The Wild West days of big data may not be totally gone, but it sort of felt that way this week on the Strata Data Conference’s Expo floor. Yes, there were vendors hawking the latest machine learning technology, but there were an equal number of vendors targeting basic tasks around data management, such as finding it, cleaning it, governing it, and making sure it’s not going to get your company fined $1 billion or get your CIO fired.

The lure of AI is strong, and many companies want to utilize machine learning to automate decision-making on data. And they should seek that goal, because technological breakthroughs and the rapid pace of data generation are making that possible. But for many companies, their data desires simply are more aspirational at this point. The percentage of big data projects that end in success is below where many executives thought it would be at this point. The culprit, in many cases, is the data itself. To sum it up, the data is often a mess.

Source: datanami.com
Author: Alex Woodie