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Monthly Archives: June 2015

Raise the Big Data Flim-Flam High

30 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by Martyn Jones in Big Data, Consider this

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Big Data

If there were ever a more apt rallying slogan for the Big Data BS babblers it would be “We BS about Big Data so that you don’t need to think”… and you know what? That’s how it is working.

The trouble with the hype is that almost everyone and their dog is in on it. From the freelance or indentured Big Data gurus to the Gartners, IBMs and HPs of this world. Everyone who is anyone is trying to jump on the Big Data bandwagon, whether it makes sense or not. Hell, if I could become ludicrously rich and infamous on the back of Big Data, I would jump the Big Data shark as well.

The other trouble is that the Big Data hype is very inconsistent in almost all areas, apart from the general unstated agreement there seems to be that Big Data will bring riches beyond the dreams of avarice, for everyone who wants it.

So, let’s assuming that one wants to cash in on Big Data, what’s the first thing that we need to understand?

Big Data comes in big data volumes, it has many data varieties, meaning it has a number of distinct formats, and it comes at us with increasing velocity, which most of the time we simply do not notice.

So what does that tell us? Right, Big Data is data; just more of it, more flavours of it, generated and transmitted at faster and faster rates.  To simplify, data is like water (Oh, no not another analogy) and whereas Data Warehousing is the Rhine or the Mississippi Delta, Big Data is the Ma and Pa of the Iguazu, Victoria and Niagara Falls.

So, what were the next questions I asked myself on the way to the land of Big Data health, wealth and happiness?

I asked, “if you have a Big Data success story then let’s hear the skinny”, such as:

  • Please detail data that has used to create new insight and understanding?
  • How was this data sourced, treated and stored?
  • How was the resulting data queried? Let’s see the queries, the code, the pseudo-code and the code narrative.
  • What were the results of the queries? In technical and business terms, please.
  • What normalisation of the results took place?
  • How did those results drive insight? In business terms, please.

Perfectly straightforward, right? These are the sorts of questions that one should be able to ask of a Data Warehouse user and then reasonable expect to get a coherent set of answer back in return.

Well, seems like when it comes to Big Data this sort of line of questioning and reasoning is somewhat problematic.

Which is a problem, because I am seeing fantastic claims made for Big Data, which is great, and I wish we all could become more prosperous from Big Data, but I can’t seem to get a handle on quite how one goes about it. It’s as if ‘tangible’ was anathema when it comes to practical and detailed examples of Big Data in action. You know, driving tangible business benefits through an understandable value chain of processes, ingredients and outcomes.

So, come on Big Data guys, gals and gurus, it’s time now to pony up, put up or shut up.

The Amazing ROI of Big Data

30 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by Martyn Jones in Big Data, Consider this, Strategy

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Big Data, ROI

For every professional bubble-head and bozo ‘bigging up’ Big Data there are at least ten intangible, unintelligible and phantom Big Data success stories.

Why do I write that? Simples! Because that is what we have.

From the perspective of non-IT business users, what does a real IT based success story look like?

Here’s some examples:

  • We ran a Big Data project and the end-result was increased sales and margins, which added $21M to the bottom line. The overall project cost, including cost of business disruption, was $7M.
  • We deployed Hadoop technology to identify potential influencers and purchasers on Twitter. As a result of the campaign we increased sales of the Widgets by 8% (adding $9M is revenues and $3M in profits on an investment of $1M).
  • Big Data helped us to identify and exclude significant errors of judgement introduced into our new corporate strategy. As a result we averted possible losses of more than $10M. Total cost of aversion exercise was $5M. $5M up and no egg on our faces.

These are fictitious examples of tangible benefits that might be accruable to Big Data. But, they are not factual, they are made up.

Remember this. They are not real-life stories.

Now, for some real-lifelike examples of benefits accrued from Big Data.

  • Big Data vendor strikes gold! The Big Data technology vendor GREPACLE today signed an enterprise wide licensing arrangement with the Fed for an estimated initial $750M, covering the years 2010 to 2017. The deal includes all industry-ready Hadoop “free ‘n’ open-source software” developed by GREPACLE. AWKACLE, who brokered the deal, expect to clear a $33M net profit from the arrangement.
  • OLLY-HARDY, the west coast hardware giant, has signed up WALLYCO who have handed over $60M as the first instalment for the provision of a cheap and cheerful battle-hardened commodity-hardware infrastructure that will replace the existing legacy infrastructure currently based on OLLY-HARDY MPP and SMP hardware and Oracle and Teradata software. A second contract billed to be worth in excess of $100M is in the pipe-line and is expected to be signed during the next quarter.
  • The profits of information theology research and technology advisory firm Gardening Leave jumped a clear 25% over the last three quarters due solely to sales of it’s reports and services in the Big Data domain.

