Everyone is busy leaving digital trails and tech is following them. IT is learning how to harvest huge data sets from these trails. Trails include web searches, Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, and the digital trails of billions of cellphones over small to large geographic areas. The expectation is that BI analysis of these “Big Data” sets will yield accurate predictions for superior business decision support that will result in competitive advantage, innovations, and superior productivity.
The scope of what was once considered traditional business data is dwarfed by Big Data. “Organizations today are generating more data in a single day than that the entire Internet was generated as recently as 2000.” (David Smith, 5 real-world uses of big data, Gigaom, Jul. 17, 2011) So there are oceans of it, and though the raw data itself may not be in a form that lends itself to easy manipulation, analytics are now getting cleverer at finding ways to slice, dice, and reconfigure it, in whatever format, to make sense of it all.
(See some amazing examples of visualizing Big Data here: David Vallente, Visualizing Data: 15 Fantastic Examples, Wikibon Blog, Sep. 16, 2010) So now, where once “Homo Corporatus” used to listen to his gut rather than trust BI, the ability to collect huge amounts of more types of data on the fly, from many sources, often created directly by the public, has him salivating over the promise of accurate, maybe even real time prediction- a kind of Collective Intelligence for greater agility and competitive advantage.
Beyond the hassle of storing it all, what logistics does the IT of an enterprise need to deal with its “Big Data?” What kinds of companies will get the most out of this kind of data? What key metrics are needed? More importantly, what does it mean and how do we get a particular data stream to someone that most needs that particular data? And, what about privacy laws and government regulation?
Tune in December 14th, 2011 to hear CIO Talk Radio Guests Dale C. Potter, SVP and Chief Information Officer at the Ottawa Hospital; Sabine Everaet, CIO, Europe Group, Coca-Cola; and John Crary, CIO of the American Red Cross discuss Predicting Big Business Value from “Big Data.“
