My friend and (épée) fencing teammate, Alan, e-mailed me the following question: “I’m in the middle of a Master’s degree program (Information Systems).  I’m about half-way through, and I’m stuck on picking a concentration.  Specifically, I’m stuck between Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence (DW & BI) and Information Security (InfoSec).”

Here is my reply:

First, it’s difficult to predict future demand, but InfoSec is a growing, evolving field.  We work with IBM appliances called Guardium (which provides trusted user auditing) and Identity Insight (“who is who; who knows who”).

The data warehouse space is, I believe, being overtaken by “Big Data”.  The classic DW development cycle from data modeling and star schema design to Extract/Transform/Load (ETL) to dashboards and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is time-consuming and expensive.  It might be replaced in many instances by Hadoop (MapReduce).

There is, of course, room and requirements for both development models, but in 2013 I would want to build a career around InfoSec or BigData rather than the maturing DataWarehouse paradigm.