Big data: the great exemplar of digital changes

Numerous changes and innovations have come to life recently. The pace of digital revolution is unimaginable concerning it keeps on increasing. There is no doubt most of approaching digital changes are potentially disruptive to older habits, businesses, beliefs. Unconditionally they are changing former way of life on the globe. They push whole humanity into something very new and completely unknown. In my opinion the majority of digital innovations carry similar features as they direct the similar issues and evoke the same questions

Big Data is one of them

The great number (but still countable) of unstructured data obtained from digital reality is one of the most significant product of current internet/mobile/information revolution. The more devices connected, the better connectivity, the higher storage capacity of data warehouses, the more data seems to be gatherable, storable and usable. Big Data is the concept that those “gatherability”, storability and usability of enormous data can be turn into its profitability. Big Data is also believed to be applicable literally everywhere, including Christmas presents. If business believes in “Big Data” (and apparently it does) it believes that quality can drive quality and value. This belief is much older than digital technology itself. Let’s see the way Big Data exemplifies the most typical issues connected with current torrent of digital innovations.

Incredible abundance, pace and diversity

Real time gathering of great number of data leads inevitable to challenges typical for current technologies: the abundance. From hundreds thousands mobile applications to millions wikipedia.org entries; terabytes of movies on youtube.com to whatever billions Facebook’s profiles – digital content keeps growing and crossing every imaginable limits. Faster and faster multidirectional growth of data is the best example of what is happening today. The growth and change in every field of human activity accelerates and there is no reason to think this trend will stop.

The Big Data is very much the same: it keeps growing faster, utilizes more and more kinds of sources, becomes more and more complex and diversified. This process leads to many technological challenges.

New kind of challenge

Gathering new kind of data in (almost) real time and without capacity limits is still huge challenge for current technologies. But if gathering is still not perfect, what about analysis and utilization? The rapidly growing inbound stream of data should generate proper and immediate response. Simply saying at least comparable outbound data stream. In perfect realization of Big Data concept the outbound stream should be even bigger – that is the matter of synergy of data already collected and this which is just coming. In the background there is still challenge of storage, validating and analyzing incoming data. Everything yields to synergy, optimizing exploitation of data.

Why this kind of tasks and actions is new to us? Well, it is the point where quantity turns into quality issue. The quantum leap between conventional amount of data and Big Data includes several dimensions. The complexity of Big Data-related challenges is typical to those concerning digital revolution. The interactions among all elements of digital puzzle grows geometrically while the revolution speeds up. Humanity needs more and more help to stay in touch with it.

Helping tricks – catchy names, appealing cases

One of tricks helpful with dealing with modern technology is naming and branding. There is a lot of examples of hype-generating names of some digital trends and models. Let me remind you just few. Web 2.0, instant messaging, wiki, real time marketing, wearables … They help us catch the idea and talk effectively about new and incomparable to the “oldies” phenomena of digital world. Very often convenient acronyms are created for this purpose. I think about UX, API, IoT, GUI and others. These acronyms mean user experience, application programming interface, Internet of things, graphic user interface, respectively. But the most important is that they are great, convenient and sound familiar.

Big Data is perfect illustration of this procedure. The term is catchy, professional in look and of bold appearance. The other favorite example of that kind of tech-name branding is “the cloud”. Simply saying about remote storage and processing of IT services does not sound cool enough, right? The cloud computing is different. That’s why people prefer that term.

The other trick is story-telling. This is about create and spread stories which illustrates the sense of new idea and product or service. The Big Data is full of such cases. The real time marketing, fraud detection, customer context experience and delivery – there are the most frequent stories on Big Data. This is the great story about special offers for stuff one loves, delivered in relevant place and time. It is one of the best cases of commercial use of Big Data. Real time marketing, personalized and personally tuned, is given as the perfect reason for Big Data investment. The great deal perfectly tailored, available for everybody at minimum cost – it sounds like the holy grail of retail business. But sometimes the line is crossed and customers feel over-spied, invaded in very sensitive area of comfort and intimacy of themselves.

Privacy vs. convenience – the ultimate dilemma

The major controversy is about using Big Data to this kind of commercial personalization. The problem is that customers are not aware of every data corporation collect about them. I do not say about pathology (or even crime) of using stolen sensitive data or gathering data supposed to be confidential, without customer consent. More common situation takes place when customer formally agrees (e.g. by using mobile application on internet site) but is not aware of it. Customers are not digital omnipotent professionals to know and remember which data they agree to share. In consequence they are often surprised by level of personalization delivered by Big Data fed marketing.

Once customers feel attacked they loose their positive attitude for sharing personal data with corporations. Of course, corporation offer more and more benefits and, finally, people continue to share their data. The benefit could be convenience, safety or price. So all customer groups can be tempted by personalized approach based on sensitive data analysis. However, it remains challenging to keep positive balance between increasing convenience and decreasing privacy.

This privacy/convenience (and to fulfill the picture I can add safety) dilemma is common challenge for digital innovation when applied to commerce. I would like to underline this again: the digital revolution promises more convenience and leads to less privacy. It creates more relevant services and reveals intimate, personal data. It gave us powerful, smart devices and simultaneously took our anonymity away. And we have to live with that, digitally.