Big Data - Are we and you prepared to handle it... ?

Every day we come across articles, columns or blogs about Big Data in some newspaper, magazine or management journal. Authors, like on our blog, praise its advantages and demonstrate concrete scenarios and situations where Big Data can improve things for the better. But the question we should ask ourselves is: Are we ready to handle Big Data? 

Research Company Gartner predicts that 4.4 million new jobs in the field of Big Data will be created worldwide by 2015. Despite that fact, McKinsey & Company in one of their reports recently revealed that they expect a shortage of up to 190,000 data scientists and 1.5 million managers with capabilities to use Big Data successfully by 2018. This insight is dramatic considering that data-driven companies on average show a significantly superior performance in many benchmarking studies. So how can companies, individuals and countries prepare themselves for this new era of data? 

Universities around the world are jumping on the new trend and offer courses in Big Data. My own Alma Mater, IE Business School, recently introduced an Elective in the MBA about Big Data. Other schools like Columbia University have used additional funding to establish a new institutes in this field that offer several courses around Big Data and would eventually provide entire Master degrees to interested students. Similar Masters Degrees are being offered by George Washington University, NYU and Schulich Business School. Universities are trying to fill the gap by offering relevant courses to  potential students. Nevertheless, the scale of available Big Data education is by far too little yet and traditional business schools will find it difficult to say goodbye to their preferred case study methodology, which is less adequate to teach Big Data. 

Companies on the other hand try to compensate for the trend by hiring legions of consultants from IBM, Accenture and Co. to participate in this new development and to bring new knowledge to their organizations. Despite short-term impact, it is not rare though that these kind of initiatives lose traction once the consultants leave after handing over the initiative to employees. This may be due to pure lack of skills on part of employees. The failure of such an initiative may be attributed to corporate cultures, which may not be data-driven per se. A change in culture is a required to encourage employees to use data to address business issues. Companies therefore should never lose focus to build strong in-house capabilities about Big Data and to change the culture from the top to a more data-driven organization that empowers employees to take decisions based on data rather than rigid rules. 

It is clear that not every individual can leave work and study full-time now to become proficient in Big Data. Individuals interested in Big Data can use free online courses available on platforms like Coursera or Open2Study. In addition, they could join pilot projects in their direct surroundings to gain experience in this new field of business.

Lastly, if you are still not convinced that looking into Big Data might be worth it, the average annual salary for data scientists in the U.S. is $80,000 to $220,000 based on the website www.glassdoor.com. Not bad for a bunch of geeks that by now seem to be seen more and more on main street.

Huge Data!

The new iPhone 5 – yet another James Bond to collect Big Data?

Congratulations to all iPhone lovers and owners with the launch of the new iPhone 5 (5c and 5s) and also iOS7. I have installed the iOS7 on my iPhone 4 recently and like it so far. It is nice, and has furnished most of the former features like visual-touch screen effects and software convenience. It is topped with additional sound effects and ringtones as well as a few other slight improvements. Here is an external link to a video describing what is new in the new iOS7:

Another feature that caught my attention was the camera roll nuances. In the older version along with the photo albums there was a map with locations of where the pictures were taken, if you activated the location services. In new iOS7 it is time-stamped and indicates the location of the photo as well. You have an option to collate your pictures by the moments taken as well as by the locations. On the full scale map you see your stacks of pictures by locations and the screen of the phone lets you zoom in to see the exact location where the picture was taken with 2-3 meters maximum possible error. On the one hand this is an amazing option, but on the other hand, if the iPhone knows it, then Mr. Tim Cook and his intelligent employees know this information for sure, too. And you don’t know how large and ongoing that spiral of flow is. So iPhone makers have the meta data of where you shoot pictures and when you do it. But I am wondering, is it possible that they also see the content of the pictures???

Fashionable Big Data: The “it” Trend

I’m really into fashion, love following blogs, using Instagram and Tumblr to know the new trends and get inspired by new ideas.  After reading a case study about Burberry, for my marketing class, and discovering that this 157 year old brand has evolved and adapted to keep up with most of the new technology without loosing its essence (please refer to artofthetrench.com and see what I mean), I started to wonder about the connection between Big Data and Fashion and how the fashion industry could be related with the new “It” trend of technology?

As we already know, Big Data (BD) can help us gain insights to improve already existing products and services or to create new ones.  Lately this hasn’t been a mystery to fashion designers and trendy retail stores, that’s why these two are using information to understand what the customer wants and additionally get a financial benefit out of it by optimizing production and by minimizing the leftovers of garments. How? By hiring companies such as Bodymetrics, that collects data about body measurements and sizes and gives this statistics to the designer and retailer to better predict the demand of their products according to how many items of a certain size are sold.

