What is the big deal about BIG DATA?

There was a video that came out a few years ago called “Did you Know”? If you haven’t seen it, you can check it out on YouTube.   I would strongly recommend it. The premise of the video is that everything is exploding and accelerating at the same time–population growth, mountains of information, technology innovation — everything.

What really struck me was that the amount of information contained in one week of the New York Times is more information than a person would come across in a lifetime during the 18^th century. When you stop to grasp the significance of that statement it’s obvious that technology and global information channels have become so intertwined that it boggles the mind. Just like development of the space program in the 1960’s and man’s quest to walk on the moon was a catalyst for tremendous leaps in technology. Google conquering the breath of information on the web and delivering it to my fingertips through my mobile phone is truly a quantum leap in information access; and has forever changed the paradigm around knowledge that drives every day decisions.

So what is the big deal about Big Data?

Besides being one of the biggest technology paradigm shifts, I humbly submit for your consideration that Big Data could in fact be the transformative basis for “Google” for the enterprise. Think of the parallels–massive amounts of data spread across multiple domains and geographies.  The one key difference between the web and Big Data is the need for accumulation and integration of this disparate information will be increasingly required for informed decisions by business leaders.

The great news is that this technology can now be possessed by every enterprise on the planet. What made Google so successful (besides ad revenue) was search across the web. What will make this transformative technology called Big Data so successful is search, discovery and analytics across the enterprise.

Who does that better than anyone? TA DAH!! You guessed it: Lucid Imagination!! That makes me pretty excited to get out of bed in the morning to contribute to the continued explosion of innovation.