I Thought Big Data Were Already Relevant

September 4, 2014

Here is an article that makes you question the past two years, from the Federal Times comes “Steps To Make Big Data Relevant” from August 2014. For the past two years, big data has been the go-to term for technology and information professionals. IT companies have sold software meant to harness big data’s potential and generate revenue. So why is there an article explaining how to make it relevant now? It is using the federal government as an example and any bureaucrat can tell you government implementation is slow.

If, however, you do not even know what big data is and you want to get started, this article explains it in basic terms. It has three steps people need to think about to develop a big data plan:

  1. Determine what questions need to be asked of the data.
  2. Determine where all of the data you want is located and ask the data owners’ to understand the data’s quality.
  3. Decide what it means to answer these questions and use technology to help answer them.

Then the last suggestion is to have a dedicated team to manage big data:

“To address that challenge, federal agencies need a chief data officer and data architects or scientists. The chief data officer would keep the chief information officer and chief information security officer better informed about the value of their information and how to interact with that information to make it useful. Chief data architects/scientists are needed to design the data infrastructure and quantify the value of the data at its lowest common elements.”

When you read over the questions, you will see they are an implementation plan for any information technology software: what do you want to do, figure out how to do it, make a plan to implement it. Big data is complex, but the steps governing it are not.

Whitney Grace, September 04, 2014

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

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