data is organized within a data store. The organization of data is important because that determines the efficiency of the usage of data. Data models can be designed in various styles depending on how... Continue Reading →
Integrity, by definition, is the state of being whole and undivided. Data integrity is the ability of data to provide a complete view. Companies collect a lot of data through their transactional IT systems. They also have access to loads... Continue Reading →
Data is a reflection of things and events of the real world in digital form, and good quality data is nothing but a more accurate reflection of the real world. Data Quality is an extremely important aspect of enterprise data... Continue Reading →
Data warehouse is an architectural concept. This means - it is a type of architecture deployed for business intelligence solutions. Data Warehouses are built mainly to support strategic and tactical decision making, but they are also be used as a... Continue Reading →
A potential security breach can disrupt the operations of the business, give business edge to the competition or cause discomfort to the customers. The most lethal security breach is the leaking of confidential information to the wrong people, which makes... Continue Reading →
Data visualizations are impactful ways of communicating complex statistical information in an intuitive and interactive manner. Data visualizations are used by business analysts, data analysts, data scientists etc. to understand business and derive actionable insights. Here are three most common ways... Continue Reading →
Metadata is information about data within the enterprise. Data is of great value, but only if it is managed properly. Metadata management is key for building a data driven organization. Without a proper metadata management system, business user would not... Continue Reading →
Informatica seems to be coming back in the game with its launch of a suite of modern data management products. The enterprise information catalogue, which aims at unifying the entire enterprise metadata under one umbrella, is referred to as "the... Continue Reading →
Data loading techniques are integral to data management competencies. In a data driven organization, enterprise data needs to be available to all users, when they need it. In order to make this happen, data load strategies are designed for every... Continue Reading →
As we witness an unprecedented shift of consumers towards using digital channels to do everything, incumbent companies are forced to onboard digital transformation initiatives, to stay relevant in the digital age. The key ingredient for a successful digital transformation initiative... Continue Reading →
All businesses offer discounts to their customers. Online group discount companies like Groupon help retailers offer the right deal to the right customers, thereby increasing their conversions. Mapping the customers to the deals is key to achieve higher conversions, and... Continue Reading →
Data engineers are technical professionals who are skilled at handling the complexities within data. They design and build custom software to transform raw data into information or insights that can be consumed by end users. Data engineers work as part... Continue Reading →
Data warehouses are built for tactical and strategic decision making purposes. Here are a few challenges that should be properly addressed while designing a data warehouse.. Data Analysis Business analysts need to understand the data to build transformation rules. Hence... Continue Reading →
The ability to process data instantaneously and send back insights to users as soon as possible is the key for a successful deployment of a real time data streaming architecture. Real time data streaming applications are considered good, only if they... Continue Reading →
A data architect designs systems for business users to ensure that they get access to the enterprise data as they need it. The role of a data architect is a very senior role. The data architects needs to have a... Continue Reading →
There are many instances of failed attempts to build enterprise data warehouses, and companies struggle to figure out the reasons for failure. An enterprise data warehouse can be deemed as unsuccessful, if majority of businesses dont use the data from... Continue Reading →
An enterprise data warehouse caters to the data related needs of the company. It is a centralised repository for providing trusted data for various business requirements. It helps businesses to quickly build various data driven applications, by ensuring the availability... Continue Reading →
A top down approach looks at the bigger picture, and recommends building strategic solutions. A bottom up approach, on the other hand, focuses on solving the issue at hand in a cost and time effective manner. A key decision for... Continue Reading →
Data management is an enterprise function, comprising large teams with many roles and responsibilities. However, there are a few key roles within the enterprise data management team that should be carefully chosen to build a strong foundation team. Data Strategists... Continue Reading →
Data can drive innovation and support growth in the digital age. An enterprise data strategy involves identifying ways to leverage data for new business opportunities. The key ingredient of an innovative data strategy is experimentation, and its not possible to experiment... Continue Reading →
Building a data driven organization can be a long journey, and below are the competencies that every organization has to build to become truly data driven. Data Strategy Data strategy focuses on value to the business by leveraging data. It... Continue Reading →
Companies have been leveraging data for a long time to make strategic as well as tactical decisions. But the availability of more data and the ability to process data efficiently has opened up new ways of doing business, that can... Continue Reading →
Data science is different from business intelligence. Data science is the technology and business intelligence is the application. There can be several technologies used to build business intelligence applications, "data science" being one of those technologies. Similarly, there can be... Continue Reading →
