Many software vendors, analyst and journalist are overusing the term “Data Governance” in today’s complex business and IT environments. However, it has become one of the primary goals and drivers for data-related IT projects while at the same time being one of the most difficult to define, measure and quantify. What real meaning can we give to the concept of Data Governance? What is its importance, impact and meaning for the enterprise?
To try returning some meaning and context to Data Governance, let’s go back to the semantics through an analogy understandable by everyone, and insightful in the smallest detail.
Welcome to Data Land… If data are its citizens, the governance of such a country would aim at ensuring that these data co-exist in a peaceful way, stayed healthy, enriched themselves, were not living on top of each other, did not destroy each other in the case of conflict, and most importantly work together every year at improving the GDP of Data Land. This means creating value by the use and action of everyone. Of course, bioethics laws would prevent the cloning or duplication of its inhabitants. Data governance would then define itself as a framework that intends to ensure the efficient management of the data in the enterprise. Putting data under governance prevents its chaotic generation and use.
Why cloud computing is accelerating in the enterprise
Translating time into dollars matters far more to many CEOs I’ve spoken with versus what platform their applications are running on.
What matters most is getting all they can out of every hour their business is operating. They are all focused on getting beyond the constraints that held their growth back in the past – everyone wants a growth accelerator today.
For manufacturers especially, this includes applications with depth of functionality that can be quickly deployed regionally, and in more cases than ever, globally as well. Line-of-business leaders want applications that make an immediate impact on their entire value chain.
Just having a cloud strategy is not enough for any enterprise software company anymore. Owning the pain prospects and customers go through daily to get work done is all that matters.
Every application and platform component needs to contribute to the goal of reducing customer’s challenges of doing business …
Is the CFO the last man standing when it comes to the cloud?
The use of cloud technology by corporations has mushroomed in recent years. As the concept of cloud has gained greater acceptance at a consumer level, companies have increasingly recognised the benefits that cloud-based systems can bring to their businesses.
As a result, many have moved away from technology which is installed in-house and instead have adopted systems like Salesforce.com for customer relationship management and NetSuite for ERP.
Yet while the use of cloud technology has become mainstream elsewhere in the corporate environment, the areas of finance and treasury have tended to lag behind. All too often the CFO is the last person in the organisation to take their technology into the cloud.
Barriers to adoption
With cloud technology becoming a mainstream option for other corporate functions, why are CFOs holding back?
For one thing, they tend to be more risk averse than their peers across the organisation. The CFO …
Shared Hosting Transformation and the Control Panel
Structure Research, an independent research and consulting firm with a focus on the hosting and cloud segments within the Internet infrastructure market, recently released an opinion piece titled “Shared hosting transformation and the control panel.”
The blog article provides fresh insight into the future of shared hosting with single-server panel technology vs. multi-server technology, such as Parallels Plesk Automation. Structure Research shares how management tools have not kept up with growth of many hosters. Check out Structure Research’s insights on why hosters’ ability to “scale through operational efficiency will be paramount.”
Good stuff.
Cloud Expo New York: Rethink IT and Reinvent Business with IBM SmartCloud
On today’s Smarter Planet, enterprises are turning to the cloud to revamp existing business models and manage an unprecedented rate of change. In fact, the number of enterprises moving to cloud computing will double within the next few years as they seek to transition IT from a cost center to a strategic center of business innovation.
In his General Session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Craig Sowell, Vice President for IBM SmartCloud Marketing, will discuss how the IBM SmartCloud family, including PureSystems, helps enterprises optimize their traditional IT environments while driving rapid business innovation through new engagement models. In addition, he will illustrate through specific client examples the value of open standards initiatives like OpenStack and TOSCA, and how they are crucial to an interoperable and agile cloud computing infrastructure.
Cloud Computing: Rethinking Control of IT
Outsourcing commodity capabilities to the low-cost provider while focusing your strategic value-add on customized offerings is an oft-repeated pattern in the world of business, but it hasn’t really taken hold in the world of IT until the rise of Cloud Computing. The reason it’s taken so long for the techies is because we’ve never been able to separate control and responsibility in the past as well as we can today. Before the Cloud, if we wanted to outsource one, then the other went along for the ride. Any enterprise that outsourced their entire IT operation went down this road. Sure, your technology becomes somebody else’s responsibility, but you end up giving up control as well.
Cloud Expo New York: Your Secret Weapon in the Big Data War
The cloud is fundamentally changing how organizations build, deploy and pay for Business Intelligence (BI) applications and how they manage the proliferation of Big Data. With cloud-based analytics projected to grow at 85% per year, organizations ranging from Fortune 100 companies to SMBs must move their analytical applications to the cloud to remain competitive and focus on critical business challenges. Learn how MicroStrategy’s customers have improved performance, agility and time-to-market by an order of magnitude, while simultaneously reducing total cost of ownership by millions of dollars.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Bala Chandran, Director of Cloud Products at MicroStrategy, will discuss how Cloud-based BI allows organizations to be more agile, manage Big Data, lower cost and risk, and win the war for relevance in today’s competitive business climate.
How Businesses Can Use the Number Three Social Network (and Do You Know Which It Is?)
Pinterest is a social bookmarking site that allows users to create a visual, online pinboard with images they love organized around topics of their choice by category. It’s the fastest growing social media site in history, the third-largest network after Facebook and Twitter and has over 25 million members and 10 million unique visitors a month, nearly three-quarters of them women.
Karen Leland, author of the new book “Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business,” has created a comprehensive and easy-to-use guide to hitting the road running and quickly making Pinterest into a valuable source of prospects, promotion and profits.
“Great business brands are about telling compelling, congruent stories, and Pinterest is at its core about storytelling in pictures,” says Leland. “Pinterest has tapped into this visceral lover of visuals, and no small business, entrepreneur or corporation can afford to miss the boat on bringing what they offer beyond words and into images.”
Following her own advice resulted in this infographic:
IBM Named “Diamond Sponsor” of Cloud Expo New York
SYS-CON Events announced today that IBM has been named “Diamond Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
IBM has helped thousands of clients adopt cloud models and manages millions of cloud-based transactions every day. IBM assists clients in areas as diverse as banking, communications, healthcare and government to build their own clouds or securely tap into IBM cloud-based business and infrastructure services. IBM is unique in bringing together key cloud technologies, deep process knowledge, a broad portfolio of cloud solutions based on open standards, and a network of global delivery centers.
Cloud services first: A next-generation shared services policy for government
Dr Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director, IT, Asia-Pacific
We believe it is time for governments to elevate their policy thinking about cloud services to confront their ICT strategy conundrum. They must address increasing fiscal constraints and disappointment with existing approaches to boosting ICT productivity with an approach that enables cross-agency sharing.
Mature enterprise cloud services are “capitalist economy” shared services that work. Cloud services break the cycle of agency investment in dedicated ICT solutions that are difficult or impossible to share. In contrast, each procurement of cloud services incrementally develops the capacity of the vendor to offer the same service to other agencies.
A policy position of “cloud services first” is a strategic commitment by government to the development of the next generation of shared services.
Let’s get realistic about government’s ICT strategy conundrum
Ovum believes it is time for government policy executives to start considering a more visionary …