One of the challenging things about travelling all of the time is that it can be hard to find time to learn about the cool things people are doing in your space.

Thankfully, now that I’m at home more I have time for actual thinking, so last Friday I went to a great event that was a little bit of a pulse-check on the state of big data and analytics. There were presentations from Hitachi Solutions and from MIcrosoft – who should be congratulated for finally recognizing and embracing Excel as the day-to-day BI tool for some – amongst others, and various interesting use cases to review and discuss.

Every day I see that the majority of business, especially enterprise business, is still stuck just trying to find their data and make it reliable and useful. It’s events like these keeps your imagination going, thinking about the different kinds of long-term benefits timely, reliable data can bring – very helpful while you’re slogging through the drudgery of data cleanup!

Thanks Hitachi Solutions Canada (@HitachiSoCa) for setting it up!