InsightaaS: Another day, another example of how social makes the world smaller and more detailed, all at the same time! First, the smaller – one of our tweets was favorited by what appears to be a relatively new Twitter account. Reviewing it, I found that it had also favorited a tweet by Ekimetrics, with whom we connect frequently via Twitter. The Ekimetrics tweet in turn pointed to a post by Datafloq, a Dutch firm specializing in Big Data, which included the infographic below, developed by Kapow Software, a california-based subsidiary of Kofax, which is also California based.
Now for the “more detailed” – the chart below provides insight into nine data sources that contribute to Big Data. Each is rated in terms of the extent to which it is unstructured vs. structured, and in terms of the “three Vs” of Big Data – its velocity, variety and volume; there is also a key indicating whether the data is typically generated internally, externally, or both internally and externally. What we see at a glance is that internal sources tend to be relatively slow moving. Sources that were once internal but are now ‘both’ – documents and business applications – are somewhat more complex from a 3 V perspective. And some of the sources that are relatively new to the data mix, including social media, sensor data and the public web, rank even higher on the 3 V scale. Taken together, the infographic provides an intriguing view of the pending data management challenge: enterprises are expanding the number of sources that they evaluate, and these sources in turn tend to be more external, less structured, and higher in velocity, variety and volume than traditional data sources. Big Data will be an important source of management insight – but as this graphic shows, it will also (and first) pose a substantial data management challenge!