A data lake is a recent concept, and has become more popular with the advent of big data technologies. Big data technologies and cloud infrastructure have made it cheaper and efficient to store and process huge volumes of data. They... Continue Reading →
Data governance is the missing bridge between the business and the information technology teams, when it comes to issues related to data quality and security. The problem is, technology teams are not sensitive enough to the contents of data, and business... Continue Reading →
If there is something that keeps the CXOs of companies awake at night, it is the disruptive and dynamic business environment. With market value of companies being closely monitored by the world, staying competitive is the biggest challenge. Based on Porter's... Continue Reading →
A business strategy is necessary for every business to stay ahead of competition. It involves huge investments to build a sound business strategy but the payoffs are hugely offset the investments. To build a good business strategy, we need to... Continue Reading →
An enterprise data architecture strategy is the first step of building an enterprise data architecture. It has to be aligned with the overall enterprise data strategy and should detail out aspects of the solution mainly from the end users perspective.... Continue Reading →
An enterprise data architecture is a blueprint of various architectural components that are typically used to manage enterprise data and leverage it for various business objectives. These are some of the important components of a typical enterprise data architecture. Note... Continue Reading →
In an organization, data is stored in various disparate systems. Data within these systems is referred to as internal data of the organization. Also, with digitization of the world, a lot of external data is available and accessible. Combining internal... Continue Reading →
An enterprise data management strategy defines how data within the organization is acquired, stored, organized and leveraged for various business objectives. The key pillars of an enterprise data management strategy include: Identify Business Value Data has to be leveraged to... Continue Reading →
Data governance capability mainly focuses on the people and processes associated with managing enterprise data, but can also involve building relevant systems necessary to govern enterprise data. Here are some of the key areas of responsibility of the data governance... Continue Reading →
If an enterprise data architecture does not differentiate itself, it will not get adopted by the business. A data architecture can truly become enterprise data architecture, if it gets adopted by majority of the business functions within the organization. But... Continue Reading →
Modern data strategies heavily promote building an enterprise data lake - A repository of all data within the enterprise stored in its raw format. This strategy gives quick benefits, but if not designed correctly, data lake can soon become toxic.... Continue Reading →
Data science consulting industry is speculated as the next fastest growing industry and companies - large and small - are rushing to grab a piece of the pie. Here are the major categories of players within the industry. The Management... Continue Reading →
Engineering disciplines have a tendency to reproduce, or at-least, that is the feeling that we get when we look at the way engineering disciplines have emerged over time. Civil Engineering gave birth to mechanical engineering, from which emerged electrical engineering.... Continue Reading →
An enterprise data warehouse is a collection of entire organization's data in a central location, to be accessed by the users of the organization to get a holistic view of their business. Data within an enterprise data warehouse is organized... Continue Reading →
You would be surprised to know how many organizations fail miserably in their efforts to become truly data driven. Many would attribute the resistance of becoming data driven to the intrinsic nature of humans to trust their own judgements more... Continue Reading →
What does an enterprise data architecture look like? Is it a document? a diagram? a framework? How would you describe it? In reality, an enterprise data architecture is a strategy, and is best described in the following flavours, keeping in... Continue Reading →
Enterprise data management is not about building a data product or an application, but it is an enterprise level service for helping businesses to become data driven. Data management teams work closely with data architecture teams to build the necessary... Continue Reading →
A data product is a product that uses data to deliver value to the users. It can be an e-commerce product that makes data available to consumers to compare and buy products, or it can be an analytical engine that... Continue Reading →
Data has been leveraged by large organizations for a very long time and the evolution of data driven decisions can be described in three distinct stages. The era of On-Line Analytical Processing Systems (OLAPs), 1980-90 During the 1980s, there used... Continue Reading →
There are numerous business applications of data science technologies and without getting into specifics, on a broad level, the applications can be classified into 5 categories - applications to improve products, understand customers, understand business, understand risks and build new... Continue Reading →
A product that uses underlying data to offer value to the customers is a data product. It can be a simple tool that uses data visualization techniques to promote transparency or a tool that uses data analytics to derive insights... Continue Reading →
An enterprise data architecture defines how data is acquired and organized within the organization. Some of the key drivers for formulating an enterprise data architecture include: Fit for purpose Data is only useful, if it is available in the right form,... Continue Reading →
