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A horse race in town: Chief Data Officer vs Chief Reliance Officer

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Smart City, the movement, has a horse race underway. At stake: Who will sit closer to the mayor or city manager?

Chief Data Officer, the darling of the data crowd, was out of the gate first. Four lengths behind and gaining, though, is a dark horse. It’s Chief Resilience Officer, favorite of the humanists. He’s breathing hard and coming up fast. Whoever wins will subsume the other.

If Chief Data Officer wins, the city’s chief executive will feel the sway of CDO’s data-driven whispers. All other things being equal, decisions will rely on data analysis.

But if Chief Resilience Officer pulls off a surprise win, the chief executive will hear her slightly more humanist whispers.… Read the rest “A horse race in town: Chief Data Officer vs Chief Reliance Officer”

Free-the-data movement meets privacy

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Back when data was little and simple, self-service analysis advocates started the chant, “Free the data!” IT stood in the way, they said. Fast forward to 2016: “democratized data” has become common, but so has public concern over privacy.

That nettlesome struggle drove a discussion that now stands as the data industry’s’ most important discussion of 2016. Around the conference table at last summer’s Pacific Northwest BI Summit — the annual, invitation-only confab held in Grants Pass, Oregon — two dozen data leaders pondered the issue for almost two hours. They concluded with an idea that broke open industry assumptions.

UK-based consultant Mike Ferguson told of a meeting held on continental Europe.… Read the rest “Free-the-data movement meets privacy”

Data guided, not data driven

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I like data same as the next guy. But I don’t like pronouncements like the one I heard at an industry event last year: “If it isn’t data, it doesn’t exist.”

Let’s get ahold of ourselves. Sure, data gives grounding. It’s a starting point, and it’s even a GPS. But there’s much more to any decision.

It used to be taboo to say that around the business intelligence industry. Almost 10 years ago, I repeated to a data warehouse expert what I had heard from a renegade inventor, that business users knew their own data. “No!” the expert protested. But things have changed.… Read the rest “Data guided, not data driven”