The most recent Bentley Research Colloquium focused on Big Data and a broad range of issues and topics surrounding the topic. This series highlights some of the issues examined or suggested by colloquium presenters.
A man intends to dine at Morton’s Steakhouse but a flight keeps him. He does what people do nowadays. He tells his Twitter followers. Jokingly, he wishes the restaurant would deliver a porterhouse upon his arrival at Newark Airport.
A few hours later a Morton’s server in a tuxedo greets him with a full dinner. The publicity stunt relied on sophisticated social-media monitoring, detailed customer data, and the ability to bring all this together and act on it in real time. Welcome to the world of Big Data.
The business press loves the term Big Data, although the concept is hard to pin down. It is elusive and ill-defined but widely used and applied in society.
I define Big Data as a combination of technologies and processes that make it possible for organizations to convert very large amounts and a broad variety of raw data into information and insights for use in business, science, health care, law and dozens of other fields of practice. The concept of Big Data is constantly changing depending on the state of the art in technology — today’s Big Data is tomorrow’s small data.
While the enthusiastic popular coverage of Big Data can be overheated, Big Data technologies and processes have already demonstrated their promise to create something new and transformative in a number of contexts, and there is potential for much more.
Ultimately, it’s all about analytics. By this I mean the systematic analysis and interpretation of data using mathematical, statistical and computational tools. This is creative and challenging. The value of data has to be discovered through analytical processes.
Finding the signal in the noise of Big Data requires an ability to gather data from sources no one ever thought to link together. It requires many different capabilities and draws from many academic fields.
We need people to determine whether data is meaningful and collected in a way that allows it to be valid. We need data captured on time and stored in an integrated collection that makes it possible to look at the elements together. We need a structure that allows analytical work and is also cost effective.
Only when all of the elements come together can we even begin to analyze. It’s no wonder that getting this done is a challenging process that requires specialized capabilities.
Consider sensors that measure temperature, humidity and barometric pressure. These devices can take measurements every fraction of a second from thousands of locations.
Alone these measurements are meaningless. But looked at together with other elements such as time and geography and combined with data on human behavior maybe from Twitter or social media, you have the potential for discovering something new. So we take weather-related data and we analyze that with Twitter data and with certain human behaviors and opinions and feelings. We see what we find.
The path forward is not always clear. Even when we collect the data and develop a structure for it, we may not know what to do with it. Many parties are hoarding data they think might be useful in the future. Some of the uses of this data will be life-changing, and many others will be forgotten immediately.
There are also ethical issues. We need to think about the potential consequences and implications of using big data. The fact that we can do something doesn’t mean we should do it. Organizational practices that Big Data enables have the potential to change work radically. There are many factors to weigh but also many exciting discoveries to be made.
Big Data has a direct impact on the lives of consumers and recent college graduates alike, including:
- There will be an abundance of very well-paying jobs for graduates who are able to harness the power of technology and use a variety of tools to interpret interconnected data in a meaningful way.
- Everybody will need fundamental skills in understanding and analyzing data.
- Marketers have major opportunities in using data to provide initiatives that respond to consumer desires without invading consumer privacy.
- Individual consumers must become increasingly vigilant about both how their individual data may be used and the risks surrounding breached data security.
- The sophisticated use of data will likely continue to develop at breathtaking speed. It will impact every single aspect of our lives, transforming them in ways that we cannot yet fully comprehend.
Heikki Topi is a professor of Computer Information Systems at Bentley University.