The names changed, and the project details finessed, to protect the guilty, but they are three simple, clear and fabulous examples of how gold is obtained from Big Data.

However, there are many other Big Data success stories to consider, including:

  • The indentured Big Data pundits. Who wouldn’t lie for a slice of the pie? Right! But not everyone has scruples, values or even ethics when it comes to the filthy lucre.
  • The pro-Big Data press and their Big Data advertisers and ‘infomercialisers’. There still is money in getting people to advertise, big time.
  • The external service provider. The hardware may be commodity. The disk storage may be ample, cheap and cheerful. The unit cost of staff may be lower. But, you will be paying 10 times over the odds to your favourite outsourcer/offshoring business just for the privilege of having them screw up your Big Data project… 18 months down the line. You will even pick up the tab for breaches of data privacy and data protection. But don’t worry, paying someone else to make mistakes and learn on your money and time is the highest form of corporate altruism.

Well, that should give one a flavour of the direction of Big Data, of the benefits accruable and to whom the benefits really accrue.

Now here’s a thought:

Most of the success stories seem to have the sale of a Big Data project, Hadoop’s ‘grep awk ecosystem’ and ‘development’ services as its central tangible success criteria.

At best, these are dubious Big Data tech and service vendor success stories.

What tangible Big Data client benefits are there on view in the public domain? How about non-IT business Big Data ROI? Same for Hadoop ROI? Same for Big Data and Tech Stack service ROI?

What about… Who? What? Where? When? How? Why?

Oh, there aren’t any success stories like that or they are so secret that one cannot but allude to them in generic BS terms.

But, seriously? Do people still swallow that type of mendacious flim flam?

Many thanks for reading.

Big Data Explained to My Grandchildren

29 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by Martyn Jones in Big Data

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All Data, Big Data, made simple

Ban pan doeth peir

ogyrwen awen teir

The Book of Taliesin 

Once upon a time, a hobgoblin of digital moonshine stalked the land. Its name was Shirley Temple (but, it was better known as Big Data), and it had many followers.

Few really knew where Big Data had come from, because it just appeared overnight. Like owls, snow, rumour and astroturfing flim-flam merchants.

Some say the Gardner brought it in on the bottom of their wellies after a particularly tough night on the lemonade.

One night, a man with a black dog told me that it was really all a load of old nonsense, dreamed up by Redwood Shore Larry, to shake things up a bit.

Others, of the more superstitious bent, claimed that the giant who lived in the Big Blue mansion on the hill, had concocted it, from sugar and spice and all things dodgy and nice

The more cynical amongst the population just pointed at its high priests, acolytes and bicycle boys, and had a good old laugh.

Yet others claimed that it was a digital immaculate conception and a divine-revelation of mega-trend setting proportions that would change the face of the Lleyn peninsula, forever.

Elsewhere, some talked of dark deeds, of wickedness, or that it was a psycho-paranormal phenomenon closely associated with the cultish cult of the badly drawn Yellow Elephant. A wonderful wacky, off-the-wall and global orco-centric sect that sacrificed the processing-cycles of reason, strategy and coherence on the altar of half-baked pragmatism, bodgerism and winging-it.

Nonetheless, some of the global villagers did express opinion that this was no new phenomenon, and that they had seen such a sinister semblance before. Knowledge and experience had informed them. They seemed to intrinsically know that a timeless feature of data is its variable volumes, its variable velocities, its increasing varieties and, because we insisted on hoarding so much of it, its increasingly expansive footprint.

But, how did they know?

They only had the gardener, the butler and the cook to corroborate their suspicions.

We know what we know, and what we don’t know we know what we don’t know, now, that is, but don’t tell, unless we do, or don’t, or not. So I’m glad we cleared that one up.

Down the valleys, across the moors and over the waves. From Bangor to Abertawe via Machynlleth and Caerfilli. Big Data, it moved and expanded, and expanded and moved again. Dong! Dong! Dong! Ominous, humongous and smelling of sulphur and a badly spiced kebab.

