With Big Data, Everyone is An Analyst
by Sharon Florentine on 25/06/12 at 7:31 pm
The buzz about Big Data is shaking up conversations across the Internet. Now massively parallel computing allows organizations to access, extract and better analyze data previously thought to be useless.
But the new “Big Data” age is less about your data’s raw size and more about the cool stuff individuals can do with it, says Bradford Cross, a TechCrunch guest blogger as well as co-founder and head of research at FlightCaster, who recently wrote about the “democratization of large data” – a subject he knows well from the research his company has performed, analyzing large data sets to predict flight delays.
“Now that there is so much data, it is time to unlock its value. Really neat things are happening already—like the way the people of the world can educate themselves on all manner of issues and topics, or the way data and computing serves as leverage in other scientific and technical endeavors,” Cross said. But Big Data isn’t just a boon for big enterprises. Start-ups like FlightCaster can benefit, too.
Jason Kincaid, a fellow TechCrunch blogger, explained how average Joes and Janes can track traffic trends and analyze user information, thus bringing more value to readers. “Even individuals can undertake cool projects with big data, just as Pete Skomoroch of Data Wrangling did with trending topics for Wikipedia. In the blogosphere, too, Big Data is making an impact with tools like Google analytics,” Kincaid says.
That’s the area focuses on in his Occom’s Razor blog.
He’s interested in how even the smallest firms or individuals can “figure out how to ride big data all the way to the bank.” He digs deeper on topics like: how to find insights; how to structure organizations that will use this data to ensure that they get timely value from it; and how to drive action; How to find frameworks that force a different type of thinking.
His recent keynote address for the Strata 2012 Conference outlined Kauskik’s Six Rules That Should Govern Your Big Data Existence — none of which focus on the actual technology, but instead on the way organizations think about, interact with and espouse the benefits of Big Data.
That’s the crux of the argument: Big Data is less about data and so much more about people.
AdmantX CEO and Cogito blogger Luca Scagliarini sums it up this way:
“Integrating unstructured information in the business intelligence process cannot happen without a strong semantic technology, but here, the role of analysts is even more important than in traditional BI. To take advantage of Big Data, analysts have to use the elements and connections that emerge from analysis of millions of documents and be able to interpret them to distill what really matters for the enterprise.”
About the Author: This post is by Rackspace blogger Sharon Florentine. Rackspace Hosting is the service leader in cloud computing, and a founder of OpenStack, an open source cloud operating system. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support to its customers and partners, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing.
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