Turning data into information and information into knowledge

"Performance comes from knowledge. Keep improving your knowledge to keep winning."

Geoffrey Willis, Director of Digital Engineering Transformation, Mercedes Petronas Motorsport

Big Data LDN (London) is one of the largest free to attend data focused conferences in the UK, with its seminars and exhibition stands hosting leading data and analytics experts. There were over 130 leading technology vendors, 150 expert speakers in 9 technical and business-led conference theatres, with real-world use-cases and panel debates.

TouchstoneBI, alongside TimeXtender, were thrilled to be exhibiting for the second year in a row, showcasing the possibilities of data warehouse automation with TimeXtender’s Discovery Hub tool.

At first sight you might think this was a technology event, promoting out how to collate, store and then perform statistical analysis of data. The event is much more than that. It brings together the technical elements of infrastructure with the cultural and people considerations to deliver business intelligence and artificial intelligence solutions.

A number of themes came out of the conference, a few of which are detailed below:

• Getting buy-in. Cassie Kozyrkov, Chief Decision Scientist, Google Cloud ‘A statistical analysis is not useful to someone who does not buy into the assumptions’. When delivering information we need to consider who will and who will not be receptive to the content. Those who are receptive will engage, consider and act on the analysis.
• Databases are changing: Ben Stopford, Lead Technologist, Office of the CTO, Confluent Inc The fundamental assumption is that data is passive. Data is stored in a database and waits to be queried. Yet the requirement is now to combine this passive data set with event streaming information. This combined data set is analysed, using software, to automate decision making.
• “Data science is a team sport and specialisation creates a diversity of needs” Jamie Engesser, Senior Vice President of Field Specialists Product at Cloudera. There are a number of different roles needed for a data warehouse and artificial intelligence implementation:

Data engineers

BI Analysts

Data Scientists

App developers

Data architects

Infrastructure Managers

Compliance Managers

It is a team effort to create an effective working environment.

• The culture of the organisation needs to be one of risk taking and no blame Geoffrey Willis, Director of Digital Engineering Transformation, Mercedes Petronas Motorsport. The analysis of data will provide meaningful results. From this, decisions taken and actions initiated. The culture needs to allow for this to occur in an environment where people feel psychologically safe.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) needs intelligent architecture (IA) Rob Thomas, General Manager of IBM Data and Watson Artificial Intelligence. Without the underlying information, collated in a way that can be analysed, it is not possible to deliver artificial intelligence
• The need is for a limitless analytics service, with unmatched time to insight Rohan Kumar, Corporate Vice President, Azure Data, Microsoft. Organisations are gathering petabytes of data, coming in through realtime streaming, as well as held in legacy systems. The requirement is for an infrastructure that allows for this. One technique that can be used is Ephemeral Computing [1]

Big Data London demonstrated that technology provides significant benefits and opportunities to organisations. The successful ones are those who bring together the people, the analysis and the data to provide meaningful information, working in an open culture that encourages risk taking and the trialling of ideas.

For more information about TimeXtender Discovery Hub, or information about data strategy and Business Intelligence, check out the links below, or browse our site

[1] Ephemeral computing allows organisations to demand short bursts of added capacity, enhancing the service for users if there’s a surge of demand, or reduce the service during a lull of activity, without the usual problems which normally accompany such a request.