To fully take advantage of big data tools and architectures, businesses need to adapt a different mindset, according to Edd Dumbill, who contends that looking at the data value chain is the first step to understanding the value of data.
“That’s an interesting topic because the recent development of new data technologies has kind of changed the game about how we think about managing data inside organizations,” Dumbill said. “We need a different mentality to look at the data than we used to.”
Dumbill, vice president of strategy at Silicon Valley Data Science, will be welcoming attendees at Data Summit 2015 with his keynote, “Understanding the Data Value Chain.”
The two-day event, which will be held May 12-13 and preceded by a day of workshops on May 11, will take place at the New York Hilton Midtown. Dumbill will present the keynote on Tuesday, May 12, at 9 am.
Data used to be something that was taken care of very carefully, by locking it down, and governing it tightly, because it was expensive to store and query, Dumbill noted. “All of that has changed with new technology,” he said. “That’s why I’m talking about a new way of looking at data as an organization that helps you understand where opportunities are for growing the businesses data.”
It’s important for attendees to get a big picture of understanding how data usage is changing in business and how they should respond to the various requests that are asked of them, Dumbill said. “You have to think about it in a different way and what it’s doing for the business,” Dumbill said. “When you get businesses to say: We need to know more about my customer, we know that technology allows us to do this, how are we going to go about doing this? That’s a very different question and development approach.”
During his keynote Dumbill hopes to highlight how successful data-driven companies work with data and derive its value. “What it boils down to is providing a safe way of asking better questions,” Dumbill said. “To ask lots of questions and understand the data, you need to go down a lot of dead ends.” It’s the same in business, he noted because to succeed as a business, people typically fail before finding what truly works.
“The technology that we have now allows us to start up new things and explore things cheaply,” Dumbill said. “If we set ourselves up in a way that experimentation becomes commonplace and that failure is actually success because it means you’ve learned to ask better questions. That’s the kind of environment we need to be setting up to support the business.”
Additionally, he emphasized, it is important to remember that all the new database technologies will not replace everything that has been done in the last few decades; instead, they will create new opportunities.
“I’m neither stuck in the mud nor a scary evolutionary, I’m just trying to bring together the world of [business] and technology and the things that work,” Dumbill said. “I’m really excited to meet more folks that have worked with data for a long time and to understand a lot more of where they are coming from as well.”
For more information about Data Summit and to register for the event, visit www.dbta.com/DataSummit/2015.
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