Wednesday at IOD provide another opportunity to drink from firehose of “Thinking Big”. The day was kicked off with two very lively presentations/talks featuring Jeff Jonas, IBM’s Unstructured Analytics “Guru in Chief”, followed by Nate Silver (“The Signal and the Noise”), who is a real Data Scientist by anyone’s definition. This was the red meat that the assembled masses needed to get themselves amped up for Day 3.

Day 3
The 3rd day of IOD provided me with a wealth of opportunities to deep dive into some particular areas of interest/focus i.e. Business Glossary, Metadata, Industry Models, Information Governance, Customer Case Studies, etc. I found plenty of opportunities for this and was continuously juggling my schedule throughout the day to sit in on the richest of these discussions. One o
f the most compelling sets of presos were on the newly branded “Business Information Exchange (BIE). BIE is the V9.1 bundling of Business Glossary, Metadata Workbench and several other components in the InfoSphere Information Server stack into a “business friendly” suite for managing the enterprise’s Controlled Vocabulary, Business (and Technical) Metadata. The platform allows for Business Stewards and Information Governance professionals to manage Compliance, Impact Analysis and Lineage across their enterprise landscapes.
The BIE discussions continued into the domain of the Industry Models where I saw the long-term roadmap for the models from several years ago playing itself out in real-time. Th
e Industry Models are now moving into the domain of Information Architecture (IA) where unstructured information is organized using constructs as Controlled Vocabulary, Taxonomy and Metadata Tagging. This has been a critical requirement for some time now given the growth of unstructured and the rise of “Big Data: (yes, you heard me use the term in positive vain.
It is clear to me now that IBM has delivered on promises made several years back regarding “Putting the Business in the Drivers Seat” in respect to both Information Governance and Information Management. The entire Information Management Ecosystem is fully aligned with this ideal (Data Warehouses, Business Analytics, BI, etc.). As a result they are no
w without the exception the end-to-end leader in Business Informatics and Advanced Analytics. The portfolio they have created is not only Best in Class, but fully integrated from the Top Down and Bottom Up. Additionally, they have created the most flexibility along the way to integrate these capabilities into any type of enterprise landscape, not matter how heterogenous.
Captains’ of Industry take note. “IBM has positioned themselves as the Strategic Partner of Choice to support your organizations’ “Analytics Vision” no matter how large or small it might be. You owe it to your organization to engage with them in a conversation about this journey at a time in the near future. Planning is critical to success so don’t hesitate.
Today is the final day of the IOD Death March and it is a full one as always. I will provide my review of the final day in my Friday (10/26) posting.