This Week in Data Preparation (May 8, 2020)
In this week’s news: five opinion articles, a survey article, and three announcements — Tecton.ai announces capital raising, Informatica announces integration with SAP, and CloudNine announces the release of new data wrangling software.
Stu Higgins, head of smart cities and IoT for the UK public sector, argued this week that poor data is killing the smart city dream. “While data might be more freely available than ever before, the data itself is in a poor condition and might not be in the right state to be taken advantage of by computers and algorithms”, he comments, in this article for IT Pro.
Is your AI data wrangling taking forever? Yogi Schulz, who has over 40 years of Information Technology experience in various industries, sets the question. “Most likely, your problem is the tedium, high effort and unpredictability of data wrangling that causes: stalled AI projects, increased AI project costs, doubt around AI project insights and recommendations, and disappointing benefits from AI projects. Data wrangling refers to all the effort your data scientists and software developers invest in data preparation before the actionable insights you hope to gain through data exploration and data analytics will be revealed.”, he states, in this article for IT World Canada.
Julian Thomas, principal consultant at PBT Group, discusses truly implementing data democratisation. “When thinking of the intelligent edge, I like to focus on the keyword: convergence”, he comments, in this article for ITWeb.
Mary E. Shacklett, president of Transworld Data, shares her views on key elements of a successful data preparation strategy. “If you don’t prepare data in advance for optimal performance, it isn’t going to please those who consume it.”, she comments, in this article for TechRepublic.
Data Diligence: The Missing Method In M&A Due Diligence, is discussed in this article for Forbes. “Corporate transaction experts trained in accounting standards may see it as a moot point to recognize information as an asset when valuing the business, simply because information isn’t recognized as a balance sheet asset,” says Joe Sommer, senior manager in Ernst & Young’s data and analytics practice within its Financial Services Organization. “This is probably short-sighted in today’s data-driven economy.” Greg Layok, managing director at West Monroe Partners, suggests it’s not so much an oversight as “a lack of institutional know-how in valuing data and identifying avenues of value creation from data.”
A recent survey by Databersity and Octopai reveals 86% of business technology professionals are frustrated by the amount of time spent manually mapping data. The survey results show that BI groups in organizations are finding it nearly impossible to keep up with the massive amounts of data they are dealing with on a daily basis, and welcome automated metadata management tools to help them find and understand their data in order to deliver results to the business more quickly and more accurately.
Tecton.ai announced a $20 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia (last year there was a $5 million angel round). Tecton’s technology is the result of deep experience of its three founders, who helped build the AI platform for Uber. “The foundational success of an AI-based technology revolution or even the build of a very simple algorithm ultimately lies in the health of the data,” said Kim Kaluba, who is the Senior Manager for Data Management Solutions at SAS. “Some data scientists report spending 80% of their time collecting and cleaning data,” said Jen Snell, who is the Vice President of Product Marketing and Intelligent Self Service at Verint. “This problem has become so ubiquitous that it’s now called the ‘80/20 rule’ of data science.”.
Informatica announces integration with SAP solutions to accelerate customer cloud modernization. The new integration will feature the adoption of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, which will support integration with existing data warehouses and a broad set of applications and databases on-premises and in the cloud.
CloudNine launches Data Wrangler, a new software solution to inventory and prioritize collected data for enhanced processing decisions and throughput. Data Wrangler can be purchased either bundled with other CloudNine products or as a standalone solution.
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