by Angela Guess
Clive Longbottom of Computing recently pointed out that Big Data can lead to big insights, but it can also lead to big problems and misunderstandings. He explains, “If an organisation is sitting on top of 10 databases, each of which is 100TB in size, it has a big data issue, right? Not necessarily – it certainly has a problem in that it has a lot of data to deal with, but federating databases and applying data cleansing, master data management (MDM) and business analytics can provide a pretty decent solution to this. Big data introduces a lot of different problems – ones that require a bit of different thinking which may take many outside of their comfort zone.”
Longbottom continues, “Let’s begin by taking a simple view of information within an organisation. In the dim, dark past when I got into the ITC world, a rule of thumb approach was that around 20% of an organisation’s information was in electronic format, the rest on paper. Of the electronic stuff, about 80% was held within formal databases. Roll the clock forward by a couple of decades and this has essentially flipped – around 80% of an organisation’s information is now in electronic format, and only around 20% of that will be held in a formal database. The rest of the electronic stuff will be held in various file formats dotted around on file servers, personal devices and so on. Any ‘big data’ approach that just deals with the data held within databases is therefore only using 16% of the available information – not a good way to reach mission-critical decisions.”
