Companies collect mountains of data, but often don't use the
information in any useful way. Jim Zimmermann, Director,
Skillsoft Books24x7 explains how companies that have invested in
analyzing their Big Data repositories have often discovered
information that have a large impact on the direction of their
businesses.—Jennifer Bosavage, editor What’s the big deal about
Big Data and Big Analytics? All successful organizations collect
lots of data – about customers, purchases, manufacturing, supply
chain, employees, their web sites, etc. – and the amount of data
is increasing exponentially (for example, location-based data,
RFID transactions, medical records, etc). Although some of this
data is structured, there is an increasing amount of
unstructured data such as free-form text, images, videos, audio,
etc. Much of the data that has been collected is just sitting
somewhere waiting for someone to decide if it may have value to
an organization. A recent McKinsey Global Institute study, “Big
data: The next frontier