I am a big fan of contests, and will throw my hat into the ring whenever I have something to contribute. I’ve done that internally as well as externally.
This week EMC announced another type of contest: the 2011 Data Hero Award.
I am following this event more closely than any contest I would enter myself. Why?
Because the contestants (and the judges!) represent a set of customers that are generating the requirements for a new category of high-tech product: decision-oriented systems.
Transactional versus Decision-Oriented
Transaction-oriented systems tend to focus on the speeds, feeds, and management interfaces that satisfy the needs of popular transactional applications. The products in this area are mature. Building these types of systems involves the use of well known techniques and technologies: caching, flash, tiering, API integration, etc.
Decision-oriented systems…
- …must address radically different problems than their transactional counterparts,
- …will be managed via significantly different user interfaces,
- …will be assembled using non-traditional technologies,
- …don’t serve applications, they serve executive decision makers.
As a long-time builder of transactional systems, I’m not exactly sure how to build a system that satisfies these requirements. I need to run some deep analytics of my own in order to fully understand the new customer needs. Where am I going to get that kind of data?
Fortunately for me, the Data Hero Award is more than just a contest. It’s a requirements gathering exercise for the building of decision-oriented systems.
At EMC World in May, the conference attendees will see a set of use cases that represent shining examples of big data technologies and techniques.
What they won’t see, however, is the deeper superset of submissions. Nor will they see (or hear) the back-room judging conversations that will occur before the conference. Here are the judges:
- Tom Davenport, President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology & Management, Babson College and Co-founder of the International Institute for Analytics
- Kevin Davies, Editor-in-Chief of Bio-IT World and the author of “The $1000 Genome: The Revolution in DNA Sequencing and the New Era of Personalized Medicine”
- Susan Feldman, Research Vice President, Search and Discovery Technologies, IDC
- Dr. Michael Freed, Program Director, AI Center, SRI
A Hint at What’s to Come
EMC’s involvement in the planning of this exercise has already unearthed some fairly significant insights in how to build decision-oriented systems:
- The important of provenance. Decision-makers will continually want to go back in time, change one variable, and re-run scenarios. This becomes a lot easier when data lineage is built into the solution. EMC has been researching this for years and the time is right to bake it into a new system.
- The need for collaboration enablement. Data sets in a decision-oriented system (especially lineage-aware data sets) must support annotation and collaboration by and between multiple parties. Collaborative metadata is irrevocably bound to the content. In some cases the metadata importance rises above the importance of the content; in nearly all cases the metadata must be immutable.
- Management GUIs are essentially implemented as navigational graphs and reports. The visualization of content on the system trumps the visualization of the system.
- The system must adjust to the political/cultural framework of the corporate decision-makers.
This last item had me shaking my head at first. Why is the political/cultural framework relevant?
When it comes down to presenting, analyzing, and reporting data to corporate decision-makers, things certainly get highly political and subjective.
If you study the expertise of some of the judges you begin to see the importance of the political and social skillset of decision makers. For example, consider the education background of local Massachusetts Professor Tom Davenport: B.A. Sociology (’76), M.A. Sociology (’79), PhD Sociology (’80).
This type of background is not often found in the traditional customer base for transactional systems!
I know that EMC World is a great time for customers to experience face-to-face drill-downs with EMC engineers. It is also true that EMC employees look forward to interacting with their existing customers.
This year, however, employees such as myself will also look forward to some face time with their future customer base: the Data Hero.
Registration can be found here.
Steve
Twitter: @SteveTodd
