The Culture of Big Data

The Culture of Big Data Analytics

It’s Not Just About Numbers

Today’s conversational buzz around big data analytics tends to hover around three general themes: technology, techniques, and the imagined future (either bright or dystopian) of a society in which big data plays a significant role in everyday life.

Typically missing from the buzz are in-depth discussions about the people and processes—the cultural bedrock—required to build viable frameworks and infrastructures supporting big data initiatives in ordinary organizations.

Thoughtful questions must be asked and thoroughly considered. Who is responsible for launching and leading big data initiatives? Is it the CFO, the CMO, the CIO, or someone else? Who determines the success or failure of a big data project? Does big data require corporate governance? What does a big data project team look like? Is it a mixed group of people with overlapping skills or a hand-picked squad of highly trained data scientists? What exactly is a data scientist?

Those types of questions skim the surface of the emerging cultural landscape of big data. They remind us that big data—like other so-called technology revolutions of the recent past—is also a cultural phenomenon and has a social dimension. It’s vitally important to remember that most people have not considered the immense difference between a world seen through the lens of a traditional relational database system and a world seen through the lens of a Hadoop Distributed File System.

This paper ...