Bringing Big Data Down to Earth
We are just weeks away from the
TDWI World Conference in Chicago (May 5-10), where the theme will be “Big Data Tipping Point.” I have it on good authority that by then, the current coldness will have passed and Chicago will be basking in beautiful spring weather. (If not, as they say, wait five minutes.) The theme of the World Conference is “Big Data Tipping Point,” which means that TDWI will feature many educational sessions to help you get beyond the big data hype and learn how to apply best practices and new technologies for conquering the challenges posed by rising data volumes and increased data variety.
I would like to highlight three sessions to be held at the conference that I see as important to this objective. The first actually does not have “big data” in its description but addresses what always appears in our research as a topmost concern: data integration. In many organizations, the biggest “big data” challenge is not so much about dealing with one large source as integrating many sources and performing analytics across them. Mark Peco will be teaching
“TDWI Data Integration Principles and Practices: Creating Information Unity from Data Disparity” on Monday, May 6.
On Wednesday, May 7, Dave Wells will head up
“TDWI Business Analytics: Exploration, Experimentation, and Discovery.” For most organizations, the central focus of big data thinking is about analytics; business leaders want to anchor decisions in sound data analysis and use data science practices to uncover new insights in trends, patterns, and correlations. Yet, understanding analytics techniques how to align them with business demands remains a barrier. Dave Wells does a great job of explaining analytics, how the practices relate to business intelligence, and how to bring the practices to bear to solve business problems.
The third session I’d like to spotlight is
“Building a Business Case for Big Data in Your Data Warehouse,” taught by Krish Krishnan. A critical starting point for big data projects and determining their relationship to the existing data warehouse is building the business case. Krish is great at helping professionals get the big picture and then see where to begin, so that you don’t get intimated by the scale. He will cover building the business case, the role of data scientists, and how next-generation business intelligence fits into the big data picture.
These are just three of the many sessions to be held during the week, on topics ranging from data mining, Hadoop, and social analytics to advanced data modeling and data virtualization. I hope you can attend the Chicago TDWI World Conference!
Posted by David Stodder on April 10, 2013