Over the weekend the Sunday Telegraph published an article called ‘Big
Data – Not just for geeks’ discussing how big data is moving from being the
preserve of companies IT departments to something of interest to the wider
organisation. I was struck with the similarities seen with the expansion of GI
from the core practitioners to the rapidly widening sphere of users, especially
since the introduction of BIM.
Of course this is not entirely surprising as GIS and BIM systems are
based on Big Data and Big Data being collected by other industries will often
have a spatial component.
There are many different claims for what represents the birth of ‘big
data’ with the term first being coined in 1997. Originally it was discussed as
a challenge to systems and networks, having too much data to store and transfer
in an economical fashion. However with improvements in technology big data
became increasingly seen as an opportunity. In the UK one of the first (and now
famous) mainstream applications of big data was the inception of supermarket
club cards in the mid 1990’s. Under the auspices of rewarding customer loyalty
Tesco with Clubcard and Sainsbury with Nectar (I can’t remember what it used to
be called, they kept changing it) suddenly had unparalleled access to customer
insight.
Initially (in fact until very recently) for most companies Big Data was
there preserve of their IT or software engineering departments overseen by a
CIO or equivalent. The ownership belonged to this technical ‘elite’ (for want
of a less pejorative word) with a focus on the technical challenges of collecting
and analysing this data. This is comparable to the GI industry which consisted
largely of products produced by GI professionals for GI professionals, a
paradigm that has shifted rapidly with the proliferation of web based applications.
This is not to say that these traditional roles do not exist and are not still
crucial, just that the technology and usage has spread much further.
In the Sunday Times article AGI Chair Anne Kemp (among others) suggest
that Big Data is undergoing a similar shift which will present a similar skills
and knowledge challenge. Coincidentally one of my old clients was a company
that specialised in some very clever real time analytics and I remember their Vice
President (US company) saying something very similar about the proliferation of
big data to new users and taking a more holistic approach.
At the end of the day Big Data and GI are both just tools for enabling
better informed decision making. It stands to reason therefore that the greater
number of people who are able to access relevant information the greater the
positive impact on decision making. In both Big Data and GI this presents a
twofold challenge for producers and users of the data.
The first challenge is at the suppliers’ end whether this be a
companies IT department or a GI software and data supplier. The challenge here
is to provide the data in a way that is accessible to a wide range of users
with differing skill sets that may not be particularly technical. The second
challenge is for the organisations themselves in ensuring they have the right
skills amongst their staff to interpret the data. This doesn’t mean everybody
needs to be able to code just that people have an appreciation as to how to
handle data and how it impacts and supports their role.
Meeting these challenges and a general cultural appreciation of data
(and GI) as a tool that can enable organisations to make better decisions is a
key change that will allow these organisation to save time and money and deploy
limited resources in a more effective fashion.
In short Big Data is going through the same maturation process as GI
forcing a cultural shift in attitudes to how data is used and who it is used
by. Both sectors (if they can truly be called that given their interconnectivity
with all other sectors) can learn from each other in how to espouse their
benefits and encourage an ever greater uptake.
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