For the last couple of months, we’ve blogged about the data challenges faced by many organizations today, particularly in areas of access, collaboration and governance. In those posts, we presented a vision of how IBM Data Catalog will address these challenges with an intelligent asset catalog that offers full end-to-end capabilities around data lifecycle and rule-based governance.

Our team is super excited to let everyone know that IBM Data Catalog is now available in open beta!

What is IBM Data Catalog?

IBM Data Catalog provides a cloud-based enterprise metadata repository that lets you securely catalog your data sources and assets wherever they reside. It is…

November 2, 2017 | Extract from announcement

IBM announced a series of upgrades and new offerings to Watson Data Platform, an integrated set of tools, services and data in the IBM Cloud that enables data scientists, developers and business teams to gain intelligence from data.

These new features will provide data professionals with the foundation they need to safely and securely share data across teams and environments, in order to more easily analyze and prepare data for AI applications.

By powering self-service data access and unifying data for visibility across all sources, Watson Data Platform addresses many of the problems…

One of the earliest documented catalogs was compiled at the great library of Alexandria in the third century BC, to help scholars manage, understand and access its vast collection of literature. While that cataloging process represented a massive undertaking for the Alexandrian librarians, it pales in comparison to the task of wrangling the volume and variety of data that modern organizations generate.

Nowadays, data is often described as an organization’s most valuable asset, but unless users can easily sift through data artifacts to find the information they need, the value of that data may remain unrealized. …

October 18, 2017 | Written by: Lena Woolf

We’ve all heard horror stories about companies that didn’t read the market effectively. Global book retailers who sleepwalked through the onset of the e-reader era. Mobile giants who were wrong-footed by the smartphone revolution. Brick-and-mortar video stores that ignored the onset of mail-order rentals, and later of on-demand streaming technology.

These companies all had something in common: their strategic decisions were not based on an adequate understanding of the market at the time. The lesson for data scientists and other knowledge workers is that you cannot base your analyses solely on your…

October 4, 2017 | Written by: Manish Goyal

When a company spots a lucrative gap in the market or comes up with an innovative new business model, it can trigger sudden, exponential growth. However, many growing enterprises fail to sustain their initial surge in momentum — or may even collapse dramatically.

One of the things that can put the brakes on company growth is a failure to scale up the processes and infrastructure around big data and analytics. As data science becomes an increasingly important source of competitive advantage, it’s an issue that companies can’t afford to ignore.

Size matters

In a…

September 21, 2017 | Written by: Jay Limburn

When we talk to data scientists, we hear the same sad story again and again. They tell us how their organization fell in love with the idea of building a data lake as a single platform for self-service data science. How they were wooed and won by a vendor with a solution that promised much, but delivered little. How their vision of a data lake as a clear source of business insight has turned into a stagnant swamp — a dumping ground where data goes to die.

The problem rarely lies with…

September 14, 2017 | Written by: Manish Bhide

Ever had to make a decision when you didn’t have the time, means or patience to look up all the data that could help you choose the best option? Yes, well, you’re not alone on that score. Usually, this doesn’t have significant or long-lasting consequences — does it really matter if you choose where to go for dinner because you like the look of a place, rather than combing through recent reviews?

But some decisions carry a lot more weight. For example, executives at Kodak decided not to pursue the digital camera…

August 31, 2017 | Written by: Jay Limburn

Ten years ago, Chief Data Officers (CDOs) were a rarity. Large corporations such as Visa, Capital One and Yahoo! led the way in appointing CDOs, but the job title had yet to become mainstream. Then the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 hit. Organizations heard the alarm bells ring, and CDOs — suddenly in high demand — were asked to help align operations with a raft of new regulatory requirements around data governance and reporting.

Around the same time, companies began to wake up to the value of big data, recognizing the competitive…