Robin Bloor – author of a number of books like Cloud Computing for Dummies and Chief Analyst and Co-founder of the Bloor Group, has just finished telling an Australian audience this week that Big Data is not much more than an “utterly meaningless” term created by marketers.

Not that Bloor dismisses Big Data as anything more than a smart marketing way of describing one of the latest trends to sweep the technology industry. 

To the contrary, Bloor says that companies leveraging Big Data are growing at a faster rate to their competitors and, indeed, espouses the fact that Big Data Analytics is transforming traditional business around the world.

Bloor makes the point that some business leaders, from CEO down to C-level executives, are not sufficiently aware of the value to their business of the exploration and analysis of the large volumes of data (now called Big Data) they are now confronted with.

But, as he told iTWire, he expects this situation to change over the next 10 years, particularly with C-level executives.

Bloor makes his case for greater analysis of data (Big Data) - in the interests of businesses gaining competitive advantage - over the “well-developed intuition” that successful executives have about their businesses. 

And, according to Bloor, those are the people (C-level execs) that are going to be “brought down in the next decade…these people who believe that their instincts about the business are better, rather than if they did an analysis of the data actually gathered….and they might be among those successful CEOs or C level executives whose names might be in the business press,” Bloor adds, almost as an afterthought.

Bloor does make the point that organisations are now confronted with far bigger volumes of data – most of it unstructured – coming into their businesses, and arriving at far greater speed from many more different sources, then ever before.

According to Bloor, many businesses traditionally - in sectors like telecoms and banking – did have a lot of data to process and significant issues to deal with, but it was primarily internal data, and not data from external sources.

But now, telecoms, banks and other businesses are having to confront the even greater challenge of “marrying” the large amount of data coming in from those outside sources with internally-generated data. 

“You might not have the meta data well structured and you might not know how to properly join it with (internal) data you are already processing. Then you have a whole set of problems you didn’t have before, and somebody actually has to resolve if they are going to use the data, some of which (consumer and essential network data) turns out to be very useful.”

“I think that’s really what is going on with Big Data that CIOs ought to be concerned with,” Bloor says. 

Bloor does say, however, that if CIOs are not actually faced with a lot of external data then “there’s nothing that’s changed and they have nothing to be specifically concerned about as far as their internal data is concerned.”

And, he also says that if the situation has not changed, and a CIO is primarily dealing with internally-generated data, “then the words Big Data are utterly meaningless to you”.

Source: www.itwire.com