by Angela Guess
Linda Tucci recently reported what Forrester Research learned after surveying 4,000 clients regarding Big Data practices and issues. Tucci begins, “Uncovering the secrets lurking in large-scale data sets is companies’ next best hope for beating out their competition — or so the recent torrent of Big Data reports proclaim. But first, IT needs to crack the code. If your IT organization is puzzling over what Big Data actually means and how it should be using large-scale data sets, it is not alone. In May, analyst Boris Evelson and his colleagues at Forrester Research Inc. queried 4,000 clients about their organizations’ understanding and use of Big Data.”
Tucci continues, “When he went through the responses, however, he noticed something unusual: As the questions became more challenging, respondents dropped off in droves, with only 40 people completing the full survey. He had never seen so many abandoned survey questions. ‘Being experienced analysts, we thought this was going to be another piece of research where we survey the market, talk to people and come up with some best practices,’ said Evelson, a business intelligence (BI) expert at the Cambridge, Mass.-based firm. ‘Within a few days, I came to the conclusion that at this point, the only thing we can offer our clients is to tell them what kind of questions to ask.’”
She goes on, “While the world waits for best practices, SearchCIO.com asked the experts to at least give us the answers to five questions that CIOs should consider before they tackle large-scale data processing. This advice is based on recent interviews with Evelson and his colleague, Brian Hopkins, an analyst specializing in the effect of emerging technology on IT enterprise architecture; Yvonne Genovese, a Gartner Inc. research vice president covering business applications; and her colleague, Mark Beyer, a research vice president specializing in data integration and BI.”
photo credit: AdrianAesthetic
