Top BI and data articles not to miss, 23 February - 2 March

Are you struggling to create dashboards in Excel? How many times have you been stuck in the office after hours wrestling a monster spreadsheet in an attempt to make it into a beautiful dashboard so you can share business insights with your co-workers? Don't worry, we can help!

There is a huge opportunity for Europe to take the lead in big data analysis, says Richard Benjamins, group director business intelligence big data, Telefonica. "But complete transparency is the only way to make using customer data sustainable," he told the Trust in the digital world conference in Madrid.

As we approach the end of February it seems like 2015 could be the year where the backlash starts against Big Data. I've seen numerous articles this year. including this one from InformationWeek, this one from ZDNet and this one from Quartz - ouch!, which paint a less rosy picture of the value of Big Data and, in fact, Big Data in general.

We take for granted the spam filters on our personal and business email accounts that reduce information overload but we don't always have such good control of our business data.Some people have a head for detail, and can absorb vast amounts of information and can pull out the relevant bits when needed, but not everyone can do it, and it takes time absorbing the information.

View all... There are three buzzwords that, if we had our way, would be stricken completely from the world: "cloud," "the Internet of Things," and "big data." Each of them was coined in an attempt to elegantly capture a complex concept, and each of them fails miserably.

The internet of things is changing everything about the world around us. Never before in human history has the world been changing so quickly.

As companies embrace Tableau and Qlik, will the reporting platforms like BusinessObjects, Cognos, and MicroStrategy be left behind? Gartner sees conflicting needs and deployment practices. (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) The business intelligence market is in a serious state of transition, according to the Gartner's 2015 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, published on Tuesday.

The history of Big Data as a term may be brief - but many of the foundations it is built on were laid long ago.Long before computers (as we know them today) were commonplace, the idea that we were creating an ever-expanding body of knowledge ripe for analysis was popular

The time comes during a technology's evolution into the general consciousness when its actual definition comes into question. That's especially true with something as amorphously named as big data. I've increasingly noted that some people take it literally, equating "big data" with "lots of data." That's in direct contradiction to how [...]