Data lakes have become a key tool for mining competitive insight from large repositories of data.
The term data lake has been with us for many years. It’s origin is attributed to James Dixon who coined the term while writing, “If you think of a data mart as a store of bottled water – cleansed, packaged, and structured for easy consumption – the data lake is a large body of water in a more natural state.”
Many a subsequent writer has questioned whether organizations were creating data lakes with business value or data swamps with limited or no value. Given this, Marco Iansiti and Karim Lakhani have suggested that the data lake, data in it is original source, is part of a data platform with “data flowing from bottom to top…And the data platform aggregates, cleans, refines, and processes data” captured in the data lake.
Given this more refined view, the question is: where is the data lake within its hype cycle? To answer this question, I asked CIOs and industry experts for their opinions. Read More