Thinking Outside the Box With Big Data

I remember when the term “outside the box” was all the rage a number of years ago. In company meetings my bosses would encourage us to think outside of the box, but no-one could really explain what it meant or more specifically, what they wanted me to do with and about outside the box thinking.

Today, two terms that people are really locked into are “Big Data” and “Internet of Things (iOT)”. Both sound simple enough, however in reality the concepts behind them are so multi-faceted and complicated that it’s hard to drill down to what it means to me, you, our organizations, and the mobile industry as a whole.

So, to receive clarity, we need to hear a number of thoughts on these subjects. On the big data front, Syncfusion Vice President Daniel Jebaraj has provided his thoughts on the subject in a recent paper, “HDInsight at Your Own Peril.” In the paper, he discusses the role big data will play in an organization’s decision making.

He points out that in days past, the lion’s share of an organization’s data describing its customers and end users typically came from direct transactions - one on one organization-to-user exchanges. Now organizations collect that information and an overwhelming amount of unstructured, immediate behavioral information, including time spent on a website or when a viewer stopped watching a video. 

As amassing such data becomes easier and easier, and as databases grow to unwieldy size, the imperative for many will be, as Jebaraj states, to effectively extract and interpret this information. For many organizations, executing this process will mean the difference between mission success and failure. But the process will not solely be the property of one’s technical proficiency and mathematical ability; it will also call upon one’s creativity and ability to know what to look for.

The paper is a great read and is free to download here, check it out for yourself.