“Big data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it…”
Last year TED speaker, best-selling author and Duke University professor Dan Ariely posted this status update on his personal Facebook page. The message has since been shared nearly 800 times across the social network and liked by over 1,700 people. It’s also been widely quoted online, across blogs, forums and news sites.
For years now, Big Data — the name give to the deluge of digital interactions companies have with clients — has been hyped up as a kind of “crude oil” of the new millennium, hugely valuable but useless if unrefined. Yet many businesses still haven’t quite figured out how to take this plentiful resource and turn it into fuel. A recent study by Gartner showed that while 64 percent of companies are deploying or planning to deploy a Big Data project, 56 percent struggle to understand how to get value from their data. A big part of the problem: Advanced software suites and analytics experts are generally needed to make any sense of the terabytes of raw information that can be collected daily.
