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There’s so much hype around the subject of Big Data that it’s inevitable it will sometimes be over-sold. Don’t get me wrong – revolutionary advances are being made every day by organ isation s and businesses learning to combine the vast amount of data at their fingertips with cutting-edge analytics and data science. But it isn’t a magic cure-all for your (or the world’s) problems and mistakes and miss-steps happen all the time, often at great cost.   Here are some of the “facts” about Big Data which should be taken with a pinch of salt. Like all myths they [...]

If you Googled “metadata” and found this article, you used metadata. When you bought your mother a gift from Amazon, you used metadata. Did you just reconnect with a colleague via LinkedIn? Metadata was at work. Your afternoon Spotify fix? Yep, you guessed it, you used metadata. But what is metadata? Quite simply: metadata is data that describes other data. In information technology, the prefix meta means “an underlying definition or description.” So, metadata describes whatever piece of data it’s connected to whether that data is video, a photograph, web pages, content or spreadsheets. Since metadata summarises basic info about [...]

I’m often asked whether big data can provide the same opportunities for small businesses and independent traders as it can for big corporations. My answer: absolutely! While the average small business has less self-generated data than big players like Google or Facebook, this doesn’t mean big data is off limits. In fact, in many ways, big data is more suited to small businesses because they’re generally more agile and able to act more quickly on data-driven insights. Let’s look at some of the ways small businesses can make use of big data, which I have taken from my book Big [...]

While it’s very impressive that today’s technology allows us to gather incredible amounts of data, the reality is much of the data is currently collected before anyone answers: “What do we want to do with this data?” The result: Your organisation has a lot of data that isn’t very useful for business. Before rushing to start collecting data, every business should begin by developing a data strategy. If you already have a ton of data, but no data strategy, it’s time to pause and develop one. Your team needs to determine what you want to achieve and then collect the [...]

When you’re cooking, preparation is an essential step. Ingredients need to be collected, peeled, marinated and put where you will be able to reach them when the oil is hot or the oven reaches the right temperature. This is also true in any business analytics and data-driven process – today data comes from increasingly disparate sources and in an ever-growing variety of forms. The insights you are looking for could lie in Images, communications, machine-to-machine interactions and real-time sensor data. Most probably, they will lie in a combination of more than one of these sources. This means, in order to [...]

Even though data literacy is a critical skill for the 21st century, the reality is most professionals do not yet “speak data.” This reality will limit an organisation’s success in the coming years if the data literacy gap doesn’t close. To try to remedy the data literacy shortfalls, Gartner predicts that 80% of organisations will have training programmes in place by 2020. I have helped countless organisations address their data skills deficiency, and as part of this work, I have encountered many barriers to better data literacy. In this article, I what to share the biggest obstacles to data literacy [...]

Financial services were one of the first sectors to understand the promise of the Big Data revolution, and the wave of new technology which has come with it – including artificial intelligence (AI). This isn’t surprising – businesses in the sector traditionally define themselves by their ability to interpret and analyse structured data, and use it for making predictions and decisions. The shift towards Big Data has meant applying what they know about working with structured data – data which fits neatly into the rows and columns of a spreadsheet – to working with the messy, unstructured data that we [...]

The enormous amount of data being generated every day is changing our world, and has given rise to a term most of us are now familiar with: big data. The sheer volume of data available is just one of the many challenges in working with big data. But perhaps the biggest data threat is one that many businesses don’t see coming. Big data brings big advantages Thanks to big data, organisations of all shapes and sizes are gaining unprecedented insights into customer behaviour, market preferences and business performance. This knowledge is enabling businesses to make smarter decisions, better understand their [...]