The ‘Big’ Fallacy of Big Data | @BigDataExpo #BigData

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you've been hearing about the world of Big Data nonstop. Big Data promises fortune and power to those that can wield the somewhat mystical and often nebulous power of "Big Data". Unfortunately for the rest of us mere mortals Big Data is built on an out-right lie that is both pernicious and unfortunate. It's hiding right there in plain sight in the name itself. The word, BIG. The Fallacy of Big Data is that you have to have a lot of data for it to be relevant. The common catch phrase is: "More data = more insights". There is a nugget of truth to this in that, in some cases, a lot of data is needed in order to establish valid patterns and create real insight into the activity the data represents. More often than not however, this creates a significant challenge to those responsible for performing analytics which is sifting through a mountain of data to find the parts that actually matter. Recent studies have shown that fully 80% of data analysis is spent just tinkering with the data to get it into a usable format. So we see that more data creates a massive data curation issue, and leaves us with more work to do to even start experimenting, much less monetizing our data.

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