Last time we discussed Big Data in,‘Be Wary About Jumping On The Big Data Bandwagon’, I was careful to talk about the danger that can result from engaging in any Big Data projects without a focused plan of attack.

As Big Data is so significant an issue these days, and indeed seems to be rising even higher up the CIO agenda – with Gartner recently seeing it increasingly on to-do list, it is worth us spending a little longer on the topic.

Maybe a good way to think about Big Data is this:

• You’re an astronomer, looking for a new nebula or black hole way out there. (Remember, Big Data comes out of the research realm, where they were gathering vast amounts of data, collating it and analysing it.)

• If you’re convinced there’s something for you in some remote piece of the night sky, but you don’t know quite where, you will be totally happy rolling your sleeves up and working through all the data you can get your hands on to discover something.

• If your University or research centre can afford it, sifting through Teraflops of data per day is just par for the course.

Finding your hypothesis
But, you’re not an astronomer. Granted, you too want to be a Hero to the board for discovering the equivalent for your industry of the Higgs-Boson. But you may need a working hypothesis – the equivalent of ‘I am pretty sure Star NGC47Whatchamacallit is hiding something interesting’ to direct your efforts.

As I hope everyone is starting to realise, simply having lots of data – the equivalent in business of that Terabyte of star map information – is not enough.

Changing tack slightly, look at the way Facebook fared when it went public. At first, it stormed forward, but then it dropped back very quickly. Part of the reason for that was that people looked thought, Yes, I can see you have all of that interaction and personal information about people, but, how much value can you elicit from that and how exactly can you ‘monetise’ it? So the valuation has dropped back and the market is saying, Come back and tell us, Mr Zuckerberg, how you are going to do it.

The end of the gold rush
I think there is a tailing off of the ‘gold rush’ of Big Data. The premium isn’t just amassing vast amounts of data; it’s the laser-sharp business probing of really, any amount of data, that is the smart move.

Do that, and I am sure you will find the equivalent of your own new business nebula – and avoid the black hole you don’t want the business to get sucked into!

• 
•