DataWorks Summit 2018

This was the first time I had attended the DataWorks summit: Ideas. Insights. Innovation. for big data. I had the privilege to attend the Luminaries dinner on arrival at the conference. The dinner was held for the European data heroes award. The Hortonworks data heroes initiative recognizes the data visionaries, data scientists, and data architects transforming their businesses and organizations through Big Data.

Each day started with a set of keynotes.

Day 1 Opening Keynotes

The Single Most Important Formula for Business Success Scott Gnau - Hortonworks

Changing the Data Game with Open Metadata and Governance Mandy Chessell - IBM

Big Data Success In Practice: The Biggest Mistakes To Avoid Across The Top 5 Business Use Cases Bernard Marr - Bernard Marr & Co.

Munich Re: Driving a Big Data Transformation Andreas Kohlmaier - Munich Re

Scott Gnau opened his talk with an hypothesis “Data is your cloud is your business” Connecting disparate data to provide for real time information enables us to innovated fast. A data strategy is imperative, it needs to include governance, security and adopt rapid change. Data drives our lives everyday from smart edge devices to all businesses.

He concluded with your data strategy is your cloud strategy is your business strategy if (A) =(B) and (B) = (C) then (A) =(C).

Bernard Marr then shared his insights about AI automating more things faster and the fourth industrial revolution.  He mentioned the top 5 business use cases as

• Informing: to make better decisions
• Understand: know you customers better
• Improvement: customer value proposition
• Automation: key business processes
• Monetization: data as an asset

A couple of interesting points raised were about specialist data hunting units to find new data sources and automation requirements to improve operations.  Data diversity is key to improve analytics along with data governance.

Day 2 Keynotes

Renault: A Data Lake Journey Kamelia Benchekroun - Renault Group

Are You Ready For GDPR? Jamie Engesser - Hortonworks, Srikanth Venkat - Hortonworks Inc

Embracing GDPR to Improve Your Business Practices in the Digital Age Enza Iannopollo - Forrester Research

Driving High Impact Business Outcomes from Artificial Intelligence Frank Saeuberlich – Teradata

Day 2 Forester Enza Iannopollo discussed embracing GDPR to improve your business practices in the digital age. Privacy by design and by default requires new business processes to be established and cultural change to happen. GDPR requires compliance across the organization and with external partners. The compliance strategies are only as good as your risk assessment and mitigation. The classification of data is a key place to start. Concluding the sessions with a quote

“Good Data protection normally enables you to do more things with data, not less” Tim Gough Head of Data Protection Guardian News and Media

Data Steward Studio (DSS) was launched at the conference. It is one of several services available for Hortonworks DataPlane Service; it provides a suite of capabilities that allows users to understand and govern data across enterprise data lakes.