I attended the Enterprise Data Worlds conference last month in San Diego. I was speaking on GDPR, and what you needed to do if you were just starting to think about GDPR as the deadline is now so close. The meeting was well attended which was a surprise given how close we are to the deadline. The Facebook / Cambridge Analytica fiasco has drawn attention to the protection of personal information, and to GDPR in particular. What I see are the smaller companies getting drawn into the discussion, and realizing how big this might be for them. The deck is below.
In general, the show continues to improve. The keynote presentation by Mike Ferguson. Intelligent Business Strategies Ltd Was interesting in that I am not sure if the same presentation had been given a couple of years ago that it would have been as well received. It would have been considered a fantasy by so many in the audience. Some of his key points:
- Very comprehensive at the enterprise level – remember when Enterprise data management – or enterprise anything was a bad word?!
- Tagging and classification is all going to be algorithm driven, and in the pipe – In his presentation IOT was driving the volume – had some good volume numbers.
- Pushing the virtual enterprise data lake – everything tied together in a metadata hub
The products and vendor knowledge was the biggest surprise of the show – probably because expectations were low. In general, the tools discussions were more applied. Key observations:
- Much more evolved presentations – hooked to business drivers.
- Integrated products on the rise. Especially around the source to target discussion:
- ETL, DQ, Profiling and Remediation are integrated into a single pipeline discussion
- Sales people were more knowledgeable about how this works.
- API injection of new capabilities into this pipeline – this was something that all professed to do. However, when pushed it was clear that there were varying stages of capability – All seemed to have APIs, the question seemed to be about how robust the API is.
- Linked data / semantics was a bigger topic than normal. It is beginning to be discussed in an applied sense.
- The FIBO (Financial Business Ontology) is a driver in this – more importantly it is being integrated into tools – so people can visualize how it is applied. This is pulling in the business side of the house
- This is all metadata especially business metadata – this is shifting the discussion towards business.