Big Data Moving Beyond First Movers, Going Mainstream in 2015

by Chris Preimesberger

Big data will reshape IT operations in 2015 at companies that realize these technologies and techniques must first be applied to internal operations, long before they’re used for marketing and customer projects. IT operations must be completely rethought in order to make this change.

Re-engineering for big data is critical because business processes must be geared toward action at the speed of insight. There’s no value in identifying what customers are doing every minute of the day if you can’t respond at the same speed or faster.

The key to the IoT in 2015 is starting up. If you don’t have data, you have nothing to analyze. Much effort is going to be placed on simply wiring things up to start collecting data. But remember: IoT by itself is irrelevant. It’s what you do with the data coming from it that changes everything. Putting IoT data to work is the imperative for 2015.

Companies that enable their business analysts to use the tools they know and love today, rather than spending time and money hiring and enabling data scientists, are on the road to success.

Structured data always has focused on questions around “what?” The real value comes from asking new questions, including “why?” These questions are based on context, which comes from human information. Understand my “why,” and you can deliver value to me in entirely new ways. Applications that don’t ask and answer “why” questions will be commoditized into nothing in very short order.

In 2015, the difference between “big data” and “big business intelligence” will become more pronounced. Big BI doesn’t generate disruptive results; it’s more of the same old thing—just bigger and more expensive.

This year, predictive analytics will go from “cool new thing” to “you’d better have it, or else.” It’s no longer hype.

Big data technologies and techniques will be the only way for enterprises to keep up with threats. If organizations are not proactively monitoring and predictively modeling the threat, they’re already dead.

For enterprise big data teams, finding data-literate business people will be the highest priority in 2015 and beyond. Key skills to look for include the ability to architect solutions that can be abstracted away from their underlying systems and languages. Being able to work across multiple platforms is an also a strong asset.

The data scientist will soon be replaced by the data-savvy business person. Connecting, analyzing and interpreting data will be far more important than direct technical skills. Thinking up new questions and figuring out what data can be used to answer them will be the most important skill. Joining structured machine data with unstructured human-created data will be another difficult—but valuable—skill to find.