Most companies, even if they don\u2019t know it, already have way much more data than they can efficiently handle; they are literally drowning under data! So, do you believe the Big Data promise? That it’ll make a difference in your business performance and profits?\u00a0 Not so evident!<\/p>\n
But first, let\u2019s see what we are talking about?\u00a0 What is Big Data?<\/p>\n
And when did it turn out to be BIG?<\/p>\n
Data comes in two forms: structured<\/em> <\/strong>and unstructured<\/em><\/strong>. When you join the two, it becomes Big, really BIG.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Structured Data<\/strong> is any kind of data a company has within its walls, that it has formatted to better handle it, mostly it\u2019s proprietary information; meaning, the data has been extracted (gathered), categorised and linked under some kind of hierarchy in either Excel sheets or Databases. It is then considered useful (available); it can be easily manipulated, crushed, compared, etc\u2026 displayed as BI on dashboards and accessed anytime, anywhere (ideally) for analysis, interpretation, decision-making, etc.<\/p>\n Business Intelligence<\/strong> experts estimated a few years ago that only 4% of all data amongst enterprises\u2019 walls was structured.<\/p>\n Unstructured Data<\/strong> has to do with the rest of it, all data related to your company; that is, conversations in your company\u2019s emails, chats and blogs, technical information and specifications, all your social media conversations and all information published in media channels and experts about your company and your field of activities.<\/p>\n They say: \u201cYou access the Big Data fountain by simply overlaying<\/strong> (how do you do that?<\/em>) unstructured data on top of structured data and use analytics software to visualize it\u201d. That is the essence of the Big Data promise; it’ll be marvelous and easy !<\/p>\n In theory, you should get never-before-seen insights about almost anything; that\u2019s the promise. In theory, you will be able to better predict product sales, target customers better, discover new emerging markets, reduce transportation cost, increase productivity, etc.<\/p>\n Big Data has evolved rapidly since the days of open source tools. It is now more mature with offerings to help\u00a0you visualize Big Data from specialists like Tableau, Qlik, etc., and major players like Microsoft, SAP and Oracle.<\/p>\n But the reality is that companies are having major issues with feeding data to these analytics platforms.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Now, here are two highlights that should rise suspicions regarding the Big Data promise:<\/p>\n Big Data as is is still not very much automated today, the data cleaning problem proves that companies still have to spend a lot of time sorting out and organizing data before it gets analyzed.<\/p>\n Hence, there is still a major problem at the source with the Big Data promise; feeding the right data, that is: identifying, gathering and curating data.<\/em><\/p>\n And the Internet of Things (IoT)<\/strong> will not help at all, on the contrary; as we get better at collecting data and increase the amount of available data, the problem will only get… BIGGER. Some think that AI will magically solve the Big Data issue. Well, that calls upon other issues\u2026<\/p>\n\n
Now what?<\/strong><\/h3>\n