How to drive a car

Big data for non-data scientists

Lets talk about your car (ok, if you don’t have one, imagine you have), nowadays cars has a lot of sensors collecting data all the time, they’re everywhere: engines, tires, wheels, doors, there are even cameras to help you to park, etc.

Ok, this said, let’s think about something for a while:

Imagine your car buzzing every time your car’s wheels did a complete round in turn of itself warning you about your current speed, so would you be able to calculate what is your car current speed just from hearing the sound, verifying the time range between the buzzes and driving at same time. Could you do this, pretty easy, isnt it? No! Obviously not!

That’s why i hope (I rlly do☺) that your car has a speedometer, otherwise would be impossible to drive in nowadays streets. But you must agree that all these data used to provide you this information was there before, the problem is that it was in a shape that couldn’t tell you nothing, it was just a huge, opaque and shapeless amount of data.

Showing you this information (your current speed) depends on a process of: collecting, processing and showing you an insight derived from these sensor’s previously untouched data. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_speed_sensor)

This is Big Data in a microscope, Big Data it is about providing insights from some dataset reasonably large, integrating it with your business processes.

At this silly example about the speedometer, we can assume that the insight we had is to find out what is car’s current speed, while your business operations could be: driving without getting speeding fines or reduce the amount of fines reasonably, so we can also say that running a big company today without using Big Data, is just like driving a car without a speedometer.

In fact, Big Data don’t relies solely on providing this insights, it relies on storing, curating, processing, providing insights, analysing large datasets, etc. Everything since you can get benefit from using these tools, initiatives and technologies it provides you.

Wheel (ba-dam-tss), I hope it helped and didnt made your even more confused about it!