Big Data

3 M = MEASURE METRICS AND DATA

In the furore about Big Data it's easy to forget that it's just data. There may be more data than ever before and there may be new forms of data but that data is still only really useful if we can use it to answer SMART questions.

However, the following might put the Big Data ‘hype’ into perspective. If you take all the data that was created in the world between the dawn of civilization until the year 2010, the same amount of data will soon be generated every minute. Take astronomy as an example: up until 2000 a great deal of data had been collected about the subject and yet when the Sloan Digital Sky Survey began in 2000 its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks of operation than had already been accumulated in the history of astronomy. In the decade that followed 140 terabytes of information was gathered. In case you're wondering how much data that is, it's equivalent to 700,000 movies which would take just under 160 years of continuous watching to see them all. When the successor to the New Mexico telescope comes online in 2016 it will be able to acquire 140 terabytes every five days!¹ And the reason for this explosion of data is the datafication of the world and our ever-increasing ability to analyse that emerging data. And it is essentially this critical combination of factors that has created ‘Big Data’.

The basic idea behind the phrase ‘Big Data’ is that everything we do in our lives is or soon will leave a ...