Many companies now recognize the need to have a dedicated chief data officer, whose main task is to effectively leverage data - a powerful asset of an organization. The journey to become a data driven organization is long and painful,... Continue Reading →
Today, companies have access to unprecedented amounts of data. The potential to derive value from data is huge, but so are the investments. In order to maximize the return on investments, companies need to have a data strategy in place. A... Continue Reading →
The emerging roles of data consultants are often confused with that of data scientists. While data scientists convert data into insights, data consultants ensure business impacts from those insights. Data consultants are evangelists of data science and play a critical... Continue Reading →
While speaking at the data science congress summit 2018, in Mumbai, Rajeshwari Aradhyula, chief people officer at Fractal Analytics highlighted the key behavioral skills of a data scientist - perseverance and curiosity. Perseverance - Getting insights out of data requires... Continue Reading →
While speaking at a panel discussion on building skills and competencies of data driven organizations, Riaz Mulla, head of training at Tech Mahindra talked about the two key principles - Integrity and Intent. He was speaking at data science congress... Continue Reading →
All firms are looking to build a digital strategy for obvious benefits. In the last decade, everyone has started using digital channels like laptops and smartphones to do various tasks. With the changing landscape of technology, companies are rebuilding their... Continue Reading →
Every company has to comply to various regulatory requirements, and they need to build the necessary information technology solutions to ensure compliance. It can get very expensive to build standalone solutions for each regulatory compliance requirement, as these requirements keep... Continue Reading →
Data Privacy is becoming a huge concern, and governments have started to act on it. GDPR (General data protection regulation) is the first of its kind regulation enacted by the european union, that imposes restrictions on organizations on the way... Continue Reading →
Business intelligence competency within an organization provides a strong framework for leveraging data science capabilities. As we build deep insights using modern machine learning algorithms, the business intelligence framework helps in bringing those insights to the right users at the... Continue Reading →
Analytics allow automated decision support. A self learning analytical model trains itself to make predictions using data. This is a breakthrough in the way computers operate, and is popularly known as a machine learning technique. Machine learning techniques are used... Continue Reading →
Machine learning and Artificial intelligence are the buzzwords of 2018, but companies are struggling to understand the roadmap towards gaining the competency in these areas. Companies procrastinate these investments, since they look at them as strategic long term investments. As... Continue Reading →
Technology is changing the future by changing itself. What was hot yesterday, is not anymore. What is hot today will not be tomorrow. But here is a list of technologies that are hot today! Big data The concept is simple... Continue Reading →
Data science, today, is the most preferred career jump for students and professionals with backgrounds in both business and IT. It is the key to many successful careers within business consulting, management consulting, entrepreneurship, research and academia. Data science leverages... Continue Reading →
As we move towards the era of artificial intelligence, data has become the new oil, and data ownership is becoming a huge concern. Blockchain is the technology that can potentially solve this problem, as it can truly democratise data ownership, making... Continue Reading →
The demand for data scientists is increasing, as more and more companies are looking to hire data scientists with the hope that they will create magic by leveraging data. With rising expectations, data scientists are under immense pressure. Managing the expectations... Continue Reading →
The skills of data scientists and data engineers may overlap to some extent, but the roles are quite distinct. Data scientists focus on effectively analysing data to identify patterns, derive insights and define potentially useful data products, while data engineers... Continue Reading →
Would you trust your investment decisions on an algorithm that may or may not know you well enough? As machines are getting intelligent and smarter, they are encroaching the areas like personalized financial advisory and investment recommendations. This area has... Continue Reading →
Data science is opening up numerous gateways to new, innovative and personalized service offerings and is automating many complex and tedious tasks. As the number of applications of data science is fast outpacing other information technology applications, it is gaining... Continue Reading →
As we see organizations introducing the chief data officer's role, the responsibilities of this role are quickly evolving, or getting defined and redefined. The role of CDO is NOT about improving the existing business using data. This is already being... Continue Reading →
It is heavily speculated that the number of applications of artificial intelligence are going to far exceed the applications of information technology. Although we are still at the beginning of this technological evolution, we already see many real applications of... Continue Reading →
Technology has kept evolving in a manner that is hard to predict. Back in 1970s, when everyone thought of flying cars as the next logical evolution, the world instead witnessed supercomputers that changed the way we remember and communicate information.... Continue Reading →
The past decade has seen a surge of disrupting internet startups, and the main weapon of these disruptors has been "data". The disruptors in the financial services sector are being officially labelled 'Fintech' startups, and the same terminology is being... Continue Reading →
