The real story behind big data

Abstract

Thanks to the promise of business analytics, seeing data as the new oil is all the rage these days, which is why something like 85 per cent of Fortune 500 companies are investing in big data initiatives. As The Economist recently put it, “Data are to this century what oil was to the last one: a driver of growth and change.” But as The Economist also noted, successfully mining data really isn’t like extracting, refining, valuing, and trading any previous resource because it “changes the rules for markets and it demands new approaches from regulators.” It also requires deeper thought from users, which is why, despite the exponential growth and interest in business analytics, there are big question marks over the extent to which organizations actually realize value from analytics.