by Angela Guess
Fred Gallagher recently wrote for GigaOM that in the field of Big Data, timely solutions are more important than mountains of raw data. He writes, “Maybe some huge enterprises and government departments do need big data, but what about the rest of us? Can collecting more data help? Perhaps, but you must first answer: Am I getting useful, timely answers from the data I already have. Do I have disciplines in place to operationalize insights and measure their impact on the business? Sadly, if the answer is no, you are not alone. According to a recent study by Freeform Dynamics, only 15 percent of enterprises feel they fully exploit traditional database information for decision making.”
He continues, “It seems that most of the data already stored for analysis is going underutilized. To the point, Bill Inmon, father of the data warehouse, claims that 95 percent of data in a warehouse is “dormant.” Will adding terabytes or petabytes of unstructured data to your already underutilized data warehouse change this? Probably not. In fact, there’s a good chance that it will make dormant data, dead data. What companies need is not dormant or dead data. They need data that helps them gain operational insights to make their existing business run better.”
