Put Building Data Culture Ahead Of Buying Data Analytics

In his keynote at the recent AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon vice president and chief technology officer Werner Vogels said that the cloud had created a "egalitarian" computing environment where everyone has access to the same compute, storage, and analytics, and that the real differentiator for enterprises will be the data they generate, and more importantly, the value the enterprises derive from that data. For Rob Thomas, general manager of IBM Analytics, data is the focus. The company is putting considerable muscle behind data analytics, machine learning, and what it calls more generally cognitive computing, much of it based on its Watson technology. That includes the Watson Data Platform and its Data Catalog, Data Refinery and Analytics Engine. But when it comes to data analytics, Thomas takes what's been called an "attitude before aptitude" approach, with the idea being that enterprises need to create a "culture of data" before they can take full advantage of analytics. They need to have in place a belief that data and facts are what's important when making business decisions rather than instinct, beliefs and what's been done in the past. And it's an approach that's got to come from the top and become part of how the business operates.