by Angela Guess
David Fishman, vice president of marketing at Arcadia Data, recently wrote in Inside Big Data, “To read the headlines, it’s easy to think that the only thing bigger than ‘big data’ is big talk about big data, but in fact, it’s been about 3 years since Gartner’s Svetlana Sicular called the start of Hadoop’s ‘trough of disillusionment.’ …However, no less an authority than Gartner recognizes that the trough of disillusionment is not the end of the road; rather, it’s traverses the inflection point leading to the ‘slope of enlightenment‘. And with the accumulation of big data and analytic experience in the last several years, the shift shows no signs of slowing down. In 2016, big data will quite literally be the elephant in the room. Here’s what I predict you’ll hear from those who think they can continue to ignore it.”
Fishman begins his list, “Business Users Can’t Get Access to Big Data. As organizations flatten and modern mobile technologies demolish old functional barriers, those same organizations have taken to wider dissemination of BI and visualization tools across their workforce. The idea is to facilitate more autonomy for those who are closest to living, breathing business processes, customers, and marketplaces. But that’s only half the equation. Until these users can get well-structured access to ever increasing sources of information, those tools are really an exercise in rearranging the slices on the pie chart. Without direct, well-managed, granular big data access, visualization puts the chart cart before the horse.”
photo credit: Flickr/ DerrickT