by Angela Guess
Steve Mills was recently interviewed about Big Data at IBM and in general. Mills is Senior Vice President and Group Executive of IBM Software and Systems: “He has some 100,000 employees reporting to him and oversees the operations that contribute about $40 billion worth of IBM’s revenue. If you were to look for someone who’s on the front lines with big IT projects intended to corral and extract value from mountains of data, he’s it.”
When asked about how the human element can sometimes limit the value of data, Mills responded, “There’s no such thing as a big data program without a pilot. The more pilots you run the more real deployments you do. Will every pilot result in an immediate deployment. No. Does that mean you don’t see any value? Not really, but its just that as you run it and begin to see the complexity, you might back away, other priorities might come in, projects get shelved. I think the discussion of big data is better when its around an applied operational definition rather than a theoretical one. You look at areas where business are exploring this and looking for value.”
He continued, “We see a lot of consumer packaging companies looking at what’s known as sentiment analysis. They want to collect things out of the blogosphere and Tweets and whatever information there is about what people are saying about the products they produce. Historically they might have run focus groups, and they probably still will, but you see them reaching out for large amounts of unstructured data, and a lot of it is garbage. They’re hunting for the jewels, and it comes back to the issue that the technology is there, it’s affordable. If you talk to any consumer package goods company, they’re definitely looking at this and beginning to make some attempts to determine if they can get any incremental value from analytics.”
Read more from Steve Mills here.
