Big Data at Work

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The Human Side of Big Data

If your goal is to make something good happen with big data in your organization, perhaps the most important component is the human one. After all, almost every other major factor of big data production is free or cheap. The software is often open source; the hardware is highly commoditized. The data is often either already lying around within your organization, or obtainable at little cost from, say, the internet. There are exceptions to this pattern, of course. But the humans who do big data work are difficult to find and keep, and expensive. And it’s pretty clear that not much will happen without them.

Thus far the primary focus on the human side of big data has involved the data scientists, or the people who produce ...