The IBM Information User Group meeting on April 11 was a great start to building a local community of users and other interested parties. Based on the questions and comments at the closure, the content was valuable and current. Here are a few highlights and opportunities from the three presentations:
William McKnight (@williammcknight) repeated his keynote presentation from the CDOVision/Enterprise Data World Conference Raising the Information Management Maturity Curve. A must-see for CIOs and their staffs, William maps the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) levels 0-5 to on-the-ground activities across the organization. These levels must be reflected in the three dimensions of information management: infrastructure, people, and process. Different divisions will rarely be more than one CMM level apart.
William has found a strong correlation between the CMM level and the competitive leadership of a company. He described how client CMM evaluations and client management roadmaps can be used to increase their CMM level. As a company’s CMM score increases, data costs decrease and data quality and governance increases.
Lamont Lockwood (@LamontLockwood) presented Turbocharge Data Science with Information Server, making the case that IBM’s flagship data integration and governance product can be the key data provisioning application for the data science team during the day while ETL experts build enterprise data warehou
ses (EDWs) for the largest organizations on earth at night. For example, data scientists spend 80% of their time doing data integration and cleansing (DI/C). Most data science training favors statistics and machine learning over DI/C techniques. Included were automated integration and machine learning examples that fed Python scripts automatically. The generated portfolio of analytics are gathered in a portal for business collaboration and further analysis. This 360-degree solution leverages powerful, production-ready, governed tools while saving time and effort for data scientists creating actionable intelligence.
Integration Expert and Big Data training organization Divergence Academy have created hands-on, project-oriented training for data scientists in the use of Information Server to support data science, particularly DataStage and QualityStage. We plan to turn them into very successful business analysts who know the basics of data, information integration, and ways to interface with cloud applications, statistical tools such as Python, and collaborative display techniques so that data science won’t remain in its “Ivory Tower.”.
Kyle Jones, Information Integration Worldwide Sales Executive, finished the evening with Information Server and IGC: IBM’s direction. Information Server is still the most powerful, performant, and flexible data movement tool in the industry; Kyle described IIS being a “significant part o
f five major IBM thrusts.” Information will be flowing between on-premise, the Cloud, and hybrid solutions in between: IIS will have roles for operational movement (ETL, CDC) and analytic workloads. IBM will be supporting new methods of interacting with IIS for different groups, not unlike the recently-released thin client for Information Analyzer.
Many thanks to Nancy Linder, Mark Hickok, Brian Sprecher, and Kyle Jones for supporting IBM’s important role in the DFW Information Server User Group. The next meeting will be scheduled soon in the July-August timeframe and will include governance through IIS inline rule-based metrics and project examples of data science powered by IIS.
Please spread the word for the User Group to other IIS users in the region. We plan to broadcast all of our meetings and even take these presentations to clients outside of DFW. Thanks for your feedback and interest; email us at User_Group@IntegrationExpert.com