The technology space around us is changing rapidly, and as the industry tries to catch up with these changes, the question that pops up every time in our minds is that of our education system. Most of our education system... Continue Reading →
Dr. DJ Patil, first U.S. Chief Data Scientist in President Obama's ministry, was in Mumbai this week to address the data enthusiasts at DataGiri meetup in Mumbai, India. Talking about building great data products and startup ideas, DJ Patil asked entrepreneurs to... Continue Reading →
As companies are trying to become data driven organizations, the corporate leadership is struggling to understand the road map to achieve this goal. Mr Bhupesh Daheria, the CEO of Aegis school of data science moderated a panel discussion during the data... Continue Reading →
Data science professionals are currently in huge demand. The role of a data scientist did not exist a few years back, and many technologies that are used in data science did not exist either, in their current form. Hence there... Continue Reading →
Vishal Dhupar, NVIDIA's managing director in South Asia believes that we are about to enter a new era of artificial intelligence. He was speaking at the data science congress 2017 event in Mumbai, India. During his key note to the audience... Continue Reading →
As Dr. Ravi Vijayaraghavan, Vice President and Head of Analytics at Flipkart stated that "the only way to understand customers in eCommerce industry is through data". He was speaking at the data science congress 2017 event held in Mumbai, India.... Continue Reading →
Algorithmic trading is the process of using computers for trading. The speed and frequency that is possible through algorithmic trading cannot be matched by humans. But this kind of black box trading can make investors nervous, especially when large amounts... Continue Reading →
Kunal Jain, founder and CEO of Analytics Vidhya, was present at the data science congress event 2017 that was held in Mumbai, India. He was moderating the panel discussion on the topic - data science in banking, financial services and... Continue Reading →
Bhupesh Daheria, CEO, Aegis School of Data Science has almost attained a celebrity status within the data science fraternity after conceptualizing and organizing the largest data science event that was ever witnessed in India. Data Science Congress 2017 event -... Continue Reading →
In the recent few years, rapid advancements in BIG data technologies have been associated with complementary advancements in data visualization techniques. Several eminent speakers at the recent data science congress summit 2017 in Mumbai, India, spoke about the power of... Continue Reading →
When Harvard Business Review called it "The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century", the term "data scientist" became a buzzword. Dr. Usama M. Fayyad, a veteran data scientist and probably the first person to ever hold the title of Chief... Continue Reading →
The term data science generally gets associated with academia, research, education and its implementations at high end technology companies like Google, Amazon, Netflix, LinkedIn etc. In reality, that is only one of the many facets of data science, and its... Continue Reading →
Dr Abhijit Gangopadhyay, the dean of Aegis school of business, data science and telecommunication, is one of the key visionaries who conceptualized and organized the largest event in data science ever witnessed in India. The Data Science Congress summit was held on... Continue Reading →
In his inaugural message to the audience at the Data Science Congress summit 2017, the largest data science event ever witnessed in India, Mr Y. S. Chowdary, Minister of State for Science and Technology & Earth Sciences, gave a clear indication of... Continue Reading →
Solving a problem requires expertise, knowledge and skills in a specific field. Although this sounds like a fair statement, there are new techniques for solving problem, that do not necessarily rely as much on the expertise, knowledge and skills of... Continue Reading →
An agile business is characterized by its ability to quickly respond and adapt to the changes happening around the world. Agility is not a tool, framework or methodology, its a culture based on solid principles. To be able to survive... Continue Reading →
Extracting knowledge or insights from data has suddenly become the new trend. Everyone is talking about the potential of data science in all aspects of life. Universities are gearing up to introduce new curriculum and degrees related to data science,... Continue Reading →
Over 1.5 million engineers are graduating every year in India, more than US and China combined. However, jobs are not getting created at the same pace. Until now, studying engineering had been equivalent to securing a job. But not any... Continue Reading →
As companies expand, they need to adopt newer methods of management. While companies are busy with the revenue and profit margin targets, they are extremely susceptible to the risk of loosing their identity, the very essence of their existence. Each... Continue Reading →
Machines have been helping humans in almost all aspects of life since quite a number of years. It started with machines replacing the human muscles, and we have already seen the results. Now they are replacing the human brain, and... Continue Reading →
Humans have a tendency to collaborate and work, one of the reasons why we survived through the history, and became the dominant species of the world. This collaboration has resulted into very big and powerful organizations that have dominated the... Continue Reading →
One of the main objectives of democracy is to safeguard the interests of the people that form the society. The problem is when people don't realize what is in their own interest. The problem is when their long term interests... Continue Reading →
Humans have always demonstrated strong ability to analyze issues, and form expert opinions. And with internet at their fingertips, no topic is out of reach. The only problem is, most often than not, the opinions of various experts don't match.... Continue Reading →
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