Secrets of Data Analytics Leaders

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 that describes what we used to call IT monitoring. The new moniker is fitting given all the technology changes that have happened in the past decade. The cloud, big data, microservices, containers, cloud applications, machine learning, and artificial intelligence have created a dramatically complex IT and data environment that is harder than ever to manage. And the stakes are higher as organizations move their operations online to compete with digital natives. Today, you can't run digital or data operations without observability tools. Kevin Petrie is one of the industry's foremost experts on observability. He is vice president of research at Eckerson Group where he leads a team of distinguished analysts. He recently wrote an article titled "The Five Shades of Observability" that describes five types of observability tools. In this podcast, we discuss what observability is, why you need it, and the types of available tools. We also speculate on the future of this technology and recommend how to select an appropriate observability product.

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 of data literacy and explain how to implement it in an organization, we invited a data literacy expert to share the secrets of his trade. Kirill Makharinsky is the founder of Enki, a San Francisco-based company that provides data-as-a-second language training services. Kirill is a serial entrepreneur, having previously co-founded ETG, one the largest online B2B travel companies in Europe, and Quid, a leading research and analysis tool.

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, Joe Hilleary, Dave Wells, Andrew Sohn, and Sean Hewitt range from data and privacy governance to artificial intelligence with stops along the way for DataOps, data observability, data ethics, cloud platforms, and intelligent robotic automation.

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 these data leaders continue their momentum in 2021, the data laggards will strive to catch up. In this episode, Kevin Petrie, VP of Research at Eckerson Group, interviews Sumeet Agrawal, VP of Product Management at Informatica, to discuss the impact of COVID on enterprises. Sumeet talks about the trends of adoption during the onslaught of COVID and how enterprises are navigating in the post-pandemic era.

Continuous Intelligence (CI) integrates historical and real-time analytics to automatically monitor and update various types of systems, including supply chains, telecommunications networks and e-commerce sites. CI encompasses data ingestion, transformation and analytics, as well as operational “triggers” that recommend or initiate specific real-time actions. CI casts a wider net than traditional analytics because it includes contextual data, for example related to market behavior, weather patterns or social media trends, that help enterprises operate the core systems more intelligently. In this episode, our VP of Research Kevin Petrie interviews Simon Crosby, CTO at Swim.ai, a continuous intelligence software vendor that focuses on edge-based learning for fast-data. He co-founded security vendor Bromium in 2010, later sold to HP Inc in 2019.

This blog compares Predictive vs Prognostic analytics and gives a quick view into systems dynamics and causal modeling. If it sparks your interest, watch for an upcoming series of articles connecting the practices of systems thinking, causal analysis, and analytics. Originally published at: https://www.eckerson.com/articles/looking-at-the-future-through-analytics-predictive-vs-prognostic

This blog is about Continuous Intelligence (CI) and how it integrates historical and real-time analytics to operate, monitor and tune systems of all types. Our next blogs will explore architectural approaches to CI, and how to navigate the trade offs it introduces to your organization. Originally published at: https://www.eckerson.com/articles/continuous-intelligence-the-nexus-of-data-integration-analytics-and-operations

This blog is about Graphics Processing Units (GPU) and how much of the focus and industry growth in the use of GPUs has come from their suitability for machine learning, especially neural networks, more commonly known as deep learning. Originally published at: https://www.eckerson.com/articles/gpu-databases-getting-more-value-from-your-machine-learning-infrastructure

This blog is about the challenge of data sprawl and how the combination of AI-based entity matching, schema matching, and enhanced knowledge graphing is moving us ever closer to the vision of self-driving data. Originally published at: https://www.eckerson.com/articles/using-data-knowledge-to-conquer-data-sprawl

This EG blog is about data modernization steps and guiding principles that can help maintain balance within schools, stores, and other face to face businesses affected by COVID-19. Originally published at: https://www.eckerson.com/articles/covid-19-and-higher-education-a-case-study-in-data-modernization