Dealing with today’s huge amounts of data requires analytics. IDC’s recent Big Data and Business Analytics forum was all about connecting data and analytics. The organizers of the event addressed questions such as: what are the forces behind the explosion within the digital universe? Technology has certainly helped, by driving down the cost of creating, capturing, managing, and storing information to a sixth of what it was in 2005. The real impetus, nonetheless, is financial. Since 2005, investments in the digital universe among enterprises have expanded some 50% to $4 trillion – money spent on hardware, software, services, and staff, ultimately, to generate revenue.
I was one of the speakers at the event. My presentation Quick results in the conversion of large amounts of data into business information was about agile approaches in the implementation of solutions for data analysis, business solutions in real time and predicting the likelihood of business events. The magazine MonitorPro wrote about me in the February 2014 issue:
“Maja Ferle talked about agility. She pointed out that business users and developers must work closely together when analyzing data. There is no need to wait until the data warehouse is completely loaded. She recommended that the ETL process is accomplished in agile iterations where each iteration is already an opportunity to analyze data which must constantly fulfill current needs of the business users.”