One of the most unfortunate casualties of the current economic downturn is the diminished ability and willingness of business leaders to think seriously and practically about the future. When you’re facing crises in revenue and margins today, there is a natural disinclination to think much about tomorrow. After all, if you don’t survive the present, it doesn’t much matter what’s going to happen in the long term.
Posts Tagged ‘data growth’
Big Data = Information Optimization
Monday, October 31st, 2011Everyone is talking about “big data” yet we each have a slightly different view of what it means and its impact. One thing we all can agree on is that we must devise strategies to handle and leverage the “Forty percent projected yearly growth of global data.”
One of the things I have heard is, “Well, we have a lot of information scattered throughout, so if we put everything we own in a single, distributed processing system like Hadoop—which is meant to house massive amount of information efficiently—we can start making sense of it.” I want to shake my head, “No, no, no!”
Big Data: Big Challenge or Big Opportunity?
Monday, December 6th, 2010Avanade recently released its 2010 report on “The Business Impact of Big Data.” Though this report comes from across the ocean—the UK—it mirrors the issues that we face in our own backyard.
According to the research, “one in three executives is regularly unable to find the right people who can provide the information they need when they need it.” This is huge as business decisions are driven by information. Perhaps I should clarify that by saying intelligent business decisions.
Economist Reports on the New Phenomenon: Big Data
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010The Economist issued a special report last week entitled “Data, Data Everywhere.” In this report, Kenneth Cukier, a financial and business correspondent in Japan, was interviewed to share his thoughts around how the superabundant growth of information is having a macro-economic effect not only on businesses but even society as a whole. Some have labeled this the age of “Big Data.”
Kenneth explains the Big Data movement through a business example. He reports that “Wal-Mart handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes.” The CIO of Wal-Mart, Rollin Ford, wakes up everyday asking himself “how can I flow data better, manage data better, analyze data better?” Wal-Mart is not alone in asking how they can prepare for the age of Big Data.
