I recently stumbled upon this nicely built infographic, quite ambitiously titled “The Future of Big Data”, that broaches upon several interesting points and raises some questions (please refer to the infographic for each subject below).
- What’s generating data– or where is big data coming from. Some examples are absolutely correct: smartphone activity/geotracking, RFID in product pallets, or ocean measurements via buoys – but some listed here seem a little less obvious: sensors in pet collars or in gambling casino chips?
One of the issues here is that any kind of data can indeed be produced and collected, but it needs to make economic sense. Why would anyone want to put a sensor in every pet collar – and, more important, deploy a nationwide network of detectors to track these sensors? Why would a casino need to track the path of its gambling chips? Verifying authenticity is one valid reason to have RDIF in the higher-value chips, but there is no need to collect and store this data once the cashier has exchanged the chip...
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Why big data is important. No argument, all the folks listed are interested in the results they can get from the data. But it’s not because the White House has pledged $200 million to help government agencies using big data, that the private sector or other countries are following suit. And it would not work anyway. Either technology is beneficial (in this case, it is), or it won’t grow just because a government invests some money in it.- How it is useful.“It creates innovative business models, products and services” is right on the money. The biggest advance of big data is that it allows doing new things. It’s not about automating human decision making (scary proposition if you ask me – remember Skynet?) or “creating transparency” (duh?). The real value of big data is to detect, create and apply new types of processing to existing or new data sets, creating new value.
- Privacy. A concern with all data collection processes, small or big. Nothing specific to big data. But I am not sure how the fact that data is poorly organized and difficult to analyze, creates new privacy challenges.
The most interesting part of this infographic however is the bottom: positives and negatives of big data (I am paraphrasing here).
Positives:
- Improve understanding of the world and society
- Nowcasting and real-timeliness
- Promoting user innovation and measurement
Negatives:
- The digital divide is not likely to get any better
- Hidden motives and incentives for data collection
Far from being perfect, this infographic does an interesting job at summarizing some of the issues. But it’s impossible to cover it all. Or maybe with a Big Infographic?
Yves