Reprinted with permission from DePaul Business Exchange.
© 2014 by DePaul University Driehaus College of Business. All rights reserved.
Ninety percent of the data that exists in the world today has been created since 2010.
The consulting firm IDC predicts that by 2020 this digital universe will expand by a factor of 300, from 130 to 40,000 exabytes.
How much is that? One exabyte has 18 zeros behind it.
In people terms, that’s more than 5,200 gigabytes of data for every man, woman and child on Earth by 2020.
Consumers are the main source of this growth, creating more than two-thirds of the data in cyberspace through videos watched, photos shared, social media messages sent and purchases made online. Add to this a mountain of machine-generated data from smartphones, tablets and networked computers, plus supermarket scanners and other sensors, and what has come to be known as big data certainly lives up to its name.
Big data is usually viewed in terms of aggregate numbers, such as millions of cell phone calls culled by the National Security Agency or billions of pages created on the Internet. But for people who really want to understand how this phenomenon can affect their business, professional and personal lives, it’s useful to reduce the term to its essence: fragments of our lives ensconced in digital code.
“The businesses that will thrive in this space will realize that value and convenience to the consumer—to individuals—is at the center of this big data evolution,” says Sheila Colclasure, global public policy and privacy officer at Acxiom, an international digital data brokerage. “The consumer is the primary constituency. The technology and data are the means to enable businesses to meet the needs of the consumer.
“Our job in the business world is to deliver value and positive brand experiences to the consumer,” Colclasure continues. “In relation to the technology and data used to do that, we’ve got to help consumers get an understanding of how it works and provide relevant choices and controls.”
So, just how do we find value in this data-driven world as businesspeople and consumers without drowning in numbers? We asked alumni, industry and academic experts to provide their perspectives on the top four trends in big data.
