The Unknowns and Big Data Integration
April 23, 2013
John Yapaola, CEO of Kapow Software gave an interesting presentation at the Kapow.wow user summit about the three main cases for Big Data. According to the Kapow Software blog article “Winning the Unknown Unknowns with Big Data Integration” the three cases are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns (UU’s). Yapaola uses post 911 as an example, to show that the United States realized that we had very little actual data about the enemy. The current known data intelligence that we had was not good enough because there were new sources of unknown information about unknown enemies and combatants that was constantly emerging. There is a similar battle in the business world. It involves the shift from “data at rest” to “data in motion.” Data at rest describes your business data, which is physically stored in databases and mainframes tucked behind the firewall. This can be thought of as the comfort zone of the business or the “known knowns” because in this area business decisions are generally made based on historical data.
“Data in motion is all the new types of digital data, constantly changing, external and unstructured. This is where businesses are crossing the chasm into the known unknowns.”
Companies know that their competitors are making changes but they don’t know exactly what changes are occurring or when. Yapaola goes on to point out that the last area the “unknowns unknowns” is the most complicated and require much more predictive intelligence and information in order to be able to identify and ultimately react. However, on the other hand unknown unknowns can be a good thing and bring about innovation. Yapaola sums it up by saying
“You have volatility built into your business – changing market conditions, new competitors entering the market, employees’ turnover, financial markets etc. The information you need is also constantly changing, in a variety of internal and external sources, multiple formats, structured and unstructured. At the end of the day, the combination of integrating the right data, the agility that you get it with and the ability to distribute it as Big Data insights directly to business users for decision making is going to determine your business trajectory. Value creation is at the heart of this Big Data movement.”
Wouldn’t it be great to be able to break down the unknowns and unknowns and predict which horse will win the Kentucky Derby or even more important how will China decide to handle North Korea. Yapaola finds an interesting way to remind us that with things constantly changing in the business world the importance of predictive tools and understanding Big Data in order to be prepared for these changes is more important than ever before.
April Holmes, April 23, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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