by Angela Guess
Jim Manzi recently wrote an article for Forbes relating three ways to make Big Data make money. He writes, “Big Data is now deep into the hype phase of the innovation cycle. All the classic signs are there: you can eat buffet dinners all 52 weeks a year at Big Data conferences, Big Data tag lines are now common in emails from industry analysts, and even investment bankers are tossing around the phrase. Any experienced businessperson has seen this movie before with earlier technologies ranging from the World Wide Web to CRM to Enterprise Data Warehouses. As with these other innovations, however, there is real substance at the root of the hype. And – like CRM, the Web, and data warehouses – Big Data is very likely to be a big part of running almost any large corporation in the future.”
He continues, “Most early movers among the users of these prior technologies lost a lot of money, but a small number created enormous shareholder value. By definition, all of the early movers were willing to take risks. But three characteristics distinguished the winners from the losers. First was an unwillingness to be snowed by conventional wisdom, technical jargon or the fairy tales of universal knowledge that abound when everything was still mostly talk and potential. Second was a strong bias to act quickly at low cost, learn what works from experience, and then reinforce strengths… Third was a ruthless focus on profits in excess of capital costs within the foreseeable future as the success criteria for proposed investments of time or money. This article will attempt to consider the Big Data opportunity from the point of view of the P&L-owning executive.”
