Let’s face it, Americans like things big.
Big country, big cars, big houses, big salaries, big goals. We like our Macs big, our fries supersized, and our presidents tall. (At 5’8″, poor little Mike Dukakis didn’t stand a chance against the lofty 6’2″ George H.W. Bush .) And come on, you know you want your kid to be the biggest in the class.
So when we look at the behemoth that is modern data, we can say with American pride, “That’s big!”
So what is big data? It’s the 40 billion photos that Facebook handles in its user database. It’s the million customer transactions that Walmart handles every hour of every day. It’s the information that will skyrocket from 2.75 zettabytes in 2012 to nearly 8 zettabytes by 2015. (What’s a zettabyte? A billion terabytes. A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes. I don’t know about you, but those are numbers that I can’t even begin to visualize.)
Of course, all this data has to go somewhere, so businesses are being forced to constantly enhance their bandwidth and storage. But more important, they are looking for ways – and for workers – to make sense of all that data, to manage, interpret, analyze, and access the piles of information that can be a boon or an albatross.
Because, no matter how much we love big, Big Data can be too big. According to Douglas Merrill, former CIO/VP of Engineering at Google, “With too little data, you won’t be able to make any conclusions that you trust. With loads of data you will find relationships that aren’t real.” As any good scientist will tell you, given enough data, you can demonstrate any correlation you want; you can “prove” any particular bias.
So regardless of the hype surrounding Big Data, companies may be well served not by simply collecting data, but by hiring IT professionals with the real world experience that allows them to understand business challenges and how to select data relevant to them.