The Big Deal About Big Data

We are in the midst of a “Big Data” revolution. But there is so much hype around this buzzword that it has become what I call a lemmings market: Every tech company on the planet now claims to have a solution for analyzing the mammoth amount of data businesses generate—and need to collect. No wonder top managements find it so difficult to figure out exactly what their companies should do about this trend.

The big deal about big data is that it offers the ability to take huge volumes of data and pick out the important patterns and trends—without having to know the right questions to ask. This is key because the amount of information companies must deal with has grown exponentially and changed in unprecedented ways: Data now come from social networks, images, sensors on all sorts of equipment, and the myriad systems that keep track of Web transactions from supply chain management to consumer sales—to name just a few.