Insights

Research, perspectives, and commentary on data, AI, governance, and what it takes to make AI work.

  • How Much Authority Are We Ready to Give AI?

    As frontier AI leaders debate the risks of increasingly powerful systems, enterprises face a more immediate question: how much decision-making and action should they delegate to AI? Warnings over the weekend at the frontier of AI development have put the question of AI safety and control back in the spotlight. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has…

  • In an AI-Saturated Market, Original Thought Becomes a Scarce Asset

    With the advent of generative AI, I’ve been giving some thought to the concept of original thought. There is no doubt in today’s market that organizations feel pressure to deploy AI. Executives are demanding it; boards are asking questions about it. In my research at TDWI, I’ve seen that most organizations we survey are doing…

  • 2026 Won’t Reward AI Experiments—Only AI Readiness

    Looking back, 2025 was not the year enterprises “figured out” AI. It was the year many organizations finally admitted how unprepared they were. When generative AI burst onto the scene in 2023, adoption was fast and furious. Off-the-shelf tools promised immediate gains in productivity for writing, coding, and summarization; organizations embraced them enthusiastically. At the…

  • A Tale of Two AIs: From Consumer Tools to the Agentic Enterprise

    Artificial intelligence is reshaping how we work — but not in one single, unified way. Beneath the surface of the current hype, two very different AI waves are unfolding. The first is visible and noisy. It is filled with influencers, prompt guides, and off-the-shelf tools promising instant productivity gains. The second is quieter but far…

  • What’s Ahead in AI for 2025?

    As we enter 2025, artificial intelligence (AI) will continue to be a major theme. From foundational readiness to advanced applications, organizations are both excited by and challenged with integrating AI into their operations. Based on our research at TDWI, here are four trends that I see shaping the AI landscape in 2025. 1. Preparing for…

  • Organizational Readiness for AI: Are We There Yet?

    AI enters the mainstream AI is on the mind of many organizations, and for good reason. It can provide a lot of value in terms of cost efficiencies and innovation. Generative AI has certainly added visibility to AI work that has been going on for decades. In a 2024 TDWI survey, for instance, generative AI…

  • Seven considerations for unstructured data

    As organizations compete with analytics, more often they realize that structured data alone isn’t enough. Unstructured data — i.e., data sets that have not been structured in a pre-defined manner — such as text data, audio data, image data, and video data can provide a lot of value. For example, unstructured data can help to…

  • Cloud data stacks vs. Data fabrics: what is right for your organization?

    At TDWI, we’re seeing that organizations are dealing with complex data environments.  In our surveys we see that more than half of the respondents are already managing 10s or 100s of TB of data.  Of that group, 15% are already managing petabytes of data. That data includes legacy data and primarily structured data, but also new…

  • Responsible Data and Analytics

    It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. I plan to do that more regularly. So, stay tuned! Recently, TDWI published one of our Best Practices Reports on Responsible Data and Analytics. These are primary research reports that examine important topics in data and analytics. Responsible data and analytics considers the ethical, societal, compliance, legal,…

  • How mature is your advanced analytics program?

    Advanced analytics is being deployed in a range of use cases across business units and industries, especially as data types and volume increase. One of the top use cases for advanced analytics we see at TDWI is predictive analytics to understand customer or operational behavior. Statistical as well as machine learning models are used to…

  • 5 Best Practices for Building a program to become data-driven

    There are organizational and technology components critical for a business to succeed in becoming data-driven. On the organizational side, a key component to succeeding with data and analytics is to create a culture that supports these efforts. Companies that succeed are typically goal-driven, transparent, empowering, and collaborative. They have strong leadership that believes in data…

  • The Predictive Analytics Conundrum

      TDWI research indicates that if users stuck to their plans around predictive analytics, adoption would be at 75–80% versus the 35–40% we currently see.   Predictive analytics is on the cusp of widespread adoption. Many organizations are excited to make use of the power of predictive analytics (including machine learning) because they understand the…

  • You guessed it – women still earn less in IT than men

    Since joining TDWI about six years ago, I have been following and reporting on our salary survey. The report quantifies and interprets the compensation, roles, responsibilities, skills, and experience of individual BI and IT professionals. It also provides detailed profiles of the 10 most common BI and data warehousing roles, examining age, gender, education, salary…

  • 3 Best Practices for Becoming More Self-Sufficient with Self-Service Analytics

    My colleague Dave Stodder and I recently lead a Webinar in conjunction with our best practices report about becoming a data-driven organization.  Audience questions included several about self-service. In particular, attendees were interested in how to make self-service more accessible to managers and leaders in their organization. Let me set the stage for self-service analytics…

  • Advanced Analytics: What’s Ahead for 2018

    2018 will be the year of the three As:  AI, Automation, and Advancing analytics skills In 2017, advanced analytics maintained its momentum in the enterprise. Open source technologies such R and Python gained ground.  Other technologies such as machine learning continued to pique interest.  Use of the cloud become more mainstream. TDWI expects these technologies…

  • Three Organizational Best Practices for Becoming Data-Driven

    Dave Stodder and I just finished writing our 4Q Best Practices Report on “What it Takes to Be Data-Driven: Technologies and Practices for Becoming a Smarter Organization.”  What struck me in analyzing the data for the report is that although organizations have embraced BI and analytics, they still have a journey in front of them…

  • Does Gender Matter in BI Salaries?

