Expert Reactions: Josh Sullivan, Senior Associate
Jeff is beginning to talk about the science of big data and the value to organizations of connecting information across the stove-pipes information systems. Think of big data as the words of a story – by themselves they have limited meaning. When you add grammar and structure, you begin to link together these words and can develop many different meaning and insights from the collection of words. The science of big data is similar----data stored in information systems are the words and the emerging data analytics is the grammar which allows analysts and decision makers to derive meaning from data.
Organizations are beginning to understand the value of performing analytics across dissimilar types of data to identify rare patterns and correlate data to drive data-based decision making. Emerging technologies such as cloud computing provides new capabilities to perform analysis across highly-varied data, using new technical approaches to store, search, mine, and distribute massive amounts of data. These new technologies allow analysts and decision makers to ask ad-hoc questions and enables data “self-service” by processing massive volumes of data in very quick and precise ways. Historically, the ability to analyze intelligence data was constrained by the amount of processing power which could be applied. Consequently, complex data models and normalization became common, and data was forced into models which did not fully represent all aspects of data. Understanding the emergence of ‘big data’, data reflection, and massively scalable processing can lead to new insights for better decision making.
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