Velocity is the Neglected V
January 27, 2014
Isn’t this three V thing getting a bit long in the tooth? Ah, well, the convention serves as a vehicle for an emphasis on speed in Gigaom‘s piece, “Big Data and the Missing ‘V’.” Writer Alain Vandenborne notes that two of Big Data’s famous three V’s, volume and variety, have received a lot of attention, but insists that the third, velocity, is just as important to an organization’s success.
He writes:
“Velocity is what differentiates big data from traditional business intelligence (BI) practices. It enables real-time decisions and actions, whereas traditional BI generally only covers volume and variety. In a traditional data warehouse, data is typically collected and analyzed at the end of the day, and then made available the following morning, at the start of business. This creates issues, as a lot can happen since the last transaction—continued customer activity, supply chain issues, product faults, etc.—and companies can’t afford to wait for this data to become available.”
He has a point, and backs it up with some examples. One is feedback posted on social media—one negative comment left unaddressed overnight can grow into a firestorm of negative press before start-of-business the next day. Another good illustration involves the capacity for financial institutions to flag a potentially fraudulent charge and stop it mid-transaction.
Yes, customers have come to expect promptness on a scale like never before, and many businesses that can’t deliver will find themselves falling behind, no matter how much, or how many types of, data they can process (comparatively) slowly. The article suggests companies with a need for speed turn to cloud services like AWS and SAP Hana.
I wonder: Have companies overcome their hesitation to store data on third-party servers? Are we at the point where businesses will have no choice if they want to prosper?
Cynthia Murrell, January 27, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
