IBM has established that 90% of the world’s data is less than two years old – we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of the stuff each and every day. Let’s put that another way; in the last 24 months, the existing infrastructure for creating, storing and interrogating data has had to absorb an enormous volume of raw data. That infrastructure costs a lot, even before a single byte is analysed. Some of this data is incredibly... Read More
People analytics isn’t just another catch phrase. It means using data and analytics to personalize and manage each employee in order to drive superior employee outcomes. Primarily that is done by using hiring, retention, diversity, and top performer identification algorithms. Further, individual abilities and tendencies towards job loyalty, leadership, collaboration, and innovation are identified as well as individual key motivators. In other words, people analytics transforms HR from a relationship and reputation model to a... Read More
I think the phrase ‘big data, big problems’ has become somewhat overused – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true, as mobile network operators are beginning to discover. The sheer amount of data that is passed through mobile networks is huge – so huge in fact that global mobile data traffic grew 70 percent in 2012 and last year’s mobile data traffic alone was nearly twelve times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000... Read More
According to a survey of senior executives by Big Data consultancy NewVantage, Big Data is “top of mind for leading industry executives,” but these same executives struggle to find the right people to analyse their data. In fact, while 70% of those organisations surveyed plan to hire data scientists, 100 per cent of them said they find it at least “somewhat challenging” to hire competent data scientists (see image). Given the difficulty in finding qualified... Read More
The CEO of ISC has been quoted as saying that “the explosion of big data is crippling,” and in a way he is quite correct. As we often see today, rather than improving your business, having too much information can leave business leaders completely unable to make a decision, faced with too many choices and too much to get their heads around. A large part of the ‘big data’ problem lies in hiring in the... Read More
The Mars Curiosity Rover, at times as far as 250 million miles away from NASA, needs to be able to stop itself from falling down crevices, bumping into rocks or, who knows, even running over Marvin the Martian. But with a twenty-minute communication lag between the red planet and Earth, the lonely Rover must rely on highly complex autonomous hazard avoidance software (artificial intelligence, or AI) to keep the $2.5bn piece of equipment out of... Read More
It’s no secret that big data offers organisations a real opportunity to gain competitive advantage, open up new revenue streams and increase efficiency. Yet, while some are charging ahead, others are falling behind. The past two years have seen an 80 per cent jump in organisations believing analytics provides a competitive advantage, but only 11 per cent were classed as ‘analytical innovators’ by MIT in a recent piece of research. Of the 2,500 companies surveyed,... Read More
2012 was a year of change. Change that could have far-reaching implications in the near future as internet service providers (ISP’s) and web browser developers look to take advantage of public concerns regarding cookie tracking, distorting the fragile equilibrium of internet data availability and therefore threatening a core pillar of digital communications. What’s happening? The digital data buzzwords of 2012 were Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) – technology that allows ISP’s to monitor all users’ internet... Read More