Another way in which BD is improving the fashion business is trough social media, in this case the information gathered from Facebook, Pinterest, Polyvore, Instagram, and other social websites can help to figure out consumer sentiments towards a certain brand or product, which is essential feedback for retailers and designers and avoids them from relying exclusively on post-experience or intuition. 

Now that we have a clearer perspective about how the fashion industry and Big Data are linked, we can confirm that this is a match made in heaven. And can ones more ratify that BD is improving everything around it, so tell me what’s not to LOVE about BIG DATA?

iData?!...

In the line of the latest development of smartphones and tablets, we have witnessed the explosive development and sales of applications for the mobiles. These applications contain loads and loads of information as well as entertainment tools. If smart phones are that smart, could they carry and analyze Big Data?  

Yes, they can!

Nowadays our smart friends can carry and analyze big data on the spot. The new, for then, application of finding and scanning bar codes or QR codes is not a surprise for anybody today. This application contains and recognizes information from tons of products listed on the Internet.  You can easily get price quotes for any book or perfume with a bar code, or decipher any message loaded onto the QR code on any promo or ad. 

Not only app developers pile data for us, but the new trend in mobile Big Data applications is, they are becoming based more and more on UGC - user generated content. For example, Waze – a free GPS navigation application in the AppStore caught my attention when I first met its co-founder – Uri Levine as guest speaker in Venture Lab Competition day at IE. You open the application on your phone before driving your car to the bar on the weekend and immediately become a contributor of the application and are notched by the program. It was gradually making sense to me, how a user generated system was gaining such popularity and it eventually clicked the button when I read in the news about the sale of the Waze to Google for 1.3 billion (yes, billion) US dollars only 6 years after its establishment.

Cloud computing and data warehouses is another application of Big Data and its use in mobile apps has created controversial rumors about leakage or even “legal” delivery of private information contained in clouds to the application developers. Recently the information security issues has brought a higher attention onto the developers and put the security issues on demand. 

So with growing loads of information and Big Data, life and business solutions are being made easier, but the security and safety of the information have become an issue meanwhile. Make sure you keep your very private information really private!

Big Data Stats!!!!!!!!

Big data – a journey 90 years back

Big data – a journey 90 years back

Some weeks ago, when I was in a hotel in South East Asia just about getting ready to check-out, the TV was still on and the movie J. Edgar, directed by Clint Eastwood was being shown. Leonardo DiCaprio stars in the move as J. Edgar Hoover, the powerful head of the FBI for nearly 50 years. There is a scene pretty early in the movie when J. Edgar Hoover is fighting for more competences for the Bureau, which so far has not been granted any teeth. All his passion goes into fighting and solving crimes. Maybe the most important weapon in his view is central access to data. For instance, he fought for a centralization of nationwide available fingerprints.

Just a few scenes after the hearing, you can see J. Edgar Hoover in the FBI premises when huge loads of finger print files arrive. This was just a first step and shortly thereafter an identification unit was formed. This all happened in as early as 1924 – almost 90 years ago.

To me this is an early example of big data. No internet, no satellite communication, no computers, not even copy machines as we know them today existed at that time. Can you imagine the amount of data in physical paper that was collected with the fingerprint files in just one location? However, this kind of data volume would probably fit on just one server blade of today’s computing centers. We can consider this as one of the early examples of big data, however, not in any way comparable with the data amounts collected nowadays – whether by corporations about their customers or state authority based on whatever motive. By current standards this kind of data collection would not even be considered “small data”…

The next problem after the collection of the data, is analytics and data mining. There was no electronic index and you can find the right data just with three key words or two mouse clicks. A sophisticated filing system had to be in place to enable agents to work with the fingerprints. Frankly speaking, for a non-expert like me, it sounds incredible how they worked on comparing finger prints from a crime scene with file data in their archives.

Within a short period of time from some feared bureaucratic organization the FBI has been transformed into a highly respected agency based on this new approach of fighting crime. Data collection and development of new techniques in crime scene investigation represented key factors for the success of the agency. Today, the FBI employs more than 36,000 special agents and support professionals, overseeing a budget of more than 8 billion US dollars. Besides its US operations, the FBI now runs field offices around the world.

Watch the trailer of “J. Edgar” (2011) on IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1616195/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1