Secrets of Data Analytics Leaders

As we share data, we create data webs. If we allow copies of our data to proliferate throughout these webs, we reduce the value of the data and create data governance challenges. The solution is new, ownership-centric approaches to data sharing that don’t rely on traditional copy-based integration. Published at: https://www.eckerson.com/articles/zero-copy-approaches-to-data-sharing

Treating data assets as products helps businesses increase internal data consumption and become more data driven. It also creates opportunities for monetization. But to succeed in either scenario requires product-market fit. This article presents a process for finding it. Published at: https://www.eckerson.com/articles/7-steps-for-building-a-valuable-data-product

It’s tempting to dismiss observability as another overused buzzword. But this emerging discipline offers substantive methods for enterprises to monitor and optimize business metrics, IT operations, data pipelines, machine learning models, and data quality. Published at: https://www.eckerson.com/articles/the-five-shades-of-observability-business-operations-pipelines-models-and-data-quality

An analytics center of excellence is the cornerstone of every data strategy, yet few data leaders know how to design one that works effectively. The key is to embrace federated techniques that balance standards and speed, agility, and governance. This article explains the core components of an analytics center of excellence. Published at: https://www.eckerson.com/articles/how-to-design-an-analytic...

Companies are investing in new solutions—such as data fabric, data access governance, and data observability—to keep pace with expanding business appetite for data. Pervasive use of metadata to solve data management problems means that metadata is itself a valuable data asset that we must proactively manage. Published at: https://www.eckerson.com/articles/metadata-is-data-so-manage-it-like-data

Data engineers are often responsible for numerous types of data tests: unit tests, integration/component tests, performance tests, and end-to-end tests. Their best hope is to find the automated data testing tools that work for their technologies and try them. Published at: https://www.eckerson.com/articles/testing-capabilities-and-tools-for-data-engineers-part-2

Data integration, governance, and consumption play a pivotal role in the machine learning lifecycle. New offerings from Informatica illustrate the types of tools data science teams need to handle data integration, governance, and consumption. Published at: https://www.eckerson.com/articles/integrating-governing-and-consuming-data-for-the-machine-learning-lifecycle

Data architecture-as-a-service or DAaaS is a metadata-driven approach that injects SQL guardrails into no-code data development tools so business users can develop their own data pipelines without creating data silos. This article defines 10 criteria for evaluating DAaaS-based products. Published at: https://www.eckerson.com/articles/data-architecture-as-a-service-how-to-evaluate-products

Today’s data architecture discussions are heavily biased toward managing data for analytics, with attention to big data, scalability, cloud, and cross-platform data management. We need to acknowledge analytics bias and address management of operational data. Ignoring operational data architecture is a sure path to technical debt and future data management pain. Published at: https://www.eckerson.c...

This audio blog, the first in a series, presents the fundamentals of location intelligence. It will explore how location intelligence has evolved in recent years and the kinds of insights it can provide. Published at: https://www.eckerson.com/articles/location-intelligence-part-i-leveraging-geospatial-data-to-drive-your-organization

Data architecture-as-a-service (DaaS) is a new self-service paradigm that empowers local data owners to create architecturally compliant data repositories. By abstracting data architecture within self-service tools, DaaS solves the problem of data silos, which wreak havoc on enterprise data consistency and trustworthiness. Published at: https://www.eckerson.com/articles/data-architecture-as-a-serv...

We in the West have watched Russia's invasion of Ukraine with disbelief and horror. How could this happen to a European country in the 21st century? Is there any justifiable rationale for the wanton destruction of people and property there? As we ponder these questions, our data colleagues in Ukraine have experienced the war firsthand. To help us get a handle on Ukraine's role in the data economy...

COVID, inflation, broken supply chains, and not-so-distant war make this a turbulent time for the modern consumer. During times like these, families tend to their nests, which leads to lots of home-improvement projects…which means lots of painting. Today we explore the case study of a Fortune 500 producer of the paints and stains that coat many households, consumer products, and even mechanical ve...

The number of women entering data professions is growing, and men need to adapt. This podcast is designed to enlighten men about the role of women in the data field. Our guests are all executives at data and analytics software companies who have held positions in other sectors of our field: Prukalpa Sankar, Cindi Howson, Debika Sharma.

Nothing has galvanized the data community more in recent months than two new architectural paradigms for managing enterprise data. On one side there is the data fabric: a centralized architecture that runs a variety of analytic services and applications on top of a layer of universal connectivity. On the other side, is a data mesh: a decentralized architecture that empowers domain owners to manage...

Nothing has galvanized the data community more in recent months than two new architectural paradigms for managing enterprise data. On one side there is the data fabric: a centralized architecture that runs a variety of analytic services and applications on top of a layer of universal connectivity. On the other side, is a data mesh: a decentralized architecture that empowers domain owners to manage...

Gordon Wong is on a mission. A long-time business intelligence leader who has led data & analytics teams at HubSpot and FitBit, Wong believes BI teams aren’t data-driven enough. He says BI leaders need to think of themselves as small businesses owners and aggressively court and manage customers. He says too many don’t have metrics to track customer engagement and usage. In short, BI teams need to...

Fast-casual restaurants offer a fascinating microcosm of the turbulent forces confronting enterprises today—and the pivotal role that data plays in helping them maintain competitive advantage. COVID prompted customers to order their Chipotle burritos, Shake Shack milkshakes, and Bruegger’s Bagels for home delivery, and this trend continues in 2022. Supply-chain disruptions, meanwhile, force fast-c...

Knowledge graphs are a new, human-friendly way of organizing and navigating data that makes it easy to infer relationships that aren't explicitly defined. Knowledge graphs now power many applications in the cloud, including Google Search, data fabrics, and data catalogs. They make it easy to glean insights that aren't manually baked into the model. This is why people say knowledge graphs provide a...

It’s hard to find a data discipline today that is under more pressure than data governance. One on side, the supply of data is exploding. As enterprises transform their business to compete in the 2020s, they digitize myriad events and interactions, which creates mountains of data that they need to control. On the other side, demand for data is exploding. Business owners at all levels of the enterp...

The advent of big data, self-service analytics, and cloud applications has created a need for new ways to manage data access. New data access governance tools promise to simplify and standardize data access and authorization across an enterprise. Data management expert, Sanjeev Mohan, provides an industry perspective on this emerging technology and what it means for data analytics teams.

In the physical world, you can see a bridge rusting or a building facade crumbling and know you have to intervene to prevent the infrastructure from collapsing. But when all you have is bits and bytes - digital stuff, like software and data ---how can you tell if your customer-facing digital interactions or data-driven analytics and models are about to go up in smoke? Observability is a new term t...

In this episode, we explore an area of data analytics that everyone knows they need to improve but no one knows how to do it. That is data literacy. Data literacy ensures that business people have the skills to accurately interpret data represented in charts, tables, and dashboards, as well as the knowledge to use those tools to gather and analyze data on their own. To guide us through the nuances...

Every December, Eckerson Group fulfills its industry obligation to summon its collective knowledge and insights about data and analytics and speculate about what might happen in the coming year. The diversity of predictions from our research analysts and consultants exemplifies the breadth of their research and consulting experiences and the depth of their thinking. Predictions from Kevin Petrie,...

The COVID shock forces enterprises in every market to accelerate and reshape their data analytics strategies. This trend is likely to continue. “Data Elite” enterprises survived this year through a mix of agility, efficiency, and intelligence. They met these requirements of survival as they accelerated their digital transformations, adopted cloud data platforms and embraced advanced analytics. As...