Most data isn’t “big,” and businesses are wasting money pretending it is by Christopher Mims.
From the post:
Big data! If you don’t have it, you better get yourself some. Your competition has it, after all. Bottom line: If your data is little, your rivals are going to kick sand in your face and steal your girlfriend.
There are many problems with the assumptions behind the “big data” narrative (above, in a reductive form) being pushed, primarily, by consultants and IT firms that want to sell businesses the next big thing. Fortunately, honest practitioners of big data—aka data scientists—are by nature highly skeptical, and they’ve provided us with a litany of reasons to be weary of many of the claims made for this field. Here they are:
Christopher makes good points:
Even web giants like Facebook and Yahoo generally aren’t dealing with big data, and the application of Google-style tools is inappropriate.
Big data has become a synonym for “data analysis,” which is confusing and counter-productive.
Supersizing your data is going to cost you and may yield very little.
In some cases, big data is as likely to confuse as it is to enlighten.
So what’s better—big data or small?
But I like his closer most of all:
Remember: Gregor Mendel uncovered the secrets of genetic inheritance with just enough data to fill a notebook. The important thing is gathering the right data, not gathering some arbitrary quantity of it.
Should I forward this to the NSA?