It’s Not the Size of Your Data that Matters, it’s How You Use it.
The term Big Data is bandied around a lot these days. It’s true that there is a ton of data out there and it’s true that everyday it grows at an exponential rate. If you’d like to have your mind blown about the amount of data we are producing click here.
But so what? What does it all mean? What can we do with all this data?
The fact of the matter is that humans can’t do anything with data. We can’t interact with it or use it. That because we can’t process data, we process information. It’s information that allows use to work smarter, to save time and to make better decisions. So while more information will certainly help us in our lives, more data will not.
Mine’s bigger than yours
Time and time again at conferences I hear people bragging about the volume of data they have access to. Gigabyte, terabytes, whateverbytes. While people are often able to boast about the vast swathes of data they ‘process’, they are less adept at explaining the results of all this processing.
It simply doesn’t matter how much data you have access to or the volume that you process. What is important is how you process your data and what you do with it once processed.
Perhaps a good way to think of this is to picture a funnel. Consider the sand you pour into the top of the funnel as data and the sand that falls out the bottom as information. Information that is relevant to your business and can be understood by a human. You’ll quickly see that pouring more data in the top has no impact on the amount of information that falls out the bottom.
The answer to better insights and better decisions is not more data. It’s better processing.
Ask not what your data can do for you, but what you can do for your data.
The key to processing data is not to look at what the data can tell you, but rather to approach the data with a specific question in mind. As the link above suggests, the sheer volume of data we produce today is overwhelming. This data can then be cut and spliced into a near infinite number of permutations. Unless you know specifically what you’re looking for, you’re going to get lost in the data jungle.
The challenge, and indeed the opportunity, for big data is to clearly define what you are looking for. As the data starts to pour in, you will likely drift from this goal. It’s critical however, that every effort is made to refocus your attention until you find what you were searching for. This requires a shift in focus from looking at ‘big data’ towards looking for the ‘right data’.
