‘Big data’ has been talked about keenly in i-gaming circles, and beyond, for some time now. But what is it and what does it mean for the data industry?
“BIG data,” screamed the headlines ushering in a new world of exciting opportunity thanks to the arrival of so-called big data.
But what is big data? It really depends who you ask. The reliable if occasionally flawed Wikipedia defines big data as “an all-encompassing term for any collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand data management tools or traditional data processing applications.”
In a March 2014 article, the Financial Times went some way to highlight the confusion surrounding the issue when it called big data “a vague term for a massive phenomenon that has rapidly become an obsession with entrepreneurs, scientists, governments and the media.”
In that FT piece, author Tim Hartford pointed out that through our communications, movements, actions and preferences, so much of which is now chronicled digitally, our lives can now be recorded and quantified in a way that would have been hard to imagine just a decade ago.
Writing for Forbes magazine in 2013, Lisa Arthur outlined big data in similar terms: “Big data is a collection of data from traditional and digital sources inside and outside your company that represents a source for ongoing discovery and analysis.” Arthur’s definition is more encouraging than Wikipedia’s since it presents not a problem but an opportunity.
She also wrote that defining the term is problematic, that not everyone – even “in the C-suite” – is on the same page. In her article, Arthur discussed the opportunities presented by big data but most notably, she deployed a particularly helpful phrase: big data marketing.
And that’s an important suffix, that “marketing” for it cuts to the heart of the big data opportunity. It’s not what you have or how you store it or precisely how much data there is or if it’s unstructured or multi-structured. No, what matters is that you know what you have and what it can tell your business. Understanding the value in the data you collect could well inform marketing strategies for years to come. Yet, as Hartford points out in his FT article, “big data has arrived, big insights have not.”
Read the full article in the issue 4 of iNTERGAMINGi
