The Big Data-Driven Business

Chapter 1Big Data, Big Benefits

Data, information, facts—whatever term you want to use, collecting and analyzing data have played a crucial part in humankind's ability to survive and to thrive since the dawn of consciousness. The earliest humans shared with each other what they knew of the world from their brains, those powerful catalogers of data in their skulls: hunt now, not later; eat this, not that; sleep here, not there.

Data is how we understand our world, and data has the capability to take us far beyond the surface impressions that our senses give us. Even though the world may appear flat to the eye, the ancient Greeks determined that the earth was round. In 240 BC, Eratosthenes used the different angles of shadows in two locations at high noon on the summer solstice to calculate the planet's circumference with remarkable accuracy—to within 1.6 percent.

Much of the mathematics, geometry, and other information compiled and shared by the likes of Eratosthenes essentially disappeared as the Dark Ages descended after the fall of Rome. But with Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1440—as statistician and writer Nate Silver points out in his book The Signal and the Noise—the amount of information available to societies again began to grow. Printed content enabled data to grow exponentially.

With his mind soaking up an expanding ocean of data created by these newly printed books, a sixteenth-century Roman Catholic church administrator named Nicolaus Copernicus ...