Wayne Eckerson said the future is data, and for software vendors, it’s an imperative. 
A subset of your application’s users – call them analysts, power users or techies – will immediately grasp the value of ad hoc analytics and make it useful for their reporting needs. This may be the top 20% of end users if you’re lucky. But there will always be a larger population of casual end users who also need ad hoc reporting. You cannot ignore their needs and expect them to see self-service analytics as a valuable element of your application. So the question becomes when launching self-service analytics in your application, how do you get these users on board? Read More
New data management technologies open up a wide array of capabilities for businesses. But don’t be distracted by shiny objects! Selecting the right toolset for any challenge requires starting with a clear understanding of the business problem that needs to be addressed. Read More
By 2018, the number of data science jobs needed in the United States will exceed 490,000, with fewer than 200,000 data scientists to fill the positions, according to a McKinsey study. Also, lacking will be 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions. One question that isn’t asked enough is whether a top-down approach – driven by highly skilled data scientists and technical, data-literate managers – is the only viable approach.
A few years ago the Harvard Business Review called data scientist the sexiest job of the 21st Century. Demand continues to outpace the supply of data scientists, so positions command a healthy wage. Read More
Organizations keep generating more and more data. You’d think they’d learn something from all this information. But data analytics are pretty tough when few of the people with access to that data know what to do with any of it. For any hope of gaining insight from this information, they need to achieve data literacy. Read More
Every independent software vendor (ISV) – and every software engineer – wants to build a better application. However, between the regular maintenance updates and a looming release date for a completely new application, reaching that goal becomes more difficult. Read More
