Outsell Inc., a founder member of BIIA, has just released a report on ‘Big-Data’ authored by Frank Gilbane, President of Outsell’s Gilbane Services
“Big-data” has a lot of buzz these days, and if the big-data buzz is based in reality, there will be a lot more data available to create and harvest new information products. The promise of big-data is that it provides additional value, increases productivity, and even exposes and creates new information and decision support in real time. These are big claims. Publishers and information providers must put and keep big-data on their radar, and start considering whether, when, and how big-data will change their business. This report focuses on big-data, its implications, and its importance to our industry.
This latest report from Outsell includes:
- A definition and examples of big-data;
- A discussion of the value of big-data for publishers and information providers
- An overview of big-data technologies and technology providers;
- Several challenges that managing big-data presents to the information industry;
- Essential actions for utilizing big data and developing products and services for the industry.
Is big-data qualitatively different from the data we already have? Is more actually not just better but different? Put another way, are the advantages of big-data disruptive, allowing possible leaps in our knowledge, or is it incremental? Where is the value of big-data?
In Outsell’s opinion, there is something different with big-data – an inflection point, with new business models, data products, and services; increased productivity; new discoveries; and new ways to assess corporate value as big-data increasingly becomes a core raw material of business. The increased data transparency concomitant with big-data is a key contributor to value in multiple ways, boosting productivity, fueling data integration “mash-ups,” and inspiring new business opportunities.
Whatever one thinks about the value of data in itself and the emergence of information from the sheer scale of big-data, there is no doubting the power of combining data with software to produce significantly enhanced information value in multiple ways. Increased value comes from easier access, better communication, and more efficient workflow processes.
To interpret big-data assets will hinge on analytics and the author indicated amongst other challenges possible shortages of skills in statistics, modeling, and possibly computer science to analyze the new data sets being created and the analytics being generated. This is a ‘must read’ report!
