Last month, Forrester Research released a report, "Expand Your Digital Horizon With Big Data,” for CIOs that focused on how they
should approach big data in order to
take full advantage of it for their businesses. It addressed how big data is
influencing markets across industries and is prevalent in various business
sectors, such as healthcare, web marketing and telecommunications. The report
also discussed several factors for companies to consider when working with
their data, such as redefining approaches to using data beyond traditional BI
tools.
Key points included
how major potential challenges of big data include not only the cost of the
technology but also the shortage of data scientists. Companies are starting to
seek professionals with big data skills, stimulated by new pressures to scale
large volumes of unstructured data. According to a recent Forbes article by Quentin Hardy, the “data scientist” phenomenon has
recently started to emerge in big data conversations with debates currently
over its definition, the skill set required and the data scientist’s role in
the big data trend.
Forrester analyst
Brian Hopkins, who co-authored the report with Boris Evelson, Sharyn Leaver,
Connie Moore, Alex Cullen, Mike Gilpin and Mackenzie Cahill, posted a brief summary of the report on his blog, emphasizing three key questions for companies to address in order to understand
and create a big data plan: 1) What is
new about big data? 2) What is it? and 3) How will it influence our market?
Some interesting data points, findings and recommendations from the report
include:
1. Forrester surveyed 60 of their clients
who are using or experimenting with big data computing. 75% of the surveyed
clients responded that data volume was the main reason for looking into big
data solutions. 58% of respondents in Forrester's June 2011 Global Big Data
Online Survey reported interest in insight driven by an analytics approach.
2. 70% of respondents expressed interest in
big data for managing current enterprise information. Therefore, many early
adopters are using big data solutions to understand existing information and
not new data sources.
3. Cost is the underlying theme for big data
challenges. These challenges include:
·
Volume, in terms of data amount exceeding how it can be stored cost-effectively
·
Velocity, in terms of processing data fast enough for businesses to respond and adapt rapidly
·
Variety, in terms of integration costs of adding new data feeds and interpreting variable data structures
·
Variability, in terms of complex and highly variable data structures that complicate analysis
4. Big data is still in its early stage, and
thus serves as a challenge to businesses. To succeed and overcome the
challenges, businesses should:
·
Encourage
collaboration between business and IT
·
Create new,
agile and compliant processes and approaches to deliver big data solutions
·
Adapt
quickly to fast-paced, changing technology trends for rapid growth
As
the big data trend continues to flourish throughout industries, companies that
tend to have a handle on managing and using their data are able to develop
forward-looking strategies and gain a competitive advantage over their
competitors. CIOs are facing increased pressure to figure out ways to make use
of the company’s data to achieve meaningful insight for valuable business
decisions. As a result, this brings up an important question to address: how is
the CIO’s role evolving as new big data technologies emerge and IT spending in
big data increases? Is your business feeling the pressure to join the
competitive big data crowd?
Pervasive
Big Data encompasses Pervasive’s DataRush big data
software platform
for companies to consume high volume and variable data for complex
analysis. We have been watching this big
data trend grow for the past two years and have built our tools to help with
the challenges of processing and analyzing big data.