Have 'Big Data' Sand Boxes Become Sand Traps?

Virginia Rometty, CEO of IBM aptly stated that “data is the new natural resource.”

With 2,500,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data we create every day, has Big Data become a become mess? Have sand boxes turned into sand traps?

Big Data is still a vague concept for businesses, a concept they sort of understand. Most companies have either no idea or a partial understanding of what big data is and what it does, let alone managing and capitalizing on it.

Many organizations have initiated pilot projects to manage and utilize Big Data. However, in almost all cases, it hasn’t gone any further. While they begin with great energy, procure tools and create sand boxes to learn and understand how to make the most of unstructured data, they eventually lose their way, diminishing the value of the project. What’s missing is end-to-end data management to protect assets and enable compliance. Many companies fail to use the right processes and tools to manage huge volumes of data collected from various sources.

The solution as per the experts is to manage the beast of Big Data by harnessing its power, with a shift in culture, attitude and discipline. What is required is a combination of traditional and new and advanced data management capabilities.

While Big Data is a big market,

Let it not become a Big Mess,

Manage it before it manages your business!

Get to know how to integrate Big Data with your business goals

Why Big Data is the Big Boss from InfoCheckPoint

Look at “Big Data in a Human Context”

What story does your data narrate?

While most B2B organizations look at data visualization in the sense of infographics, there are innovative iterations of how we can visualize and draw stories from data. Here’s an interesting ‘did you know’ moment:

In the 9/11 Memorial, the names are inscribed not alphabetically or in a grid, they are streamed in what the architect, Michael Arad envisioned as “meaningful adjacencies”. The names were placed “according to where people were and who they were with when they died”. Jer Thorp (the artistic designer of the 9/11 Memorial Algorithm on for the placement of names) said it is a, “meaningful framework; one which allows the names of family and friends to exist together”.

With the question of “Is Big Data, the New Oil?”,  visualization can prove to be a great tool in engaging with characters in your data. Data visualization from Jer’s perspective is not about the result or outcome, it is about the process. By breaking down the process into 'sketches’, distinct characteristics can drive specific solutions, to make engagement efforts more relevant.

Data visualization should be considered more than an image, graphic, or substitution for a sentence. By putting pieces of ‘data in a human context’, you not only understand customer histories you build empathy for people in the system. And this in turn, as Jer says is, “it builds fundamental respect, which is missing in a large part of technology. And we start to deal with issues like privacy. They carry weight”

While we may not be ‘there’ yet, our process of drawing narratives through data visualization has only just begun. What about you?

Jer Thorp is a ‘Data Artist-in-Residence’ at The New York Times. Take some time out and watch how he puts data in a human context.