Big Data and Sir Isaac Newton

Famous financier Bernard Baruch said “Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.” While it sounds outlandish, there are actually documented accounts that support this, the writings by William Stukeley and Voltaire respectively to name a few. It is safe to say Newton had some important, famous, and influential friends.

Fast forward to present day, if you look at Baruch’s quote and apply a Big Data backdrop, what matters most when it comes to Big Data: the marketing, the data, the tools, or the question(s)?

Remember when the allure of Big Data was just that, an allure. The entire premise of what it was and the grandiose promises it set to deliver sent shockwaves through all circles in every industry. It had more buzz than cloud computing, you know, the catch-all term folks started using (really misusing) to explain anything they did not understand that was IT related. The entire concept of Big Data splashed (actually cannonballed) onto the scene, and companies that had zero understanding about what Big Data was dove in to be part of the early adopter wave. They jumped in due to the marketing brilliance; Big Data was gussied up and pranced around. Companies thought it was going to be the panacea they needed to increase sales, increase customer satisfaction, provide supply chain visibility, and produce all the answers the business needed to forge ahead. Thank you to all the early adopters, while you plowed into the Big Data craze with the glee of a spendthrift, you enabled value creation and lessons learned to be uncovered at minimal cost for the rest of us.

Many leaders let the voluminous types of data they have frame their business questions instead of asking the business questions and determining if you have the data necessary to be able to answer said question. The tools seem to be ubiquitous, it is often misconstrued that if you are working with software packages such as Hadoop, NoSQL, MapReduce, MongoDB, Hive, CouchDB, etc., that this is where the Holy Grail resides. To all folks who make decisions for a living, business drives technology, don’t let the gussied up Big Data marketing magnetism, the data you have in-house, or an overzealous so-called technical expert pushing big data tool sets frame the questions that the existing data will answer.

From my constant dialog with business leaders and clients in this space, there has been one lucid revelation that many still cannot seem to process, and that is that the TRUE value of Big Data is in the question(s) being asked, not what data you have, tools utilized, or marketing appeal. Define the questions before you become biased with a Big Data product or allow the data you have be the catalysts for the questions you pose to drive your business. It seems so logical and simple, but for some decision-makers this idea of first devising questions that matter to the business is foreign and incomprehensible. Leaders please pause and think about what is driving your Big Data push and define your goals and questions prior to blazing down the Big Data trail. It would be advantageous for you to know if there is a cliff at the end of the trail you chose to sprint down, right? Leaders and decision-makers, are you asking why the apple fell or are you simply content with just having a piece of fruit?