A couple of people have tweeted links to this article in my stream this morning and a couple of comments in it stood out for me, particularly bearing in mind I’ve already considered the concept of big data. Money quote from that piece:
I’m troubled by the impression I have that big data is somewhere we should be at without understanding why we should be at it and what we can get from it.
Moving back to the piece from VentureBeat, one of the standout sentences for me was this one:
The phrase “big data” is now beyond completely meaningless.
I’ve never, very liked the term big data because from my point of view, it never was meaningful. And yet there are still people having conversations that go “what are we doing about big data”.
This is the wrong question. The question is “how do we best exploit the data we have, how do we improve the quality of the data we have”. Scale has very little to do with this when you think about it.
Data is all about the questions you ask of out.