What Really Does Big Data Mean to People?

It seems that I go through these times in life (which I assume most people do) when life hits you up side the head and you feel like you are just a small little boat being tossed around in the middle of a hurricane.  That has what life has been for me in the last 9 months or so, but I am back writing, which is something I truly love to do.

So, lets pick right back up where we left off back in March with some discussion around big data and the value it brings to an organization.  I know some of this may be a bit elementary now, 9 months later, but it still is worth discussion.

Big data to most people is a really nebulous term that really means very little to them.  Almost everyone in the business world has heard or talked about the concepts and what it means for the last many months now, but I am unsure if business folks really understand it.  I would go as far as to say that most still do not.

The way that I look at big data is quite simplistic.  I believe the world of big data is really all about working to get more value out of data, in order to better acquire and serve customers.  Yes, you will have people writing articles talking about how it is game changing, how it is revolutionary, how it is not about big data but small data and the like.  All of this is noise in my mind.  The real focus of any business with data is, how can I get more value out it.

For most, I still think big data is a bit intimidating as it can be incredibly complex.  Within the big data "ecosystem" you have a whole bunch of new or growing concepts that fuse together to help companies derive value for their organization or customers.  There is distributed computing, dataflow, sensors, algorithms, models, machine learning, artificial intelligence etc.... And then there are the names like Hadoop, Hbase, NoSQL or Spark that get thrown around to make things even more confusing.

But lets just keep it simple.  When people talk about Big Data, it is really just a bunch of really interesting concepts and technology that are coming together to help drive value in new ways for companies.  

Again, I know that this is not a game changing post or super insightful for many, but I think keeping the world of big data simple helps many non technical folks begin to wrap their heads around where technology is enabling us to go with our customers.

In the next post, we will take this very simple way of looking at Big Data and apply it to use cases that are beginning to add value for companies.