Big data has been sashaying around the VIP area for a while, courted by all and sundry as one of 'the next big things'. Alas, she's not quite ready to go out and hit the dance floor and mingle with the mainstream; her make-up isn't flawless, and the dress doesn't fit properly. Yet.
Big data isn't new to the scene though, In 2001 Doug Laney published a report that formally addressed the rise of data velocity, volume and variety.
11 years later, Gartner has now placed big data at #7 on it's strategic tech trend prediciton for 2012:
With potential to help address issues with the health and socio-economic circumstances of states and institutions who can harness it, unsurprisingly the major advancements have been made in leveraging it for business.
There's a slight problem though - as I said the make up isn't flawless and the dress doesn't fit. Translate that from tedious analogy-land to plain English: companies are still battling to harness the data and leverage it to add value.
Harnessing it
The usual mix of established corporates and start ups are flying around trying to figure up the best way to capture, package and break up the vast swathes of data that is mined from us everyday by various consumer application APIs such as Foursquare and Facebook. Some of the players in this arena are companies such as Oracle, with a multi-platform offering, and MapR Technologies with it's Apache Hadoop project.
However, it's not only tech companies developing solutions. It's also a top 3 priority at Walmart and Intuit. This is highlights how seriously it's being taken, with the accepted wisdom of it becoming part of a business infrastructure. With much of the recession being blamed on CDO's (Collatoralised Debt Obligations), perhaps we will see a new type of CDO help us out of it as Michael Vizard asks, "Is it time for CDO's (Chief Data Officers)"?
Leveraging it
It's all well and good with the infrastructure level platforms mentioned above being able to harness that data, but the biggest challenge is to make sense of it. This is where I think start ups can play a key role in creating apps that can crunch the data and make the data valuable to business.
Companies such as the mysterious Continuuity (founded by former Yahoo VP Todd Papaioannou) and Wibidata are looking to address this. However, most of the companies looking to leverage the data are still in their infancy or not quite there yet. Some are working well in their sector such as Runkeeper and 100Plus but in the main, Gartner's prediction that we're 2 years away from the mainstream is (unsurprisingly) true to the mark.
Killing creativity?
The question that interests me the most however, is how big data will affect creativity. Will it mean original ideas will get forced off the dancefloor and kicked out of the club via the back door? Will we see the two enhance each other?
I asked this question a while back on Quora and got some great responses. Felix Velarde, MD at Underwired, noted that, " The best creative ideas therefore enable splintered expression, based on the recipient/electee's understanding of and motivations in relation to the brand".
A fellow veteran of the digital world, Trevor Chambers also commented that, "data needs a start point, an idea doesn't." He goes on to say that "at some point in the near future, every brand will know everything about everyone, data will no longer be a big advantage. At that point the only difference will be originality, creativity and ideas."
For me, there is a battle to be fought between creativity and big data as creatives grapple with ideas and concepts that fit into a more individually targeted approach than ever seen before. Over time, this meshing together will smooth out and a by-product will be what Tom Cunniff calls, "Big magic" becoming more prominent. Tom explains it as follows:
"With the pressure to be accountable, many of us want to be smarter than magic. We want to crush problems with the weight of our frontal lobes, with the elegance of our algorithms, with the sheer bigness of the Big Data in our Big Spreadsheets.
What lies beyond data is something bigger and harder to explain, but immensely more valuable. So our real job is to keep looking for magic. And when we start to feel magic happening, our greatest contribution is to get the hell out of the way and let it happen".
I do believe that taking into account all of the above, we'll see some creative ideas falling in step with a more segmented approach to marketing whilst 'big magic' will too have it's role to play. But when that time comes for big data take to the mainstream dance-floor, I think we'll find her taking the slow jam at the end of the night with big magic, wandering off in Web 3.0 harmony.
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