|
|
Gartner Reports That Big Data Challenges Go Beyond Managing Large Volumes Of Data
By Bill Ives
Expert Author
Article Date: 2011-08-24
Big Data is certainly a hot topic. I went to a session on Big Data Analytics for Social Media at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. Here is some advice from Gartner that we can certainly agree with as reported by Nathan Eddy in the Channel Insider. The article begins buy noting that many IT leaders are managing "big data" challenges by focusing on the high volumes of information and properly covering the many other dimensions of information management. According to Gartner, this can leaving massive challenges to be addressed later.
Big data is a "term used to acknowledge the exponential growth, availability and use of information in the data-rich landscape of tomorrow." It is, in part, fueled by the explosion of user-generated content, often through social media, on the Web. They report that worldwide information volume is growing at a minimum rate of 59 percent annually. I have also heard from several sources that in 2009 more content was created online than in the entire prior history of content.
While the volume within big data is a significant issue, Gartner analysts "said the real issue is making sense of big data and finding patterns in it that help organizations make better business decisions." We could not agree more.
The article quotes Mark Beyer, research vice president at Gartner: "Today's information management disciplines and technologies are simply not up to the task of handling all these dynamics. Information managers must fundamentally rethink their approach to data by planning for all the dimensions of information management. The business's demand for access to the vast resources of big data gives information managers an opportunity to alter the way the enterprise uses information."
They also quote Yvonne Genovese, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner: "The ability to manage extreme data will be a core competency of enterprises that are increasingly using new forms of information-such as text, social and context-to look for patterns that support business decisions in what we call Pattern-Based Strategy. Pattern-Based Strategy, as an engine of change, utilizes all the dimensions in its pattern-seeking process. It then provides the basis of the modeling for new business solutions, which allows the business to adapt. The seek-model-and-adapt cycle can then be completed in various mediums, such as social computing analysis or context-aware computing engines."
Supporting the need for organizations and individuals to make sense of massive amounts of information from multiple sources is our goal with the Darwin Awareness Engine. As Rob Paterson said after using the Awareness Engine for a public television project, "Darwin showed me all these impressions (in conversations on the Web) and relationships every day. The human brain is a pattern seeker. Darwin gives me chunky patterns. I had made some bets on the issues so I looked at things like jobs, food, and economy. Like any scientist I had some hunches. Then by presenting me the data in a patterned way it allowed me to chunk the data. I could see the comparisons and this picture began to emerge Darwin helps me unpack the complexity by showing me these patterns."
Comments
About the Author:
Dr. Bill Ives is an independent consultant and writer who has worked with Fortune 100 companies in business uses of emerging technologies for over 20 years. For several years he led the Knowledge Management Practice for a large consulting firm.. Now he primarily helps companies with their business blogs. He is also the VP of Social Media and blogger for TVissimo, a new TV schedule search engine. Prior to consulting, Dr. Ives was a Research Associate at Harvard University exploring the effects of media on cognition. He obtained his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Toronto. Bill can be reached at his blog: Portals and KM. He also writes for the FastForward blog and the AppGap blog.
|
|