The Big Data mini-meme spread like wildfire fuelled by petrol and crack. It was a force to be harnessed, a force for good and bad. Even though no one really knew what it was, and nobody knew how to do it, many claimed to have done it, and successfully so. It didn’t matter how, what where or when. Front interface, back-end processor, client-server, no one and nothing was free or safe.

The benevolent Big Data virus reached everyone. The rich, the poor, the shop on the corner, and the girl next door. Everyone knew its name and that it was new and mega and good and bad and all of that.

The thing is, Big Data wasn’t really anything new. As we now know.

But, at the time, for some people, especially the so called high-ups and professional people, it was a big deal, even in Pontypridd! Like a major inflection point in the evolution of the generation and use of what we now call data, or to use the vernacular, digital gold-gold.

You see, back then, people wanted to make another class of data and another class of gold, and another series of lovely, chubby little verbose categories to describe it. People needed another name, one that represented some data class values, spirituality and imprecision. It was a time of post-modernism, and we were always stoned, mazed or drunk.

Some of my peers at the time – not all of them, just the exceptionally plain Jane, weird and alternative ones – told me that Big Data was data that came in bigger volumes, at greater velocities and in greater varieties.

The first I heard that, I was gobsmacked… Honest to God!

I know probably you’ll laugh at that, now, and you may even tell your friends and butties just how superstitious, primitive and money-grubbing we were back then.

So whilst you are making fun of your old granddad, do not forget either, that is the way it was in those days, down the data mining towns and Big Data pits of South Wales.

I know it is hard to believe, but back in those days, people really believed in that nonsense. I didn’t have any time for it myself, but many did, and many people made a living of sorts just talking and writing about it.

It’s hard to believe now, but at one time we were really dumb, but as we didn’t want to stand out from the crowd by revealing that we didn’t know, we just stood back and let the buffoons, clowns and comics run the show. Whilst we exclaimed, “these guys are really good”, “I wonder if he can turn Big Data into wine” or “maybe he does requests and children’s parties”.

Now we look at data, all data, and we call it…. Yes… data.

How we have advanced. It’s amazing.

But then, when it all died down, as these things do, in their given time, we regained our senses, of sorts, we got back on our feet and we progressed in a sane, rational and humane way.

Now we can look back and see things for what they were. The Big Data hullaballoo, that you have never heard of, was the last gasp of some the biggest IT dinosaurs, who had tied their hopes and aspirations, ridiculously so in my view, to some toys created by the naïve for the gullible. It was always going to end in tears, and it did.

Now you know.

So, this ends the story of Big Data, also known as Shirley Temple.

Goodnight kids!

Many thanks for reading.

As always, please share your questions, views and criticisms on this piece using the comment box below. I frequently write about strategy, organisational leadership and information technology topics, trends and tendencies. You are more than welcome to keep up with my posts by clicking the ‘Follow’ link and perhaps even send me aLinkedIn invite. Also feel free to connect via Twitter, Facebook and the Cambriano Energy website.

For more on this and other topics, check out my other recent posts:

  • Big Data Predictions for 2015
  • 7 New Big Data Roles for 2015
  • Data Made Simple – Even ‘Big Data’
  • Big Data is Dead!
  • Why Destructive Eagerness? The Data Warehouse Example
  • Big Data and the Vs
  • Did Big Data Kill the Statistician?
  • Infotrends 2015: 21 Directions in Information Management
  • On not knowing Climate Change
  • Big Data Robitussin – Big Data: Read all about it!
  • Absolute certainty…
  • Mugged in Data Hell

#BigData #BigDataAnalytics #Decency #Ethics

Is big data really for you? Things to consider before diving in

13 Saturday Jun 2015

Posted by Martyn Jones in Big Data, Strategy

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Big Data, Strategy

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

“For the likes of Google, Twitter and Facebook, Big Data is an intrinsic part of their business and plays a key role in their ability to survive and thrive. However, it is not for everyone. Here’s how to know for sure if Big Data is for you.”

The rest of the article appears on my IT Circus blog hosted by IT World (Copyright © 2015 IDG Enterprise)

Link: http://www.itworld.com/article/2934368/big-data/is-big-data-really-for-you-things-to-consider-before-diving-in.html

#BigData #DataAnalytics #Qualification

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