    As a female and a feminist who has worked in male-dominated fields for most of my career, what immediately caught my eye when reading the most recent TDWI Salary Survey report was the on-going pay disparity between women and men in BI. According to TDWI research, men continue to out-earn women in the BI field,…

  • Achieving Analytics Maturity: 3 Tips from the experts

    What does it take to achieve analytics maturity?  Earlier this week, Dave Stodder and I hosted a webcast with a panel of vendor experts from Cloudera, Microstrategy, and Tableau.  These three companies are all sponsors of the Analytics Maturity Model; an analytics assessment tool that measures where your organization stands relative to its peers in…

  • Next-Generation Analytics: Four Findings from TDWI’s Latest Best Practices Report

    I recently completed TDWI’s latest Best Practices Report: Next Generation Analytics and Platforms for Business Success. Although the phrase “next-generation analytics and platforms” can evoke images of machine learning, big data, Hadoop, and the Internet of things (IoT), most organizations are somewhere in between the technology vision and today’s reality of BI and dashboards. For…

  • Six skills for predictive analytics

    Today, I participated in a webinar with Actuate on the skills needed for business analysts to perform predictive modeling.  This is a hot topic and there were hundreds of participants on the call.  In my part of the presentation, I outlined some major trends in predictive analytics (including the fact that the tools are much easier…

  • Four ways to illustrate the value of predictive analytics

    My new (and first!) TDWI Best Practices Report was published a few weeks ago. It is called Predictive Analytics for Business Advantage. In it, I use the results from an online survey together with some qualitative interviews to discuss the state of predictive analytics, where it is going, and some best practices to get there. You…

  • Three entry points for big data initiatives

    The TDWI Big Data Maturity Model and Assessment is set to launch November 20th.  Krish Krishnan and I have been working on this for a while, and we’re very excited about it.  There are two parts to the Big Data Maturity Model and Assessment tool. The first is the actual TDWI Big Data Maturity Model…

  • Deathtrap: Overlearning in Predictive Analytics

    I am in the process of gathering survey data for the TDWI Predictive Analytics Best Practices Report.  Right now, I’m in the data analysis phase.  It turns out (not surprisingly) that one of the biggest barriers to adoption of predictive analytics is understanding how the technology works.  Education is definitely needed as more advanced forms…

  • Big Data’s Future/Big Data’s Past

    I just listened to an interesting IBM Google hangout about big data called Visions of Big Data’s future.  You can watch  it here.  There were some great experts on the line including James Kobelius (IBM), Thomas Deutsch (IBM), and Ed Dumbill (Silicon Valley Data Science). The moderator, David Pittman, asked a fantastic question, “What’s taking…

  • Five Trends in Predictive Analytics

    Predictive analytics, a technology that has been around for decades has gotten a lot of attention over the past few years, and for good reason.  Companies understand that looking in the rear-view mirror is not enough to remain competitive in the current economy.  Today, adoption of predictive analytics is increasing for a number of reasons…

  • Closing the loop in customer experience management: When it doesn’t work

    Last week I had the unfortunate experience of trying to deal with American Airlines regarding some travel arrangements via its Advantage help desk.  I literally spent hours on the phone trying to get to the right person.  I won’t bore you with the details of my experience, however I did want to talk about how…

  • Two Big Data Resources Worth Exploring

    It’s a good day.  Our new book, Big Data for Dummies, is being released today and I’m busy working on a Big Data Analytics maturity model at TDWI with Krish Krishnan.  Krish, a faculty member at TDWI, is actually presenting some of the model at the TDWI World Conference:  Big Data Tipping Point taking place…

  • 3 Takeaways from the IBM Big Data Event

    Last week I attended the IBM Big Data at the Speed of Business event at IBM’s Research facility in Almaden.  At this analyst event IBM announced multiple capabilities around its big data initiative including its new BLU Acceleration and IBM PureData System for Hadoop.  Additionally, new versions of Infosphere Big Insights and Infosphere Streams (for data…

  • Two Weeks and Counting to Big Data for Dummies

    I am excited to announce I’m a co-author of Big Data for Dummies which will be released in mid-April 2013.  Here’s the synopsis from Wiley: Find the right big data solution for your business or organization Big data management is one of the major challenges facing business, industry, and not-for-profit organizations. Data sets such as…

  • Five Best Practices for Text Analytics

    It’s been a while since I updated my blog and a lot has changed.  In January, I made the move to TDWI as Research Director for Advanced Analytics.  I’m excited to be there, although I miss Hurwitz & Associates.   One of the last projects I worked on while at Hurwitz & Associates was the…