Oh, Oh. Big Data Has Problems. Impossible.
August 21, 2015
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to “5 Problems with Big Data.” How can this be? Big Data is the new black, the new enterprise search, the new information management opportunity.
The write up states:
But when data gets big, big problems can arise.
The article identifies five issues. Most of these strike me as trivial for MBAs and failed middle school teachers to resolve before lunch. The alleged problems are:
- Storage. Hey, hey. I thought storage and the management thereof were a no brainer. But I have heard rumors that finding useful items and moving them around may contribute to digital heart burn.
- Bias. What! Incredible. I heard an MBA say at a conference not long ago that with Big Data little issues get smoothed out. Imagine. Big Data works like an electric iron with a spritz feature.
- False positives. Yo, dude. Those are things one talks about in Statistics 101. So a method says Tom and Betty have Ebola. After a quick check up at the doc in the box, both seem to be suffering from bad pizza and a sleepless night caused by worrying about the mid term statistics test. So what if a financial model predicts that GOOG and GOOGL shares no upward boundary. Hello, infinity.
- Complexity. Gasp. Layering SAP with SAS components within a SharePoint environment is complex. No way, José. This is century 21. We can crash a lander on an asteroid. We can handle a simple upgrade to an air traffic control system.
- Outputs which answer a question no one asked. Look, gentle reader, we have IBM Watson. That system can answer the question, “What sauce will tamarind enhance?” The answer which made perfect sense to me was barbeque sauce. Who worries if the question was a coded string intercepted from a anonymous post on a Dark Web forum.
Stepping back I have complete confidence in the confidence men and women pitching the Big Data thing. Five speed bumps presented as real, live problems. Big Data is the answer. Enterprise search vendors like Lucid Imagination and wizards like the IDC crowd which sold some of my work without my permission on Amazon (Dave Schubmehl, where are you?) know that Big Data will do the revenue trick.
Problems are just too darned negative. I want a happy face on that flawed, incomprehensible, irrelevant, and expensive report. This is the modern world, not tout at the chariot races pitching Nero’s team.
Get real. We have no “problems.” We have opportunities.
Stephen E Arnold, August 21, 2015
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