by Angela Guess
A new article warns companies not to dive into Big Data strategies without doing a little planning first. IT begins, “You’re not really sure how it happened, but some time between last year and the summer of 2011 you were suddenly facing a big data problem, or you were being told you were facing a big data problem, or more accurately you were being told that you needed a big data solution. Funny thing was, you hadn’t really done anything drastic over the last couple of years that would seem to indicate a tsunami of data was about to breach your storage floodgates. But then again, it wasn’t like you watched yourself going bald either.”
It goes on, “On the other hand it is hard to argue with the old adage that knowledge is power, and that data leads to information which can lead to knowledge, which can hopefully translate into making highly informed decisions. It is also true that there is a massive amount of data traversing in and out of the business that seems to ghost its way through the system like an angst ridden goth teen with a passion for walks in dark alleys – alone at night – while wearing all black and really dark purple. So, does your data hold some big magical gold nuggets of information that will radically transform the business?”
The article continues, “Before you go leaping into the murky abyss of your companies data swamp you may just want to take a deep breath and do a little planning. First off, what questions are you hoping and/or needing to answer? If you don’t know what questions you are trying to answer why would you exert any effort on trying to find an answer? Do you believe you have the data to actually answer the question? This is a very common theme in analytics and BI, you want an answer, you spend a ton of money to churn, prep, store, map reduce, analyse and visualise data, only to find out the questions you really need answered you cannot because you simply do not collect the data to answer the questions regardless of the myriad of tools, consultants and sharply dressed enterprise sales weasels that come knocking.”
photo credit: stevendepolo
