InsightaaS: Forrester Research is one of the world’s leading IT analyst firms – it is generally thought to be a key source of insight into and influence over use of new technologies.
Forrester’s blog page acts as a “roll-up” of blogs by its analysts. Today, we excerpt a post by Brian Hopkins, principal analyst in Forresters Enterprise Architecture Professionals practice, in which he looks at how Big Data strategies can be tuned to the needs of business leaders who “recognize that the big deal about big data is the potential for getting more value more quickly from more data, at a lower cost and with greater agility” – and who as a result invest aggressively in addressing issues of data velocity and issues with data access limitations.
Big data noise has reached the point where most are reaching for the ear plugs. And with any good hype bubble, the naysayers are now grabbing attention with contrarian positions. For example, The New York Times expressed doubt about the economic viability of big data in “Is Big Data an Economic Big Dud?” This post grabbed a lot of attention, but, like many others I read, it fundamentally misses the point of what big data is all about and why it’s important. The article compares the productivity boom associated with the first wave of the Internet to the lack of growth experienced since the inception of “big data”; it implies that big data’s expected economic impact may not happen. Furthermore, the article implies that big data is something that firms will do or implement. Thinking about big data this way or differentiating between data sets as big, medium, or small is dangerous. It leads to chasing rabbits down holes.
Here is what I mean. We all know that big data is getting bigger – I just read another NYT post that projects 40 trillion gigabytes of global data production by 2020. Awesome, but so what? Most firms I talk to have only a vague notion of what could be done with all this data, yet they are ramping up big investments in big data hoping to capture insight from new social and mobile data sets…
Read the entire post: http://blogs.forrester.com/brian_hopkins/13-09-11-dont_have_a_big_data_strategy_yet_good
