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| Big Data, The Moving Parts: Fast Data, Big Analytics, and Deep Insight (Photo credit: Dion Hinchcliffe) |
I do think there is big money in
Big Data. A lot of people do. But here is a disagreeing thought.
Is There Big Money in Big Data?
Peter Fader says a flood of consumer data collected from mobile devices may not help marketers as much as they think. ..... Few ideas hold more sway among entrepreneurs and investors these days than "Big Data." The idea is that we are now collecting so much information about people from their online behavior and, especially, through their mobile phones that we can make increasingly specific predictions about how they will behave and what they will buy. ..... what was going on 15 years ago with CRM (customer relationship management) .... ask anyone today what comes to mind when you say "CRM," and you'll hear "frustration," "disaster," "expensive," and "out of control." It turned out to be a great big IT wild-goose chase. And I'm afraid we're heading down the same road with Big Data ..... many "big data" people don't know what they don't know. ..... the still-powerful rubric of RFM: recency, frequency, monetary value. .... Ask anyone in direct marketing about RFM, and they'll say, "Tell me something I don't know." But ask anyone in e-commerce, and they probably won't know what you're talking about. ...... Chartists are looking at the data without developing fundamental explanations for why those movements are taking place ..... Among financial academics, chartists tend to be regarded as quacks. But a lot of the Big Data people are exactly like them. They say, "We are just going to stare at the data and look for patterns, and then act on them when we find them." In short, there is very little real science in what we call "data science," and that's a big problem. .... the more data we have, the more false confidence we will have
If his point is that collecting Big Data is not enough, you also have to make sense of it. I agree. But in my definition the whole idea behind Big Data is that of course you are going to make sense of it.
One part where I agree is that Big Data enthusiasm will have plenty of accompanying froth.
What he is saying is making sense of data is going to be more important than collecting data. I agree. But that is what I thought Big Data was all about. To me it never was simply collecting.
