Top 10 information management stories of 2022

Data for good is a big theme of the Computer Weekly top 10 information management stories selected for 2022.

At the planetary level you can read about the use of a graph database to track space junk that is a threat to life on Earth. You can also find a bunch of Scottish schoolchildren deploying sensors in their local environment to generate data that is part of a climate change project orchestrated by the University of Edinburgh. And that is aimed at forming the data scientists society will need in the decades ahead.

Meanwhile, the UK data community of today mobilised to provide medical kits for the civilian casualties of the war in Ukraine.

This list features an interview with someone who is spearheading the drive to professionalise data science: Rachel Hilliam, chair of the Alliance for Data Science Professionals. She argues strongly that data science is not just the latest flash in the pan. “A few years ago, we had the big data revolution that went very quiet. But I think this will endure, partly because it’s not a completely new discipline. It is an interdisciplinary umbrella of those different areas of statistics, applied mathematics and computing.”

Back in Scotland, and in a similar vein, Brian Hills, chief executive of The Data Lab in Scotland, explains why he thinks the organisation’s mission is less about data and more about changing lives by giving people career opportunities.

Also featured in the list is a profile of a woman from an originally poor background who became the chief executive of a data management firm. This is Christal Bemont, CEO, Talend, who reflects on coming through difficult times in solidarity with co-workers, and gives the core advice of being authentic to yourself: show up as you are.

Her own firm is a specialist in data integration, which remains one of the thorniest challenges in business intelligence and analytics. Achieving it is technically and organisationally complex, and it gains in importance all the time. This feature explores the near-Sisyphean challenge that data integration represents. “Firms looking to maximise the value of their business data must still address data quality and integrity, provide consistent and timely data flows into BI and analytics applications, and ensure that business leaders act on the insights from those applications. And they need to do this with skills that remain in short supply.” It’s a tall order, but this feature has a few pointers, synthesising analyst advice.

One emerging and developing approach to getting better business value from data is to embed analytics – based inside applications, often real-time, and driven by APIs – as a way to get to the next level of business intelligence

Elsewhere in this list, you can find data analytics driving wind turbine power generation and illuminating the state of fuel poverty in the UK.

Here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 information management stories of 2022.