Unless we conquer the last semantic mile, big data will be an expensive lesson in hardware, software and missed opportunities.
Consider Sid Probstein’s take on Simplify Big Data – Or It’ll Be Useless for Sales (Lareina Yee and Jigar Patel of McKinsey & Company):
I am tempted to refer to this as using a venerable telecom term: “the last mile”. Investing in analytics to help optimize business is a good thing, but without also considering how the information will be integrated, correlated and accessed, the benefit will be severely limited. Here are some concrete steps that companies can take to improve in this regard:
Take inventory. Even the mere attempt at cataloging will help identify opportunities for massive productivity increases. In the world of sales, those translate directly to revenue. Cost savings can also be uncovered here. This is the role Attivio plays at a major financial services firm: receiving, versioning, analyzing and tagging data sets as they come in. End users use SQL or search queries to correlate the information at query time, and can seamlessly employ their choice of analytic tool (e.g. QlikView, Tibco Spotfire or Tableau).. Push information — not data. Most end users don’t want data; they want information that helps them make a decision. Identify key people (like Maria in the article) and find out why they do the analysis they do, and move that process upstream. The day they get the analysis, not the data, will be the day they become 10x more productive. As the article concludes, it’s the key to “mask all that complexity”. Think in segments. One thing I really liked about the Forbes article is that it focuses on data-driven selling. Customer service, regulatory risk, internal performance management — each of these has its own sources and methods. Understanding and organizing your inventory in this way is key to understanding where to focus. (emphasis added)
How would you use topic maps to “simplify” big data for sales? (Using their concerns and terminology is recommended.)
The block quote and inspiration from: Simplify, Simplify, Simplify. Three Key Steps to Big Data Business Value by Sid Probstein, Attivio.