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Big Data: The Data Revolution is Here and There's No Going Back
150 years ago Wendell Philips, American abolitionist and lawyer, commented that “Revolutions never go backwards.” There’s a revolution happening right now and Big Data is at the heart of it. An excellent new free whitepaper, called Data rEvolution, by CSC researchers William Koff and Paul Gustafson, describes how big data and business intelligence technologies are revolutionizing nearly every industry and changing the world as we know it.
The CSC report is both interesting and comprehensive in its breadth of discussion. It includes a summary and high-level discussion of Big Data technologies and platforms, like MapReduce, Hadoop, and NoSQL, and also gives many practical examples which illustrate how these new technologies are being applied today. Core to the discussion is the idea that much of today’s data is unstructured and “doesn’t fit neatly into the orderly – structured – world of the past. The challenge of the Data rEvolution is to unite and process the data, connect the dots, and glean new insights. And, do all this rapidly.”
The report contrasts how our relationship to data has changed over the last decade. The table below, taken from the report, summarizes some of those differences.
| From | To |
| Analyzing | Predicting |
| Collecting | Connecting |
| Data as a fact of life | Data as a factor of production |
| Information | Insights |
| “One version of the truth” | Multiple sources and perspectives |
| Structured | Unstructured |
| Relational | Non-relational |
| Centralized processing | Distributed parallel processing |
| Terabytes | Petabytes, exabytes, … |
| Analytics as niche | Analytics for everyone |
| Limited participation | An era of experimentation and innovation |
The report concludes that ” Great discoveries come from having a broad spectrum of knowledge. The Data rEvolution opens up a world of exciting opportunities for establishing new insights, products, services, partnerships and roles. With data a key factor of production, data’s growth and leverage will be a basis for business innovation for years to come. Organizations need to prepare for the data-centered economy.”
