Efficacy is defined succinctly as the ability to generate a desired or intended effect. Organizations manage data primarily to enable informed decisions. Thus, "Data Efficacy" is, in essence, the ability for organizations to manage data in such a way to drive informed decisions. Conceptually, the idea of data efficacy is...

I recently blogged about the 5 C's of Big Data, and have since received inquiries about the "C" I named "Content," which was related to the size of large files or objects. The concept of large object data has been around IT for years, and databases support this...

You can't engage in a conversation about IT today without hearing having cloud computing dropped in the first two sentences. But behind that term is an overwhelming number of types, issues, solutions, and architectures to consider and digest. The world could benefit from a translation of sorts to explain to...

Big Data is one of the hottest buzzwords in Information Technology based on its one-year hockey-stick trend curve in Google Trends when compared to other hot IT buzzwords. In fact, per Google Trends, its interest level is about 40% of "Cloud Computing," which is...

Six months after blogging that 2012 would be the Year of the Semantic Web, I am now sharing some recent events that are indeed suggesting this prediction to be true. The Semantic Web was initially envisioned in a 2001 article in Scientific American, and is now defined by...

This is the third installment of a trio of blogs on social media analysis (SMA), and it provides an example of how SMA works -- after all, a picture is worth a thousand words. The first provided an overview of social media analysis, followed by the

In my last blog I gave you five reasons to use Social Media Analysis. This blog provides some technical depth that can be used for analyzing Social Media Analysis solutions.

SMA technology offerings range from small companies that monitor individual, named social media accounts using keyword search to...

Social Media Analysis (SMA), often referred to as or at least closely related to, Social Media Monitoring (SMM) and Social Media Intelligence (SMI), is a growing technology market, with IDC projecting a 38% growth in the market last year. A quick search can provide hundreds of vendors with...

In 1996, Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), defined modern Semantic Web technology with this vision:

If the interaction between person and hypertext could be so intuitive that the machine-readable information space gave an accurate representation of the state of people's thoughts, interactions, and...

In the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Dr. Vannevar Bush's famous essay, "As We May Think," was published as one of the first articles addressing Big Data, information overload, or the "growing mountain of research" as stated in the article. The

The time is ripe for smart Business Process Management, or BPM.

Why?

BPM speaks in terms that C-level executives understand: BPM aligns IT with business needs; BPM reduces costs and optimizes operational efficiencies; and, BPM increases productivity -- three crucial tools that allow IT to work for an...

I recently attended the NoSQLNow! Conference 2011 in San Jose with 512 attendees. The conference primarily focused on the rise of NoSQL databases as the future of database management systems.

It is coincidentally ironic that the conference was scheduled in the same city and 42 years and...

Information security is defined by emerging IT trends. I group the past information security focus timeline into three eras, with each era evolving the past era's contributions.

1. Physical Access Era (pre 1975): IT was air-gapped in most cases during this era. If you had physical access to an IT asset,...

The biggest buzz in IT today is Cloud. If you haven't heard about The Cloud, then you just aren't listening. But The Cloud vendors' sales pitches are very diverse. For some vendors, The Cloud is desktop applications available at your work desktop, your phone while traveling, or your laptop while...